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| Atlanta Spirit President & CEO Bernie Mullin |
With a wealth of diverse experience and success in college and professional sports business, Bernie Mullin has won a reputation as a master builder. A Liverpool native, he played for Coventry Univ. (B.A. in business studies) in England and later for the semi-pro Oxford City FC. He continued his studies at the Univ. of Kansas, where he earned an M.S. in marketing, an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in business. Mullin was a sports marketing professor at the Univ. of Massachusetts and vice chancellor at Denver Univ., where he presided over the move to Division I and the construction of a $300M athletic facility. In between those two academic posts he was the head of sales and marketing for the Pirates, helped launch the IHL’s Denver Grizzlies and relaunch the Avalanche and Rockies. Mullin also worked in the NBA office as Senior VP/Marketing & Team Business. Since '04 he has been President & CEO of the Atlanta Spirit, the parent company for the Hawks, Thrashers and Philips Arena. Mullin spoke with SportsBusiness Journal N.Y. bureau chief
Jerry Kavanagh.
Favorite piece of music: “Nights in White Satin,” by the Moody Blues.
Favorite vacation spot: Positano on the Amalfi coast.
Favorite book: “The Audacity of Hope,” by U.S. Sen. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL).
Favorite quote: “The enemy of excellence is good.”
Favorite sporting event: The Grand National Steeplechase at Aintree Racecourse in Liverpool, England.
Favorite movie: “Fracture.”
Last book read: “The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive,” by PATRICK LENCIONI.
Pet peeve: Ultra-liberals who espouse free speech but won’t allow conservatives to make their point.
Favorite athletes: TIGER WOODS, JOSH SMITH and MARIAN HOSSA.
Morning ritual: Coffee and ham and egg biscuit while I’m organizing my “to do” list.
Management philosophy: Make decisions based on the right data/input with a fan focus and a humanistic touch.
Best professional advice received: “Never believe your own B.S.” That was told to me at my first job after graduating by the VP of purchasing at British Leyland Motor Corporation in Oxford, England.
Best career decision: To close my consulting practice and take the senior vice president of marketing and team business operations position with the NBA in April 2000
Biggest challenge: Taking the Atlanta Hawks from the cellar of the NBA to the penthouse in the shortest time possible.
Regrets: None. I have learned invaluable lessons everywhere I have gone, even in the short stint where I took on rebuilding RHI, the professional roller hockey league.
Q: Has there been a theme that characterizes your career?
Mullin: The constants are a love of sports and coaching: working with and developing people. You know, whether it was straight up as a coach for a short period of time with a club sport at Kansas or as assistant coach at the Univ. of Massachusetts or being a professor -- where you’re a coach. And then going to the Pirates and later starting with the Rockies, you’re a business coach.
Q: A business coach?
Mullin: You’re setting standards. For example, here’s what we need to do in revenue. Here’s what we need to do in new sales or retention or total attendance. Those are the points on the board. It’s the same as the score at the end of a game. At the end of the year, what was our attendance? What was our revenue? Our percentage growth against our goals? What was the feedback from customer service? We’re always measured.
Q: Tell me about keeping score.
Mullin: There were always goals, always a scoreboard. You always knew when you’re ahead or behind. You always knew whether you won the game, and whether you can pull it in under budget so that it wasn’t a question of just maximizing revenue or looking at the expenses. It was always about the return on investment.
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Mullin Says Stern Has Been Most
Influential Person In His Career |
Q: Who has been the most influential person in your career?
Mullin: DAVID STERN. He is brilliant, accepts nothing less than total commitment to excellence. And in addition to taking a deeply troubled league to what the NBA is today, he has also made so many statesman-like decisions that are now benchmarks for all of business and industry -- not just sports. Namely: tough discipline on player conduct violations, creating the blood pathogen handling guidelines, creating the only sustained women’s professional team sports league. Also, women referees, global expansion, league-operated TV network, and so on.
Q: PETER DRUCKER wrote, “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” How do you create a customer?
Mullin: By building a relationship first and foremost with that person and then with your product. We had what we call a fence-sitters breakfast with 11 Hawks’ season-ticket holders who have not yet renewed. Our renewal deadline had passed by about six weeks. Some were waiting to see where the ping-pong balls [in the NBA lottery] went, and others were waiting to see who we were going to draft and who we were going to pick up in free agency. And with those people it’s about building a rapport where they have confidence in myself.
Q: Establishing a trust?
Mullin: Those people have to have faith in you. You have to be credible and they have to believe in your vision and plan for where the franchise is going. Once they have that, they’ll make the decision to commit their time, their money, their passion and their heart. Because that’s what you’re asking people to do: to get behind you and rise and fall with wins and losses with the team. It starts with the relationships and then it goes to delivering and executing on your promise.
Q: Washington Nationals president STAN KASTEN made the same point regarding the fan experience. He said, “When we’re selling a ticket to a customer, it’s not just their money we’re asking for. It’s four hours of their time. If we give them a good time during their four hours, if we give them reasons to spend money, they don’t mind spending money.”
Mullin: Sports is an emotional connection. People say, “We won; they lost.” The real fan is the one who is with the team year in and year out when the team doesn’t win. You get that in the rest of the world in soccer. In new markets you don’t have, you know, 100 years of history as, say, the Cubs or Red Sox or Yankees. And that’s the real challenge for us, and that’s where the people give you their passion and their hearts. That’s when you know you’ve got them.
