Every [player] decision has two main components, the scouting or traditional analysis and the numbers … depending on the situation, you weight them differently. |
I am very excited to be joining Carroll Dawson and the first-class basketball organization at the Rockets. My base of experience provides another perspective toward the common goal of everyone who works for Carroll, winning a championship for the fans of Houston. |
I've never seen a business that shouldn't be more analytically driven than ticket sales … we have fantastic data on who the customers are, where they're sitting and what they'll pay. |
If we have a hot Lakers game and I want to package it with four other games on the fly, now we can easily find seats that are open across four games. |
Our marketing is more real-time than other places … in other businesses, it's not as event based. But, if we don't properly sell, price and get the right offer out for the Minnesota game tonight [January 18], we've left money -- that will never come back to us -- on the table. |
The product is the team, the market is Boston and competitive responses are fairly muted. You sell most of your tickets to diehard Celtics fans and there isn't much price elasticity in terms of other sports teams or entertainment options. |
The reason that opportunity exists is because the ownership groups buying teams are very different than in the past. The franchise is their primary asset, and they come from backgrounds with an analytical focus such as venture capital, private equity, and management consulting. In the past, sports franchises were secondary assets in the portfolio of individuals who made their money in industrial-based businesses. |
We optimize the business to give Danny [Ainge, the Celtics executive director of basketball operations] as much money as possible to go spend on players -- the more money we make, the more he has to spend. |
Without a visual sense of who was coming into the building and where they wanted to sit, it was like playing chess without a chess board. You could play chess with written notations in Excel, but it makes a big difference if you can actually see the demand and the revenue trends. |