Podcast Alert: Nic Barlage – Cleveland Cavaliers & Rock Entertainment Group

Transcript

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Nic Barlage: [00:00:00] We’re all unfinished products, and the moment we think that we’re finished or we’ve figured everything out, is the moment we start to regress as leaders, as operators, as people that work within the business.

Jeff Nelson: Hello, welcome to the Navigating Sports Business Podcast. I’m your host today, Jeff Nelson, the President of Navigate.

We are a data-driven consulting firm guiding major strategies and decisions in sports and entertainment. We started this podcast to share the experiences and the stories of some of the amazing people we get to work with. They’re not the star athletes on the field, but they are the most influential people off of it.

Hopefully, you learn a little something about them and a little something from them. Over the course of our conversations[00:01:00]

today, I’m happy to be joined by Nick Barlage, the CEO of the Rock Entertainment Group. As we are recording this, I feel like our audience should know the timing. I believe we’re a week behind when this will be published, but right now. The Cleveland Cavaliers just swept the Miami Heat. It’s the morning after.

And so Nick, I’m hoping I find you in a good mood.

Nic Barlage: Yes, we’re in a great mood. We, we feel like the start to the playoff journey for us has been a good one and a positive one, and we look forward to continuing to build upon the momentum we created through round.

Jeff Nelson: So before we get into the Cavs a little more, I obviously said you are the CEO of the Rock Entertainment Group.

I didn’t say the Cleveland Cavaliers. Can you give our audience kind of a quick overview of the Rock Entertainment Group, how it came to be and the properties in your portfolio?

Nic Barlage: Yeah, so about three [00:02:00] and a half years ago, four years ago actually now, we were looking at all of Dan Gilbert’s kind of sports and entertainment assets and we said, Hey, we’ve grown fairly considerably over the last four or five years.

Obviously the headline of our portfolios is the Cleveland Cavaliers, but we also have the Cleveland Monsters. We have the Cleveland charge. We have Rocket Arena, which we manage and we book. And then we have on the other side of the ledger, we have some properties we consult and commercialize with.

So we have a tournament called Tennis in the Land. It’s a WTA 250 event and we have Pickle in the Land, which is a pretty big pickleball tournament, one of the largest in the Midwest, and growing very quickly. And then we have the Rocket Classic, which is a PGA tour event hosted in Detroit at the Detroit Golf Club.

And then finally, which is a little bit of a different approach for us, we were a, a limited investor in Cosm, which we have a board seat on. And so we’re working on, Actually last week we just broke ground on Cosm Detroit. And so for us it’s really, it’s a platform that we’ve used to unify all of Dan’s sports and entertainment interests.

[00:03:00] Really, namely between Detroit and Cleveland, quite frankly. That’s geographically where most of the assets are located, but one that allows us to. Think about things more on a platform basis and allows us to create a heightened level of impact across the different businesses. And so that’s ultimately what kind of ties and threads all of our sports and entertainment assets together is the RAG platform.

Jeff Nelson: This is becoming more common, these kind of umbrella companies where an owner has multiple properties and I think you mentioned right, there can be some efficiencies there. If they’re all under that same umbrella. Can you give us a little more detail? What are the efficiencies that you’re able to find when you bring everything together like that?

Yeah, it’s

Nic Barlage: a great question, Jeff, and I think that there’s multiple dimensions to those efficiencies, not just obviously what’s, what everybody looks to right away is the administrative side of the business, right? Shared services. When you think about finance, legal people and culture as we call it, or HR, as [00:04:00] other people call it.

Operations. Those are all places where we find scale and efficiency based on bringing all of these assets under one umbrella. I think the other part of it that’s really encouraging for us is when you unite all these assets, they’re very different in demographic, right? Our WTA 250 event, which is a women’s tennis tournament.

Has a different demo of buyers and consumers than our Cleveland Monsters hockey team does. And so for us, it also allows us to go, when we’re in rooms with brands or we’re in rooms with partners, it gives us a lot of dimensions of diversity relative to the demographics that we can reach relative to the people that we can attract for these partners and for these brands.

And so on that side of it, it can be a one plus one can get you to three or four or five on the commercial side of our business. And then I think too, there’s a lot of seasonality in sports. Obviously the NBA and hockey are concentrated in the winter months. Some of our other events are adjacent events that happened in the spring and the summer, and so it allows us this kind of 365 day approach to being able to [00:05:00] commercialize, commercialize these various assets, and we’ve seen a good degree of impact with that, and we’ve seen good efficiencies coming from it as well.

As we think about how we deploy our team members. And then the final thing I would say, which was really core to us culturally when we founded REG, was having these collection of assets that we could grow our team members into. We could develop them into the next leaders, the next managers, the next, the next people to be the authors of these businesses at the end of the day.