Q: How do you get them in the first place?
Mullin: That comes from exceeding their expectations. We’ve spent a lot of time and money working with CLIVE GILSON and the Peak Performing organization. It’s the study of sports organizations that are at the top year in and year out and what it takes to get there. Our purpose when we got here three years ago was to create “Win as one,” because we had three separate brands -- the Hawks, Thrashers and Philips Arena -- and the staffs were completely different. And we put them together as one.
Q: How does that work?
Mullin: We basically molded our organization and based it on the Toronto Maple Leafs, where you have one marketing department and one in-game entertainment department. We have a point person who is responsible for the Hawks’ in-game entertainment; somebody else is responsible for the Thrashers’ in-game entertainment. So, they have a different personality and look and feel appropriate for [those sports]. They are unique and distinct, but yet you get the synergy and efficiency rolled up into one mass that can basically share resources and make it efficient and effective.
Q: Perhaps it is oversimplifying, but you advocate giving the fans what they want?
Mullin: That is one of my big messages. It was always database-driven decision making. And for that you always did your market research first: Talk to the fans and ask them what they want, No. 1. And No. 2, give it to them.
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Mullin Feels Hawks Have Greatest
Financial Upside Of Atlanta Spirit Teams |
Q: How do you budget your time with two teams and the arena?
Mullin: My time is skewed very strongly toward the Hawks because that is the most underperforming asset and in need of the greatest time and attention. And it’s the one that has the greatest financial upside and the highest visibility in terms of growing the asset value, the revenue and the attendance.
Q: And the Thrashers and Philips Arena?
Mullin: Our hockey club is closer to where it needs to be. We got in the playoffs. We won the southeast division. And the arena is pretty much already a peak-performing organization in that it is in the top five in the U.S. in attendance, total gross and revenues. USA Today voted it as the best food-quality value in the NBA. All the industry publications have recognized it as one of the top arenas for people to work with when it comes to promoters.
Q: Was it a difficult transition going from the league office back to the team side?
Mullin: It was because we were so far down. We were clearly the worst brand in the NBA and we had the lowest locally generated revenue. So, it was a lot of work. We’re still down in the bottom of the NBA, but we’re growing and improving. On the Thrashers’ side, we had the lowest ticket revenue in the league when we got here, facing the lockout. We’re no longer the lowest local revenue-generating team.
Q: What about the rate of progress?
Mullin: I used to use this analogy a couple of years ago in Pittsburgh: The ship was sailing in the wrong direction. So, the first thing we had to do was slow it down. Stage two was to turn it around. Stage three was getting it moving in the right direction. Where we are with both of those operations in terms of revenue growth, attendance growth, sponsorship growth and reducing the operating losses is that we have slowed the ship down, we have turned it around and we have momentum in the right direction, albeit slow, steady progress. Not at the rate we’d like it to be, but we’re gaining speed.
Q: It takes time.
Mullin: It does. And before that, we were going downhill at a rapid rate of speed because our revenues were declining rapidly and every one of the three years we’ve been here we have reduced our operating loss, we have increased our revenues and attendance, and those are all movements in the right direction.
Q: JOHN SCHUERHOLZ wrote, “Winners encourage innovations, creativity, and passion for their work, for their life.” What’s the most innovative thing you have done with the organization?
Mullin: Probably the premise that you can grow sales better by focusing first and foremost on the existing customers. You wow them with great service so that they want to stay -- and in many cases increase their investment with you by buying more tickets or by going from a partial plan to a half plan to a full plan -- and then you turn them into evangelists who actually sell on your behalf to other people.
Q: JERRY COLANGELO said that for too long the leagues isolated themselves in doing their own thing. You oversaw the NBA’s team business operations before coming to the Spirit, and in that position you were instrumental in a coordinated effort to have NBA teams share ideas.
Mullin: That’s correct.
Q: And now that is something the NHL is trying to implement. What has taken it so long?
Mullin: I would answer the question differently and say I commend the NHL to be the second of the four major leagues to really significantly get behind the effort. I know the NFL has done some pieces of this. And as far as I understand, Major League Baseball does not have such a function. I don’t know that it’s taken the NHL so long so much as obviously they had bigger issues, in terms of the lockout [and] restructuring the economics of the league. And as they prepared for that scenario, obviously they reduced expenses. I commend now that post-lockout they are making that kind of investment because the results are absolutely phenomenal. When you compare the growth rate in NBA average gate to the other three major league sports, the growth rate far outstrips those other sports because of implementation of best practices.
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Mullin Says Atlanta Spirit Not Ready
To Add MLS Team To Portfolio |
Q: DON GARBER has said that a goal of MLS is to be in Atlanta. Any interest in an MLS franchise?
Mullin: My counsel and my direction to our owners are that we have more than enough on our plate and so we’re not looking to add anything whatsoever into our mix now. We’ve got a world-class arena, which is a peak-performer. We’re getting there with the Thrashers. We inherited a much better asset pool of players. DON WADDELL, our GM, has done a great job of building that asset pool. And so we’re a lot closer to where we need to be on the Thrashers’ side.
Sadly [with the Hawks] we inherited what we felt were overpaid and underworked players. [Executive VP and GM] BILLY KNIGHT has done a great job of cleaning house and bringing in good young talent. But we’re probably two years behind the Thrashers. So, for us to have a distraction of another business entity at this point in time is not something that I recommend to our owners, and I think they’re comfortable with my recommendation.
