jon willey / miami dolphins
Jeremy Walls got his start at the bottom in sports, busing tables at Chase Field, anything, he said, to break into the space.
That is why he got into sales in the first place; it was where he could get a foot in the door.
“I kind of realized it was really just about building relationships, and once I realized [that] and about providing value to people that I met, I actually ended up liking it,” he said. “But I didn’t go into it thinking I wanted to be in sales.”
When he was 22 and working ticket sales for the Phoenix Suns, Walls had the opportunity to move to game entertainment, but he was advised to stay in a revenue-producing sector. He did, and it paid off later with a job selling suites for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
HASHTAG YOUR LIFE
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| #WeCanDoBoth |
After more than two years with the Diamondbacks, the NBA offered him a job in New York with its well-regarded team marketing unit. He almost turned it down because he had a newborn and his wife, a Phoenix native, did not want to move.
The NBA compromised and allowed him to commute to New York … from Phoenix.
“For three years, I would leave on a Sunday, the last flight out, most weeks, and fly to New York from Phoenix, and I would spend a day or two in at the NBA office, and then fly to a different team every week, for two or three days,” he recounted. “And then fly home Thursday night and then do it again the next week.”
Was he exhausted? “Emotionally,” he said, because of squeezing a week of family time into three days.
Ironically, one of the few cities he did not visit in that time was Miami. When he arrived at the Dolphins four years ago, it was his first time in the city.
“I have a good team that really knows the market and [I] really trust them,” he explained of how he took over marketing in a city he didn’t know.
The trust all around was well-placed. Revenue is up 47 percent in the last three years, and there are now two consecutive years of sellouts in the difficult South Florida market.
— Daniel Kaplan
jeremy walls
miami dolphins | senior vice president / chief marketing officer
Age: 37
Where born: Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
Education: Mount Vernon Nazarene University (B.A., sports management)
Family: Wife, Maile; children, Kaelin (7), Kostner (3)
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at age 20: That you can be excellent at both work and at home. Some will tell you that you have to sacrifice one or the other to find success at either. That is not true … it requires intentionality, discipline and hard work … but you can do both.
Causes supported: The Daniel Summit and The Dolphins Cancer Challenge.
2017 will be a good year if … : Not if, but when we finish the final phase of Stephen Ross’ $500 million Hard Rock Stadium modernization and sell it out for all Dolphins games … and many other major events.
You’d be surprised to know that I … : Won the most improved athlete award at my high school two years in a row. I wasn’t that good … got better … but was still bad enough to win again.