And we, ’cause we looked at our group and we said, God, we had a really talented group of people. How do we keep growing them? How do we keep them together? And that was really the foundational purpose behind, behind trying to unite all these through REG was giving our team members something to aspire into and something to develop into over a period of time.

How do you

Jeff Nelson: manage all of that at the top? Can you gimme a sense of how you, whether it’s from a org structure standpoint or just the pie chart of your time, how do you. How do you feel like you’re never dropping any [00:06:00] balls with that many things under one umbrella?

Nic Barlage: Yeah. First, I think you, we really focus on this, but you need to hire, you need to hire great people.

We have a lot of great leaders in our business. We’ve got a lot of team members that have been homegrown. They started here in an entry level position and now they’re vice presidents or they’re senior vice presidents or executive vice presidents, and that’s a big pride point for us. We really prioritize, and I tell our leaders this all the time, if you’re looking for something to do, if your to-do list is short.

Prioritize your people and focus on developing them and focus on, we don’t call it succession planning, we call it sustainability planning because what is, what? What is constant for us is growth. And what is constant for us is diversifying this portfolio that we have. But that doesn’t happen without having the right people breathing life into these assets.

So it’s all starts with having the right people. And then I think as you fall into, or you evolve into, I should say. The strategy or the process. We are obsessed with communication constructs. We wanna make sure that we’re communicating things internally and externally in a very [00:07:00] transparent and authentic way, and ahead of is to the best of our ability, ahead of the news curve, if you will, if we can in some situations.

And so having a very connected communications communication construct is very important. And then it gets down to prioritization of time. I talk a lot to our group and to myself about return on energy. We don’t look at things, and Dan has some of these isms. Money and numbers don’t lead. They follow. We spend our time on where the greatest impact can be within our business or within the communities that we serve and look in, in, in some degrees.

I will say very humbly, it’s not perfect and it, there’s a little bit of a mad scientist approach to it sometimes given all the things that we have going on. But there’s a high degree of care and there’s a high degree of competency that’s threaded through all those things which provide us the opportunity to, to make the greatest amount of impact at the end of the day within our business.

Jeff Nelson: The former journalist in me, I was a sports writer outta college before I, I got a much better sense of the real world and decided to switch careers. I can’t help but pick up on. [00:08:00] The attention to detail when it comes to language that it seems like you and the organization have, you’ve already said, right, it’s sustainability planning, not succession planning.

You said it’s culture, not hr. You said return on energy, which is not a terminology you often hear. Is this something that stems. From you, from Dan, is it something you’ve always paid close attention to? Where does this, where does this careful attention to detail with language come from?

Nic Barlage: Yeah, I think it, it’s a great question and I’m thankful and appreciative of you picking up on it, Jeff.

I would say that it, it really comes from, it comes from all the above. At the end of the day, I’ve been really fortunate to work very closely with somebody who, in my opinion, is the best owner in sports, and Dan and the best chairman in sports and Dan provides. Resources while giving us a significant degree of autonomy to operate and run these businesses.

And that being said, there’s also, I’ve had an intricate network of mentors myself, and [00:09:00] I’ve really, I always try to be a student of the game. I say this all the time to people, like we’re all unfinished products, and the moment we think that we’re finished or we’ve figured everything out, is the moment we start to regress as leaders, as operators, as

people that work within the business, and it’s a little, I get a little obsessed around just all development aspects of these things because I think it ultimately, at the end of the day, nothing can replace a hard work. Nothing can replace a great work ethic, but also the right attitude and the right degree of passion and attention to detail.

And I’ve absolutely learned all those things from Dan, and I’ve learned all those things from kind of an intricate network of mentors that have helped me along the way. And now in this position, it’s really incumbent upon me to return and reciprocate a lot of those learnings and those experiences with the team that we have here and with the folks that sit adjacent to us in the community.

Jeff Nelson: Isms are something you just referenced, and I know if you’re a real sports business nerd, this is probably [00:10:00] something you’ve already. Read about and heard about with Dan Gilbert and his businesses, and then certainly REG now, but you have, am I right? Is it 20 is and it. It’s everywhere. From my understanding, it’s on the walls.

It’s just imbued in every aspect of once you are part of the Rock Entertainment Group, those isms are something you learn and they dominate the way that you are supposed to operate as a business, and each individual is supposed to contribute to the business. Can you give us a little more color on, I guess.

Your understanding of how these came to be and how you incorporate them?

Nic Barlage: Yeah, so look, the isms, at the end of the day, they’re the foundation of our entire family of companies. They’re the cultural fabric, the found, the cultural foundation, whatever you wanna say that it is, of everything we operate off of.

