Moving picture

Fans packed Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the team’s home debut, a preseason game against Dallas. Photo by: Getty Inages

Scroll down the list of Los Angeles Rams front-office executives on the team website and there are no titles next to the 49 non-football staff, other than for the owner, Stan Kroenke, and chief operating officer, Kevin Demoff.

Visit the club’s suburban L.A. office park headquarters, and you may need to ring the buzzer to get someone to open the door. The lobby isn’t always staffed. Once inside, you’ll find a robot action figure wearing a No. 3 Rams jersey.
The previous tenant, a gaming company, left behind the imposing figurine; the team added the torso fashion.

If this all seems so California and techy startup, that’s no coincidence. Since winning approval in January to relocate from Missouri, the Rams are in the midst of a chaotic nine-month whirlwind that has swept the team through 13 different sites in St. Louis and the L.A. area, all while shedding and adding staff. And that’s as the team plans for a London regular-season game in October, and already sent staff to China to prepare for a potential home opener there in 2018.

To compensate, Demoff instructs employees to wear multiple hats — thus no titles — and to embrace a startup mentality, even though the Rams franchise is eight decades old.

“I would be happy to give up my title,” he replied, chuckling when asked why he had not ceded his COO designation. Perched on a Gatorade cooler watching practice last month, music blasting under a Southern California blue sky, Demoff said, “For us, with the chance to go add maybe 100 employees over the next year, you really do look at companies that are in growth mode, how do they expand, how do they grow, how do they keep their edge, how do they innovate.

“Most teams are pretty mature businesses,” he added. “We are not a mature business right now.”

Small staff, big crowds

With up to 80 percent of each NFL team’s revenue derived from national league contracts, such as media and sponsorship, what Demoff means by immature is what the organization looks like compared with a traditional team.
Nearly half of the 100 front-office staffers made the move from St. Louis, and they’re supplemented with 21 employees from Legends Global Sales, the agency that’s working in lockstep with the Rams in their first three years in L.A. (The 21 also have no titles on the team website.)

Rams quarterbacks work out during preseason training camp at Irvine, one of several temporary stops the team will make. Photo by: Getty Images

That 71 — the Rams plus Legends — is far off the typical 125 non-football staff on average that NFL teams employ; and no other franchise remotely bears the challenges facing the Rams. It was with this vagabond crew that the Rams pulled off the biggest season-ticket sale ever in an abbreviated time (70,000 in four months), and two of the biggest preseason games the league has ever seen.

Since the move, there have been some hires, about 20, including from the league office — corporate communications specialist Joanna Hunter and her husband, Dan August, whose tasks involve data strategy, promotions and even China. The two share a table in a windowless corner of the temporary 7,500-square-foot office in Agoura Hills, the suburban L.A. town that is home to the Rams’ front office, at least until the Inglewood stadium opens in 2019.

The Rams also hired Stephanie Cheng of Premier Partnerships for sponsorships, and Maria Camacho from a local nonprofit to run government affairs. The team is looking for what most would call a chief financial officer. The team is using executive search firm Korn Ferry to assist with its hiring moves.

“Whether the title is CFO, VP of finance, person who knows the most about math, it doesn’t really matter; their job function is important,” Demoff said.

High on Demoff’s to-do list is hiring those with a flair for marketing to L.A. Before Demoff left St. Louis, his chief marketing officer left to join the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the replacement didn’t make the move. Until they are replaced, almost everyone wears a marketing cap.

Itinerant journey

When owners voted Jan. 12 to allow the Rams to move, the obstacles were unlike any team had ever faced. The club had to shut down its operations at the Edward Jones Dome, and its headquarters and training facility in St. Louis.

A handful of top executives began living out of suitcases, staying at hotels in L.A. and working out of Legends’ Culver City offices.

“I left in January and commuted back and forth for four months,” said Jake Bye, who runs consumer areas such as tickets and concessions. Bye recalled phoning in from his home in St. Louis to L.A. radio shows to promote the season-ticket campaign.

The team needed a place to play games, to train, a headquarters and somewhere to store all of its equipment (the Rams lease two warehouses, one in Camarillo and another in Anaheim). It also needed a center to show off the prototype suites and club seats of the new stadium to be built in Inglewood. Under NFL rules, the team can’t begin selling those until January. Then there’s the whole matter of building the $2 billion-plus stadium.

“Considering they were thrown in the deep end of the pool very quickly, they made the best of it,” said Howard Livingston, a movie producer with long-standing business and social ties to the Rams and who remains around the team. “First of all, the big move out of St. Louis. Then getting to a situation where you have to find temporary facilities knowing full well you will have at least one, maybe two more touches of a move.”

Football operations moved from St. Louis, staged organized team activities along the coast northwest of Los Angeles in Oxnard, preseason training camp in Irvine an hour south of L.A., and regular-season training on the campus of California Lutheran University, northwest of L.A. Meanwhile the business staff is in the 7,500-square-foot temporary offices, while a 17,500-square-foot office space is nearing completion across the parking lot in Agoura Hills (the breakrooms are designed as replicas of the suites for Inglewood). Ultimately that office is also only temporary, with the plan likely to move into space near the Inglewood stadium in three years.

That’s why Demoff hails Bruce Warwick as the sports executive of the year. Warwick runs operations, and had a staff of two working for him when the relocation began in January; he’s added a third since.

