Veteran sports executives Chris Bevilacqua and Adam Helfant have started a sports and media advisory company that will also invest in small sports businesses.
Bevilacqua Helfant Ventures is based in New York and already has a client list that includes the Texas Rangers, Washington Nationals, Pac-12 Conference, Rose Bowl, Atlantic 10 Conference and Learfield Sports. The new firm also has an equity stake in the online ticketing company Viagogo.
“At the essence here, we’re a deal shop,” Bevilacqua said. “Adam and I have got real trust here. We’ve got a lot of relationships, a global Rolodex. And we’re making deals. That’s what we’re good at.”
The company has three employees: Bevilacqua, Helfant and J.R. Hernandez, a former equity banker. It operates out of temporary space near Times Square, but will move into a permanent spot in Manhattan this summer.
One aspect of the new business will be to invest in companies that Bevilacqua and Helfant believe have a lot of growth potential. So far, the company is relying on its own capital to make these investments. But Bevilacqua and Helfant have talked with investor groups about joining.
“We’ve looked at and are considering an alignment with much larger pools of capital,” Bevilacqua said. “I suspect that’s in the future at some point.”
But the main thrust of the company’s business is to advise rights holders on what to do with their media rights, sponsorship deals and other commercial opportunities.
The founder of CSTV in the 1990s, Bevilacqua has made a name for himself by helping guide teams and conferences to some of the biggest paydays in sports media.
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Bevilacqua has helped guide teams and conferences to big paydays.
Photo by: SHANA WITTENWYLER
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In 2010, he advised the Rangers as they signed a 20-year deal reportedly worth $3 billion with Fox Sports Southwest. Last summer, he advised the Pac-12 as it signed a 12-year deal worth $3 billion with ESPN and Fox Sports and launched Pac-12 Enterprises, which plans to launch seven cable channels this summer.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Bevilacqua said. “I’ve never seen a period like this before. We are inside of an ecosystem that is in some degree in chaos. We help order the chaos.”
Helfant brings expertise in sponsorships from his years working with Nike and the ATP. “I’m very happy that we brought in a couple of big sponsors there and put the ATP on a firmer financial foundation for growth to the future,” he said.
The two executives have known each other for about 17 years, when they both worked at Nike.
“We have toyed with the idea of doing something at different points in our professional lives,” Helfant said. “The timing didn’t match up. But it matched up here.”
That’s because Helfant had just left the ATP, where he was executive chairman.
And Bevilacqua had been running his own independent media consulting business called Bevilacqua Media Corp. for a couple of years after he left CAA. Bevilacqua Media will continue to exist, Bevilacqua said. But all new business will come through Bevilacqua Helfant Ventures.
The move to work with Helfant was natural for Bevilacqua, since he was having trouble keeping up with the amount of media deals that are in the market.
“I’m drinking out of a firehose, because it’s like the media world has exploded,” Bevilacqua said. “If we look at doing something together, it gives me a chance to extend the reach in media, which I can’t do all on my own right now because there’s just too much stuff. In addition to that, it gives us a platform to actually get into other commercial aspects: sponsorship and licensing and utilizing Adam’s global Rolodex.”