Every team member in Dan’s family of companies, which is tens of thousands of people, goes through an ISMS day where you set aside one day. And [00:11:00] interaction work. We’ve, they’ve been around now for so long. We’re celebrating 40 years this fall as a family of companies. We’re having all the team members go back and do it again because we wanna refresh of the isms.

I go up and speak at it every time. It’s in Detroit especially. I’m up there probably once at least every 60 days speaking at isms Day on top of other business initiatives we have going there, but. It’s special, it’s unique, and they’re very kind of common sense in nature, but they have profound impact in their meeting.

And Dan has not only the isms, but he also has. The 38 or 39 are soon to be 40 things he’s learned in that many years of business, which are other profound little nuggets of information that I find myself just pouring into the book occasionally just to, to pick up on some things. But some Isms we talk about are, which is like we are the, they.

Meaning it’s very rooted in teamwork. It’s very rooted in making sure that everybody knows that they’re a part of what we have going on. There’s, it’s not about who’s right, it’s about what’s right. It’s, there’s another one called Launch and Learn, which is really about [00:12:00] testing and innovating and trying new things and not being scared to fail.

There’s other ones. You’ll see it when you believe it. Dan always had this, Dan always has poured into us like we all have a choice and we all have to think every day, so why not think big? And you’ll see it when you believe it, meaning you’ll see the results and the impact when you actually believe in yourself and you believe in what can be.

And so there’s a subset of all of them. At the end of the day, I try to hand out Isms books to any new, any new job candidate that’s coming in to look at, look at working with us. And I try to hand ’em out in the community as well during speaking engagements and other things because they just have those inches.

So one of the isms of the inches you need are everywhere around you. Like they, they’re, the inches we need are everywhere around us, I should say. But they just, they, you put ’em all together and they create this rock solid foundation for our culture to operate off of. And we lead with culture before we lead with strategy, or before we lead with tactics.

Because we think if you curate the right environment around your team members, they’re gonna have a higher degree of affinity to work harder for you. They’re gonna care more about the work [00:13:00] that they do, and it’s gonna be purpose-driven at the end of the day, which means it’s gonna have a much larger effect on whatever the outcome may be.

Jeff Nelson: Culture is something that I’ve talked with several team presidents about recently and some of the challenges with a new generation coming into sports and the realities of, Hey, if you’re gonna work for an NBA team, the number of nights and weekends you’re putting in are enormous, and the stress of the job is just a reality.

How? How much. Do you find these isms as a way to filter who you hire, who you retain, who you grow?

Nic Barlage: Yeah. I think the isms are, at the end of the day, they’re navigational beacons, if you will. I think relative to how we hire and what we look for in candidates, we look for a certain set of characteristics within candidates.

We want people to be passionate about the job they’re applying for or their craft. It’s easy, and the hard part about [00:14:00] sports, and you know this. People, a lot of people are passionate about sports. That’s why we’re in business, right? Because they’re, we’re unified by this passion for the game of whatever you’re consuming.

It’s different though, like we want people to be passionate about if they’re applying for a job in finance, they, we want them to be passionate about a position in finance or legal or commercial or marketing or whatever it may be, right? And so we look for a, we look for a degree of passion. We look for people that are open to learning.

They gotta be porous and permeable to new things. We want people that are willing to work hard. Dan would always say this, and I totally agree, is there’s no substitute for hard work. And then we want people pos that are positive. I firmly believe that. In life, you can look at things for the opportunities they create, not the challenges that they present.

And so we look for team members that embody those characteristics because we think in professional sports, it can be the cyclical rollercoaster of sorts, but if you have those core characteristics. And you will then therefore have a belief in our is in our isms and in our culture, which creates a stronger [00:15:00] relationship with the team member at the end of the day.

It allows for them to be more open to training and development. And I always tell our group, go find a great person or go find a good human being and we can put them in this situation. We can train them and coach them and love them up and we can make them impactful in what they do. And that’s really been born out for us on a lot of different levels with success across our team.

Jeff Nelson: Will there be a 21st Ism in the near future? Does the list continue to grow?

Nic Barlage: Look it, it wouldn’t be the isms and I mentioned Launch and Learn earlier. We’re constantly iterating a couple years ago, which was the impetus behind us having everybody go back through ISMS Day. We rebranded some isms. Launch and Learn was.

Take the roast outta the oven, meaning, if you have an idea, get it out there and see how it works. But we, we rebranded that or recasted that for launch and learn, so we’re constantly iterating on it. So never say never. I don’t think there’ll ever be a defined number of what we need to, what the isms need to be, but we’re constantly trying to evolve them, modernize them.