“Everyone is realistic about what we are up against; it is what it is,” he said, standing on the side of practice last month. “You can’t go back, so you make the best of it.”

In the beginning, after the vote, Warwick flew to L.A. on Monday mornings and each day of the week said he handled one task. He flew back to St. Louis on Friday night, living that routine for three months.

“All the moving around, that is taxing,” he said.

The Rams were fortunate in a few spots. The president of Cal Lutheran cold-called the team about hosting the Rams for regular-season training and their football operations headquarters. Because the university is private, there were few of the regulatory issues that typically slow down development in California. And so the team will have a 50,000-square-foot space on the campus, a few miles down the road from its Agoura Hills business headquarters.

For preseason training camp, the team needed a school where classes didn’t start until September, and did not have a football team but enough athletic space. UC Irvine fit that bill. The university’s swimming pool became a central feature of the first “Hard Knocks” episode, the HBO reality series that tracked the Rams.

“We resodded the fields, we redid the locker rooms, the training rooms,” Warwick said of the Irvine facility.

Day to day is how Warwick and his team live, if not hour to hour. He recalled a request from a team unit for help in November on a certain matter. “I am like, ‘November is eight years away,’” he said laughing, “You can’t even think about November.”

The distance between

Throw a dart at a map of Los Angeles and its northern and southern suburbs, and it’s bound to hit somewhere the Rams have a physical presence. Orange County to the south? Check, with training camp in Irvine. L.A. proper?
Check, with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Northern Los Angeles, where players can live far from the temptations of Hollywood? Check, with Agoura Hills and Cal Lutheran.

Amy Trask, the former Raiders president and native Los Angeleno, sat at an outdoor restaurant in L.A.’s Marina del Rey last month, picking through a quinoa salad and talking about how spread out the Rams are in L.A. The region is notorious for traffic, of course, and no conversation seemingly extends more than a few minutes until the topic of commutes and roads arises, like trading news about families.

Highways are all but personalized, so it’s not “Route 101,” it’s take “the 101” to “the 405.” She applauded the Inglewood choice, just a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport, but questioned the long distances between facilities, which depending on the time of day, can take hours to drive. Trask spent a lot of time with the Raiders scouting the area and came away convinced that compact was better.

The team defended the strategy, though conceding that some of the locations were the result of tight timing and unexpected choices, like Cal Lutheran’s out-of-the-blue offer. But much of it is strategic, an effort to integrate the team into different fabrics of L.A., said Demoff, who grew up in Los Angeles and once worked for an L.A. Arena Football League team. The Rams need a presence throughout the region, Demoff added, not just in L.A.

Trask pointed to Playa Vista, a stone’s throw from Marina del Rey, as a good place for the team’s headquarters.
Playa Vista is dubbed Silicon Beach, with companies such as Google opening offices along with startups. The Rams, as it turned out, opened a 20,000-square-foot office there late last month.

“It’s a west L.A. outpost for the whole company,” said Chris Hibbs, who manages the Legends Rams team.

Legends’ 16-person ticket staff moved last month from Agoura Hills to Playa Vista, taking over about 9,000 square feet. The remaining 11,000 square feet is set aside for the Inglewood stadium preview center, which will allow consumers to essentially test-drive suites and seats. The preview center opens in March.

All of this costs money, of course: three training sites, various office spaces, bringing the Coliseum up to NFL standards, and paying staff to afford to live in L.A.

“It has been expensive,” said Demoff, who declined to offer a price tag for the move. “The one thing Stan [Kroenke] has always talked about in the move is he would do it first class and do it right.”

Employees received relocation bonuses and bumps in pay, and their moves were covered. They received at least 60 days of free housing upon first arriving in L.A.

Midwestern nice

As the longtime president of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission, the local agency charged with bringing big events to the city, Kathryn Schloessman has interacted with a vast cross section of L.A. The agency worked with the Rams to win the bid for the Super Bowl in 2021, and Demoff sits on the group’s board.

Asked what has helped the team’s success in attracting large crowds and working with its new community,

A robot action figure left by a gaming company now guards one of the Rams’ suburban L.A. offices. Photo by: Daniel Kaplan / Staff

Schloessman cited a trait others pointed to: Midwestern nice, which contrasts with L.A.’s more polished and confident veneer.

“Everybody is all over them, everybody wants to get to them,” she said. “I don’t know whether it’s Midwest values or what, but they are so appreciative of all this interest.”

Pausing, she added as if shocked, “they are so nice.”

Bye, who handles commercial business for the Rams, said, “We also have the benefit of coming to a market where we don’t have the answers, we don’t presume to have all the answers. We have nothing to point to to say this is how you are supposed to conduct business in Los Angeles. That is sort of fresh.”

Time will tell if exposure to the big city and entertainment glamour dulls that approach.

“L.A. is Hollywood, there is a little bit of flakiness to L.A.,” said Renata Simril, who operates a local nonprofit, the LA84 Foundation, which like many charities in L.A., has been in contact with the team about working together.

That’s not to mention the business competition is not only the local two NHL teams, two MLB clubs and two NBA franchises, but the region’s natural beauty, all grabbing at time and wallet. With all those pressures, can Midwestern nice and the startup mentality survive?

Well, the club is already planning to ditch one element of its first nine months: the bulky robot greeting visitors to team headquarters for the last half year is not making the move to the new offices.