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A Day In The Life With Intersport's Brian Graybill

Intersport Chief Marketing & Client Officer BRIAN GRAYBILL since joining the firm in '14 has worked in almost every facet of the sports industry. From sponsorship activation to property creation to esports, Graybill has nearly seen it all. He recently spoke with THE DAILY to detail what a typical day can look like for him, although no two are ever the same. This particular summer day saw Graybill meet and brainstorm with several of his Intersport teams to discuss different projects and then travel from Chicago to N.Y. for a business dinner.

5:00am: I wake up around 5:00. My routine is taking a quick read of the news on my phone, certainly the cliff notes version. Gotta make sure I’m hitting at least the headlines. I bang out an e-mail or two from things that I was either thinking about when I went to bed that night or things I thought about immediately first thing in the morning. 

6:00am: I’m a big Flywheel guy so I try to hit a class. It’s a studio cycling class and you’ve got numbers that you’re trying to hit every class, so it gives you something to chase. I’m motivated by chasing numbers and I need to see that page of results versus just feeling good. It’s a great way to get some routinized exercise. 

7:00-8:15am: That enables me to get back home and take public transit to work -- I’m in downtown Chicago, I live in the city, but it’s a train and a walk to get to work so it’s probably around 8:15 when I hit the desk officially in the morning.

Graybill works with most of Intersport's major clients and has a hand in all of the firm's major initiativesBRIAN GRAYBILL

8:15am: My day starts with pounding about a couple liters of coffee -- and a Quest Bar. If I don’t have a meeting straight out of the gate, I’m staring at the big board and thinking about who I need to connect with. We’ve got a lot of clients and we do a lot of things in a lot of different fields of discipline. I touch most of our major clients, I touch virtually all of our major initiatives. I work across all of our practices. 

9:00am: This day we were hot and heavy about getting this new PGA Tour event in Detroit -- the Rocket Mortgage Classic -- running. All the things related to the financials, the sales and operations approach relating to launching an inaugural PGA Tour event. I spent about an hour and a half with the team here working though things related to that. 

10:30am: I immediately went into a meeting where we are working with a client to create a brand new property in the youth sports space. I went into an hour-plus meeting to talk about the final stages of that with the team that’s working on it.

Noon: I parlayed that into a conversation with our esports team where we are in negotiation on behalf one of our brand clients to do a deal with NINJA -- he’s the biggest name in esports in the Fortnite community conversation. So, going from an inaugural PGA Tour event to property creation to an influencer in the esports space is kind of how our days roll.

1:00pm: If I’m not out at lunch with clients or prospects, I’m eating a sandwich at my desk while I’m plowing ahead. Most of the time that ends up being early afternoon versus over the lunch hour.

2:00pm: I was getting ready to head to N.Y. I’ve got a big board in my office that has a list of clients that I personally am targeting and want to introduce our company and agency to. I always get a quick look at that before I head out to travel because there’s a whole bunch of folks that I want to reach out to. When I was in transit from the office heading to the airport I had a conversation with our culinary GM who had just gotten out of a conversation with the James Beard Foundation.

3:00pm: When I travel I take an early afternoon flight. These clients were in White Plains, so it takes a little time to get up there from La Guardia. 

6:00pm: I had dinner with our Heineken USA clients to review our college football programming that we created with them around their CFP sponsorship and also talking about the 3X3U National Championship -- our client Dos Equis was the title sponsor. 

7:00pm: If I’m not travelling I get home around 7:00. I’ll go out to dinner in Chicago with my wife, ERYN, at Athenian Room, an incredible Greek restaurant on our block, or Kameya, an awesome little sushi and Korean joint down the street. We like to do that a lot, we don’t do a whole lot of cooking at home. 

8:00-11:00pm: My evenings are spending some time with the kids before bed and talking about my day with my wife. A lot of it is talking about the day’s events and using each other to kind of wind down a little bit. Both of us will inevitably take one more crack on the laptop right before bed. 

11:00pm: I get to bed around 11:00-11:30.

Know someone who should be featured in "A Day in the Life"? Shoot us an email at jcarpenter@sportsbusinessdaily.com.

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