Make sure that they are [00:16:00] consumable to the new generations of team members. We have flowing into the family of companies. We think that’s very important. What people are looking for today is different than what people were working looking for 20 years ago, and so we’ve even tried to weave that into training modules and other things because attention spans become finite and we’ve gotta be more modern in how we train and develop and coach, coach our people.

Jeff Nelson: Is there another multi property organization that you look toward as a peer or as someone to constantly keep tabs on because there are things they do that you might be able to learn from or emulate. You have that kind of, I don’t want to call it aspirational because I don’t think that’s what I mean, but do you have that group that.

You really look toward and admire? Yeah, I

Nic Barlage: think, look, I look towards and admire any operators in our industry that are trying to [00:17:00] push the boundaries, that are trying to see around corners, that are trying to innovate at rapid paces, that are willing to take risks there. There’s all the ones that are the hallmark ones, right?

Whether it’s Harris Blitzer sports and entertainment, love what they’ve built and what they’re building. Fenway Sports Group, Kroenke sports and entertainment, and there’s a myriad of others, right? But I get, we get really obsessed around finding a better way, which is also one of the isms at the end of the day.

But for us, it’s studying what our peers are doing, what our colleagues are doing, to not just take what they’re doing and try to implement it, but take it and maybe modernize it and push it to another level, but then also make it authentic to Cleveland or make it authentic to Detroit for us. It’s never gonna be as linear because I’ve looked at these and have run the comparables.

Everybody’s got different assets, everyone’s got different aspirations, and everyone’s got different thesises as to why they’re in these businesses. But at the core, I think there’s a lot of learnings we take from each other and sharing best practices and next practices, and then creating modernization to our business.

[00:18:00] And I think that makes us a lot better. I also would say too, I, and I push our group for this and I push myself in this. Is the study outside industries. The sports and entertainment world has always been a little bit slower. I, the example I always use is getting, it’s dating me now, but. Think about how quick airlines were to move to digital ticketing and ticketing within apps, right?

We on the sports side, we’re slower to that. We were five to seven years behind and we were one of the most progressive groups with digital ticketing 15 years ago. That just, it took the industry a while to finally get there, COVID and the pandemic kind of accelerated that need for it a little bit more.

And we’ve done a great job, especially recently, of shortening that, that impact curve with tech and with other things within sports analytics, business intelligence. But I think for us, for me. It’s like I wanna study what other people are doing outside of sports because their scale and their efficiency is something that we want to aspire and harness and bring within our

Jeff Nelson: own operation.

Without giving up any first mover advantage, is there anything you see right now [00:19:00] out outside of sports that you think our industry is going to try to emulate or gravitate toward in the next couple years.

Nic Barlage: Yeah. I, I think there’s a few things. I think one, one of the reasons why we invested in Cosm is because it has this unique shared reality platform that can put you, it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to recreating a live sporting event.

Right? And so to be able to do that at retail and to do that at scale can really, and I was just in a meeting before this about real estate development, can create heartbeat a heartbeat to a real estate development, can create vibrancy, can create footfall. All these things that are needed tenants for our business to be successful or what they’ve been able to harness on a smaller scale, but at a probably a wider scale over a period of time.

So I think shared reality experiences, I think there’s a lot of run there. You’re seeing this in real estate right now with a lot of things being transitioned to experiential real estate or eatertainment I think we’re keeping a very close eye on that because those are also. Aspects and dimensions that can complement what we do on the arena [00:20:00] side or what we do on the sports and property side.

So I think those are some. I would also say we are spending an enorm time about around AI and the efficiencies it can create in our business really on that from the standpoint of how it can help catalyze and facilitate efficiencies, especially around data and around fan engagements. And so I think as you think about those kind of three things, there’s more things that are in our pipeline, but those are the three things that.

Continually rise up to things that we’re looking at, things we’re evaluating, and it could be the spectrum of things We’re looking at investing in all the way to things that we’re looking at activating in our day-to-day to create more efficiency and more scale in our business.

Jeff Nelson: We just had a internal AI summit.

Five members of our team got together, spent three days basically breaking down, okay, what are the tools we’re already using? What are the tools we need to experiment with? How does this affect our services? But then how do we also ensure that we’re advising our clients in this space? Because I think. [00:21:00] And I’m not saying anything revolutionary or crazy here, but Right.

This is that moment like the dawn of the internet where it feels like everything is gonna change. How do you as an organization, when there is something like this that has the potential to impact so many aspects of the business and of really the world beyond just sports and entertainment? You’ve got a day-to-day.

