The Olympics couldn’t come at a better time for the AVP. The professional beach volleyball company recently reported revenue of $8.8 million, compared to $11 million reported for the same period in 2007. But AVP CEO Leonard Armato is optimistic that the Beijing Games will be a catalyst, spurring the kind of growth the tour experienced after the Athens Olympics in 2004 when revenue increased 38 percent. He shared that and more with SportsBusiness Journal writer Tripp Mickle outside the beach volleyball venue in Beijing.

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What are you doing while you’re in Beijing?
Armato: One of the things I’ll be doing while I’m here is taking advantage of the world stage where beach volleyball is being recognized as one of the breakaway hits of the Olympic Games and to try and continue to build and grow the momentum that the AVP Crocs Tour has enjoyed over the past years.

How do you do that?
Armato: During NBC prime time, beach volleyball has enjoyed some great ratings numbers. What that tells us is that if (it’s) properly promoted and the stakes are meaningful with an Olympic medal, people will watch this sport in mass numbers. I think 20 million people watched Misty (May-Treanor) and Kerri (Walsh) play in their preliminary round pool play match. What we want to do in the future is work with a strategic group that can see the potential and vision in this sport that we’ve built up under the AVP umbrella.

When you say work with a group, what do you mean?
Armato: It starts with the mass audience and that means media. You want to develop media partnerships where there’s a joint effort to develop flagship events and promote them in a way that people know they’re on and you want to continue to build and grow the stars you see here shining on the world stage. If you have media partners working to promote, if you have sponsors working to promote, all of a sudden you can catch lightning in a bottle and this sport can grow dramatically over the next few years.

Does that mean you’ll be having some meetings here as well?
Armato: I don’t have any specific meetings I can identify for you. There are so many people in the same location at the same time that can be helpful to us and important to us in the future in growing the AVP and pro beach volleyball.

How do you take the ratings and prime-time exposure and build off of it going forward?
Armato: One of the things that’s exciting is that the week after the Olympics NBC will be televising the Crocs Cup Shootout, which is an event that matches up all of our top teams in March Madness form. We’ll be, over the next three weeks, eliminating teams in a March Madness format all the way down to the Crocs Cup Championship all the way down to a million-dollar Crocs Cup championship game in Manhattan Beach set to be broadcast on big Fox following an NFL game around the country.

Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh

What are your impressions of the Olympics and the production of beach volleyball here?
Armato: Well, the entertainment here is basically imported from the AVP Tour. They have our announcers. They have dancing girls. We call them the beach girls. They call them the beach girls. It’s pretty much a mirror image. We do it better, but it’s an attempt to import our style of AVP pro beach volleyball.

My impression of the Olympics is that it’s incredible. They’ve done a very good job of keeping traffic light. They’ve done a very good job of making sure lots of people are there to help you. They can’t do anything about the weather so at times it’s a sticky, hot, soupy sort of steam bath. It is what it is.

How would you describe the financial state of the organization? People have said it’s facing some tough times financially.
Armato: We had a failed acquisition last year by Shamrock Holdings, Roy Disney’s investment arm. Within the context of that failed acquisition, there were a lot of losses the company suffered — break-up fees and legal fees and sort of a lot of acrimony that unfolded because some shareholders wanted the transaction and others didn’t. We are now putting ourselves in a position to write our next chapter of growth, so I’m really optimistic about our future and where we’re headed. We’d just like to catapult off the momentum of the Olympic Games, and I have really high hopes for 2009 and beyond.

What will you be doing to capitalize on that momentum?
Armato: We have a winter tour called “Hot Winter Nights,” where we bring the events indoors. We have 18 dates starting in January, and that’s an exciting opportunity for us to bring our athletes live in front of people who otherwise wouldn’t see them.

Keep in mind something important, following the last Olympics, from 2004-05, our fanbase grew at a rate of 48 percent and our revenue grew at a rate of 38 percent, so we think in 2008 and 2009 we’re going to experience some dramatic growth.

Is it sustainable?
Armato: I hope it’s sustainable. We experienced, every year before the Shamrock transaction, 20 percent growth rate every year. Number of events, revenue, prize money, everything that was associated with the sport grew tremendously before the transaction in 2007.

So do you see this as a catalyst for renewed growth?
Armato: I see it as a catalyst — an opportunity to take advantage of this extraordinary platform where our stars have been able to shine in a way that really enlists the support of new people: fans, sponsors, media.