Mitchell Ziets, the "M" and the "Z" in boutique consulting agency MZ Sports, went into a recent interview with a potential new client, accompanied by the firm's vice president, Peter Wilhelm.
"We come in for the interview and we kid them and say, 'The whole firm's here. That's how committed we are to you,' " Ziets said.
His lean MZ agency, specializing in arena and stadium finance and franchise acquisition within pro sports, was born just two years ago. Ziets, the president and CEO, backs up his pledge of commitment with 14 years of experience that involves arena and stadium financing packages in Milwaukee, Philadelphia and San Diego.
In Ziets' business, you enjoy the occasional lighter moment when the opportunity arises because much of the work is number crunching, negotiating and researching. During the late 1980s, such pro teams as the Baltimore Orioles and Miami Dolphins were entrenched in municipal and state government funding talks to deliver new stadiums. About the same time, NBA and NHL team owners were becoming enamored of privately financed arenas.
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This calm before the storm of frenzied stadium and arena deals that dominated most of the 1990s and ushered in the era of fan-friendly sports facilities coincided with Ziets' arrival in 1988 at Philadelphia-based Public Financial Management, a firm specializing in municipal financing plans with little involvement in sports.
"I kind of fell into [sports finance]," said Ziets, at the time a freshly minted University of California graduate with a master's degree in operations research. " I could have been assigned to resource recovery — which is trash [management]— or I could have been assigned to water and sewer projects, but instead I got assigned to the brand-new sports group PFM had just formed."
Ziets had been out of sports as an active participant since playing high school baseball. Looking back, he recognized that exposure to sports has had less to do with his career progression than his natural inclination to thrive on negotiating and creative deal-making. It has led him beyond stadium finance projects and into representation of investor groups positioned to buy pro teams, as well as to working on behalf of owners looking for qualified buyers.
"It's one of those [careers] that builds on the prior deal, and you just learn as you go," he said.
After leaving PFM and following a brief stop at the financial firm Legg Mason, Ziets launched MZ Sports. As a negotiator, he has represented groups in discussions to buy the Anaheim Angels, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers and Buffalo Sabres.
These include some of the best-known franchise brands in sports, conjuring images of Sandy Koufax, Ted Williams and others. But the career path to fueling the financial engines of these properties has little connection to fastballs and home run power. For those envisioning a job similar to Ziets', what's essential is an expertise in due diligence analysis of franchise values, financial modeling and tax code deciphering.
According to Ziets, what's necessary to succeed in the area of stadium development are experience and skills in structuring a financial plan and raising capital to support it. As Ziets discovered in working for the San Diego Padres on a $1 billion stadium and entertainment complex, the process can become all-consuming.
"I worked on that deal for five years [at PFM]," he said. "That is an incredibly long time to work on one deal, but we started before [the Padres' ownership] sat down with the city to start negotiating the deal. It was a fairly typical California deal, where there's no state money and you have to cobble together a whole lot of different things."
Jed Hughes (jhughes@spencerstuart.com) is managing director of Spencer Stuart Sports Leadership Practices.