Job, you’ve got a, you’ve got the home games to put on for each of these teams. There is so much on the plate of everybody at Rock Entertainment Group, including yourself. How do you make space and time when there is something like AI to really dive in and make sure you are on the cutting edge of it?

Nic Barlage: Yeah, I think there’s a, there’s a couple of ways that we’ve handled this. One is. We’ve hired direct resources around ai, so we have, we’ll soon [00:22:00] have two to three positions that are just focused on AI development, and there’s a whole pipeline of things that they’re working on. I think the second piece of it though, is probably the most important, Jeff, is we have a innovation committee, and so our innovation committee is made up of cross-sectional team members across our entire business.

Their goal is to generate new ideas that make us better, and it’s not just, it’s not just pinned on ai, right? But it’s pinned on. Hey, see something and say something within our business that we think we can operationalize, modernize, or create more efficiencies. And at the end of the day, having innovation, being one of the pillars for which we operate off of, and having this group that’s focused on harnessing new ideas, harnessing other people’s ideas, harnessing different perspectives to then give us a, a pool of i, of just like a think tank of ideas, if you will, that then we go in and we prioritize.

We take six or eight of those ideas and we try to implement. I think that’s really important.

Jeff Nelson: Do you think there is a Nick Barage AI agent in the future that takes some of [00:23:00] your work and helps you be more efficient, or you get to take a week of PTO and there’s a Nick Barage there getting a little bit done?

Look,

Nic Barlage: I, I hope so. Not for PTO’s sake, but I hope so, just ’cause I think it could help me be better, like having kind of an AI coach I think could help me be a better leader, a better manager, a better operator of the business. I’m all for something like that. I embrace those things. Like I said earlier, we’re all unfinished products and I think you just have to be humble enough to realize that there’s something you can always be doing better in this game of life or this game of business.

And so from my end, I would embrace that. I would love that, and I think it would be something that would make us all that much more impactful in our day to day.

Jeff Nelson: Speaking of better, but. Moving into a different topic. Nobody has been better on the court than the Cavs. This year. Obviously the undefeated start and then continuing it throughout the season.

Number one seat in the east, I think I mentioned at the top when we’re talking [00:24:00] right now, you just swept the Heat. You have said that you re-engineered you as an organization re-engineered. The business coming out of COVID to be ready for a moment like this, a season like this, can you give us some examples, something that some of the people listening here who work at Teams maybe could learn from of how you re-engineered the business or how you were different pre COVID versus now and why that has been?

Instrumental in you, in, in your ability to capitalize on a season like this?

Nic Barlage: Yeah, I’ll give a couple of examples, Jeff. I think for us, COVID provided a lot of time and provided a lot of reflection. We’re not a group that’s gonna rest on our laurels, like we’re a group that’s gonna continue to figure out what we can do better.

And I remember. I, I remember because I remember where we were at the time, we were on the front end of this journey, which now has yielded amazing results. As you’ve just [00:25:00] mentioned, we’ve got an incredible product on the floor. It’s really remarkable what our basketball group led by Koby Altmans been able to do, and Kenny Atkinson.

But going back to, coming out of COVID, I was looking at all the KPIs across our business and we had dating back to the 2000 teens, as we call it. We went on four straight NBA finals runs, and then we went through a little bit of a down, not a down cycle, but we went through a little bit of a how do we, we had to reload.

We had to reload on a lot of levels and, and then COVID hit, right? And so as we’re reloading COVID just pushed pause on reloading within the business. And so I started studying across the league and I was looking at gate reports. I was looking at enterprise revenue generation, and I was trying to say to myself.

How do we in Cleveland, Ohio, how do we in northeast Ohio manifest the greatest outcomes for our business and for our market? And so when I looked at the gate reports, I noticed that the top 10 gates, most of them, and I won’t say, and I won’t say all of them, but call it the lion’s share of them, were selling most of their ticketing inventory on full seasons or split seasons.[00:26:00]

And so I said to myself. We’re not gonna be able to catch them at that same rate. And so we went through and we actually have capped our season tickets at a much lower percentage of our building. It’s call it our splits and full season tickets are less than 60% of our building. And that what that did is it gave us a lot of flexibility within our inventory to then go out and sell miniature plans and sell.

If you can sell the same seat four times. You make more money by selling it four times than you by selling it once. And then we set a a decent amount of inventory for single game tickets. We really want our games to be accessible to all fans. And I just think as new consumers come into the marketplace, as you look at the new generations of consumers, they don’t wanna come to 41 games.

They want to come to the game. They want to tell you that they want come to, and you better have the bright product and the right inventory to be able to meet that type of demand. And so we spent a lot of time studying this and now. I’m very fortunate to say we’ve jumped into the, the top third of the NBA and Gate right at the top third, I should say, and it’s a way that we get more data, we have more [00:27:00] new, unique fans into the building, and we’re able to take the, the burden of growing a business and disperse it out of our much wider population of people, which allows it to be much more consumable for our market here in northeast Ohio.

That was one of the big take takeaways we had. I would also say during COVID, it allows us to reimagine our, the way we sell our partnerships. So much more of a parameter based sales model, which we’ve been doing for a really long time, but pre COVID. But we had to do it differently. We had to become more digital focused.

We had to become more, figure out how we could get direct to the consumer and, some of the things I’ve been really proud of, we just created and launched Cavs Rewards, which is an affinity program, uh, a loyalty program that we’ve, I’ve been fighting loyalty programs for a long time in sports, ’cause I never saw one that worked.

This is one though that’s generating millions of dollars of trackable revenue to our partners and we’re just in the infancy stages of it. And so I’m really excited about what that could be. But yeah, look, and I would say this, we’re constantly figuring out ways we can re-engineer and redeploy our business, [00:28:00] but those are a few examples that stand out.

Jeff Nelson: If that loyalty program works and works for the long term, the number of phone calls you’re gonna field from your peers, asking how and asking why, and asking basically, can we emulate? This is gonna be huge. What it, can you share a little more about why you think this is different from the, the list of past loyalty programs in sports that seemed like a good idea at the time and did not work is

infinitely long almost. Can you share a little more about. How this works and why you think it’s Yeah. Different and gonna be sustainable. It’s a

Nic Barlage: partnership with UP two, which has been a, a great platform for us to use. I think a couple things. One, I think the U, the user experience is very clean. It is a very simple way for you to engage in a user experience with this.

Two is once you uploaded your credit card, we can follow those transactions, right? And so we provide rewards around that. Three is [00:29:00] I think our group has become real, not, and by the way, not me. This is our team that does this, and they should field the calls and they should get the credit for the work that they’ve put into this.

I think the other big piece of this for us, one a little bit’s, right time, right place, like very sticky, very high demand product, but two, they’ve done a great job of creating a suite of experiences that are meaningful to the consumers of the rewards program. Meaning I want to go have dinner with Mark Price, who’s a Cavalier’s legend.

I want to go have dinner with Campy Russell, Brad Daugherty. They’ve really been thoughtful and intentional of how they’ve layered in the experiential component of this. And so it’s if I want that, this is the gateway to be able to do it. And so when you converge all of these variables together, strong demand, unique experiences, rewarding platform that feeds more access to a strong in demand product, you start to see this program really grow and flourish.

And like I said, it’s a little right time, right place, but I give them a lot of credit ’cause they’ve been working on this for the better part of a year and a half. And when we launched it this year. It’s far [00:30:00] exceeded my expectations.

Jeff Nelson: That’s incredible. We will all be paying close attention. The measures of success for the business.

That’s obviously a lot of the work we do is trying to help teams, help brands measure what is and what isn’t success. When you come into a season like this, I’m sure you have KPIs set up. Sure. Then correct me if I’m wrong, you, you probably didn’t imagine that this season would be this incredible, with that undefeated start with the one seed and everything that cascaded from that.

I think hopefully this data is relatively up to date, but just looking at Crain’s Cleveland, SBJ, I saw different stats around game single game sales, up 57% group. 102% suites, 125% retail up, 60% viewership. I think 57% as of a [00:31:00] month or two ago. Like all of these are just incredible astronomical numbers. As a leader of the business who’s then reporting up to Dan the owner, are you changing your measures of success as the season evolves?

Because. You’re exceeding expectations on the court. Is there, do you have to move the goalposts, I guess is what I’m asking in order to keep pushing the team to ensure that you. Fully capitalize on the moment.

Nic Barlage: Yeah. Look, I, we are iterating on the scale in the business weekly almost if, and if not weekly in some instances daily looking at playoff ticket sales, for instance, or playoff retail.

We just opened up a satellite retail location here in, in the region that we’re constantly trying to find scale, right? And so for us to be able to do that. Yeah. Yes. Look, at the end of the day, we set a budget, we set goals, we compensate [00:32:00] people off of those, but we also have a compensation model that rewards them for when scale is being realized.

So they get incremental and additive opportunities to, to earn more. Based on the scale that we’re receiving in the business. So it gives them, it reinforces, I’m a psychology major, so it gives them kind of the classical conditioning to pour themselves more into the business and realize the scale and not just get focused on the target, the sales target or the revenue target.

And so, yes, we are constantly working on that. And I think culturally too, one of the things I’ve been trying to think about is how do we get to a place where, yes, we have goals, we have budgets, we have these numbers, these thresholds we need to hit. But we allow ourselves just to dream about what can be, and that dream does, it does not create a punitive impact on either one of those two things.

And so I think there’s a way and, and we’re still working on this. We’re not perfect at it. I’m not perfect at it, but we’re working on this kind of iterative dynamic where. The scale is just the success at the end of [00:33:00] the day. And so it’s not about a singular number, it’s about how big can that impact be.

And so we’re not, like I said, we’re not totally there yet, but we’re starting to see some of that kind of play itself out. And a lot of these percentages, all these percentages are accurate. You mentioned, look, I have to say it doesn’t, we have had probably the best season on the court for business off the court when you’re, our leanest months are October, November, and December when we’re up against the NFL and college football and postseason baseball.

And to start 15 and 0 like it was just an instant catalyst to our business. And then to have four win streaks throughout the season that were over 10 games, like once again, catalytic. We won 16 games in a row coming over, straddling the all star break as re-enrollment were hitting for our members as our season, our sales campaign was hitting for next season.

Like we do this stuff every year around these same timeframes. Right? But like. To have that helping us was the perfect convergence, which is leading to a lot of these [00:34:00] numbers. And then the last thing is having this model that’s very versatile, that’s very elastic with a lot of inventory to look, this model’s risky.

I wanna be very clear. This is not a model that a lot of people embrace because there’s a high degree of risk that comes with this model and you gotta sell this many tickets throughout the course of a season. But we embrace that risk and that risk has allowed us these kind of KPIs to be the outcome on the other side.

And so I think that our group deserves a ton of credit for all the work they poured into this. But from my perspective, it’s never just about a number. It’s really about how much and how fast and how big can we scale the impact of these outcomes. And we are constantly living in ’em. We actually have a biweekly revenue pulse meeting that’s only can last 25 minutes.

Where we go through every revenue category in the business and we celebrate the wins, and then we ask questions about the hard stuff, like what happened with that renewal or what happened with that? New deal that didn’t come through. And so it just gives us, and there’s probably 18 people on the call from all aspects of the business [00:35:00] leaders and analysts, so everyone’s on the same page.

It goes back to what I was talking about earlier, of the having these communication constructs that create this connectivity within the business that allows us to honor and recognize the success, but also allows us to pivot and move quicker through some of the things that we need to be better at.

Jeff Nelson: You’ve done. So much on so many of the topics that are the most frequent that I know we discuss with teams with the dynamic pricing and looking at the season ticket model, AI loyalty programs, right? The list goes on of things we’ve talked about. The one area we haven’t really touched on is media and the

that landscape is changing and the influence it’s gonna have on the industry on teams. You just are wrapping up another season on FanDuel Sports Network, Ohio. I believe that contract is up, but you already. [00:36:00] Have started the Rock Entertainment Sports Network and over the air. RSN launched, I believe last year in 2024 that carried the charge.

The Monsters has other content, minor league college, high school. Can you walk me through the decision to launch an RSN in this moment of so much uncertainty around where the media landscape, is headed.

Nic Barlage: Yeah. Look, I think I don’t, I actually, I don’t think I know when, first of all, we have amazing partners at FanDuel.

I give them a lot of credit for the resiliency that they’ve had in their business, and David Preschlack and that entire group. They deserve a lot of credit. They have really retooled and reconfigured the business from our end, from a RESN or Rock Entertainment Sports Network perspective. One is. As you look at these large national deals that are phenomenal that Adam and Adam Silver has done with Bill Koenig, or that the NFL has done [00:37:00] or or anybody else that have done these large national deals, they provide such a great foundation for us, right, as a local business.

But for us, we have a portfolio of assets. So we have an AHL team, we have a G League team. And then what we were noticing was in this kind of focus on national, there was a lot of gaps in the hyperlocal, meaning like we have some, football is massive in the state of Ohio. High school football in particular, right?

Same thing with hockey, same thing with basketball. Same thing with, we have a ton of minor league teams in the area as well. And so for us. It was like they deserve coverage too. And by the way, there’s meaningful revenues that can be had over a period of time for those. And by just getting them more awareness, like for instance, our monsters business, it’s the highest revenue threshold we’ve ever been in that business from a ticketing end this year.

And I think a lot of it’s due the fact that we have 20 plus games on RESN, on on an OTA network. And so from that side of it’s not meant to be a, a backup plan to FanDuel. It’s not meant to be a competitor of FanDuel. It’s meant to say, Hey, [00:38:00] look, we saw an opportunity where sports in at the hyper local level, there was, there’s a gap developing, and we think RESN can be a solution. Now, what’s a solution to that that’ll bear itself out over a period of time?

Is it. Is it just high school, college, and the monsters and the charge? Maybe we have aspirations to go recruit and figure out a WNBA team eventually could be the home of that. It could be the home of, could be the home of a certain subset of Cavs games. On the OTA basis, we’re not creating this defined destination for resin, but what we are creating is a platform that allows us to have easy access to a lot of hyper-local sports at the end of the day.

And we think there’s real value there and, but look, it’s. We are, to your point, we’re nine months into this venture and so this is a startup unto its truest form, and we’ve learned a lot. We still have a lot more to learn and we’re, but we’re not going to create a definitive destination of success for it because we think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to diversify, grow, and [00:39:00] capture and fill the gap that we’re seeing from a hyper-local end on the media side.

Jeff Nelson: I totally agree. I think we’re lucky to have live sports at the center of everything we do because so many other industries are threatened, and I think ours just has to evolve. But as long as we’re. Responsible stewards of that evolution, we’re gonna be, I think, just fine. But it’s interesting, even

Nic Barlage: just conversationally, Jeff, when you think about the success Netflix has had, Netflix is basically a catalog of all the things you know that you used to consume on cable, television.

You can just do it real time now and you can do it whenever you want. Yeah. Which is very akin to what consumers want in this day and age. I agree a hundred percent. The live entertainment has continued to be at the bleeding edge, but when done well, platforms can be hyper successful with just being catalogs of content as well.

And I think that we just can’t forget that in this disruptive period of time.

Jeff Nelson: I’ve taken up a lot of your time. [00:40:00] I want to end with a few rapid fires if you’ll allow it. The one place in Cleveland that I should go if I only have time for one meal. Huh?

Nic Barlage: There’s a lot. I would say this, I was just having this conversation with somebody the other day.

There’s an a lot of amazing restaurants in Cleveland. We are very fortunate. I think we have the highest per capita of James Beard Award winners of any Mid-American city that’s out there. But I would say if I had to go to one, I don’t know if I can just pick one, but I would either go to Olivia, which is a little Italian steakhouse.

It’s really cool. It’s in on right off West sixth Street or I’d go to Dante’s in Tremont.

Jeff Nelson: Okay. Favorite purchase you’ve made for yourself in the past year that you’d recommend to other people? Oof. I was looking at this

Nic Barlage: one before. Favorite purchase I’ve made. I’m just looking around my conference room here trying to find favorite purchase.

[00:41:00] Ah, I’ll say this. I invested in a coach. This year, which has been for the first time in my life. And it’s not a, it’s not a, it’s not a good, but I have to tell you, investing in a coach has been a game changer for me.

Jeff Nelson: Like a personal, like a performance

Nic Barlage: coach. Like a leadership coach development. Yep.

Jeff Nelson: Interesting. Yeah. That’s good. At first I thought you were referring to a like. Old coach that you would get driven around in. You mentioned you were a psychology major. I think I’ve heard on another interview you did that you were originally pre-med, before you moved into the sports world, but what other career would you choose if sports had not been the path?

Nic Barlage: Yeah, I think I would, I love building things, whether it’s intangibly or tangibly, and so I think I’d, I would love to be. I’d be in more, which we’re doing a lot of this now with our brothers and sisters at Bedrock, Dan’s commercial real estate company. But I’d love to be in some form of commercial real estate development and or some world of investment banking.

I love a deal. I love chasing a deal. [00:42:00] I love being a part of a deal. And so I’d be in one of those two sectors and the grip part in this life. I get to merge those a little bit across the board.

Jeff Nelson: I was just gonna say, real estate, getting deals done. You do a lot of that? I would think so. Pretty good blend of other interests and passions and it’s evident in the success that you’ve had.

I think that blend. I’m just amazed watching everything that Rock Entertainment is doing and the success that you guys are having and capitalizing on this moment with the Cavs and very grateful that you carved out an hour of your. An hour of your day for us. So Nick, thank you very much.

Nic Barlage: Absolutely.

It’s been a pleasure, Jeff. I love the work that you guys do. You guys provide a lot of intellectual horsepower to our industry and so it’s an honor and a privilege to be able to be on, and I know that we look forward to continue to contribute to the industry in positive ways, and we think there’s just, there’s nothing but opportunity that lies in [00:43:00] front of us.

Jeff Nelson: Thank you. Thank you for saying that to our listeners. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us. My email is JEFF@NVGT.com You can also connect with us on my personal LinkedIn or the Navigate page. Again, this is Jeff Nelson with Navigate Joined by Nic Barlage the CEO of the Rock Entertainment Group, and hopefully soon to be wearing another ring.

Thank you for joining us on Navigating Sports Business.