The ROAR Podcast: Jason Sinnarajah

# ROAR Podcast: Jason Sinnarajah
**Guest:** Jason Sinnarajah
**Date:** 2025-10-22
**YouTube URL:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuko3HnWSIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuko3HnWSIU)
**Source:** YouTube auto-generated captions (no speaker diarization)

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(0:01) [Music] Welcome to the Revenue Above Replacement podcast. I am Adam Gman. With me today is Jason. Jason, welcome to the podcast. >> Hey, thanks for having me, Adam. Appreciate it. >> Yeah. Well, looking forward to the conversation. We start this conversation the way we start every conversation, which is walk us through your career date and tell us how you got to your current position. >> Yeah. Well, thanks for having me again and really appreciate it. >> Yeah. I went to Darden. So, sorry to the Northwestern crew. I really respect your school a lot. But I went to Boston College undergrad and I went to Darden for my MBA in ' 07. And then I went to I ended up taking a job at Google. So I thought about going into the financial markets. I got an offer to go to a buyside firm, but I decided to go down the Google path. And so I joined Google in ' 07 in a group that was focused around Latin America and Asia. We were like of internal consultants helping set up businesses and if you think about where Google was at that time, we had just bought YouTube and we were a much smaller company at the time. So I got exposed to a lot of cool things. We launched YouTube in Mexico and Brazil.

(1:11) We did some of the first sort of monetization of YouTube back then in in those markets which was a lot of fun. And YouTube obviously was not what it is today. Much smaller back then. Along the way, we worked on a project that was looking at our Asia headquarters, moving from Mountain View, California to Singapore. I was a part of that and then eventually I moved out to Singapore, which was a lot of fun. I spent almost a almost a year there setting up our international uh business out there in our APAC headquarters. So got to do the go to market strategy for all these little markets in south in in Southeast Asia which aren't really little but at the time you know the internet back then was like you know a few sites were written in Thai and a few sites were Malay most everything that they were consuming was in English. So it was really cool to be a part of that to you know expand the internet really in those markets and and encourage agencies and and and content creators to put out things in local local language. From there, they moved me to Sydney, which was an awesome personal dream of mine to live in Australia for a year. That was a little bit more of a mature market. They obviously spoke English, which was nice.

(2:19) And I got to cover Australia and New Zealand. We bought a company called Double Click, which is the huge adtech business. So, I integrated that across Asia, which was a lot of fun, and got to learn the ins and outs of the buy side, sell side on on the adtech world, which is huge today. And I also help helped set up our tax entity in Singapore where we routed all of our revenue through Singapore as opposed to through Ireland which was the way we had previously done it. After about a year they moved me to Tokyo uh which was also a really great experience and I learned Japanese got to work in the Tokyo market. We bought the dolo double click Japan and then I got kind of full circle brought me back to YouTube. We launched the sort of what I would call the modern-day version of YouTube. And what I mean by that is we started working with K-pop and J-pop stars, things that you see now today. We did some of the first sort of cross marketing where we had Samsung be a part of a K-pop deal on YouTube and do concerts on YouTube and do promotion of music videos, things like that. One of the first streaming deals ever in sports actually was the Indian Premier League where we streamed that to non North American viewers. So most people probably on this podcast didn't see that. But it was the first foray into sports streaming and that was a lot of fun for me. And then after a little time there, I moved back to the states and I ran church content partnership. So what does that mean? If you type in Northwestern Athletics, uh, Chicago Bears, Kansas City Royals, you get a little box of information on the top and on the side. And I helped build that product out. And we started embedding YouTube videos, content, we put in logos. We made the product more enriching. And it's kind of what is is what you see on mobile today. And I'm really proud of that because that brought the sports leagues into sort of the Google search ecosystem. It was my first for doing business development partnership deals that had revenue impacts and so forth. And obviously Google was a huge player even back then which was a lot of fun. After that I left Google after almost 5 and a half years. I met a a Northwestern alum Andrew Miller who who recruited me to the Cleveland Indians. And Andrew has become a mentor of mine. He's a JDMBA.

(4:24) So shout out to to Kellogg, but he recruited me to be a part of a strategy and analytics crew at the Cleveland Indians as they were known at the time. Now the Cleveland Guardians obviously. And for almost 3 years there, I was a part of a small team effectively helping run the franchise, right? We looked at our headcount. We looked at different leadership roles. We changed we made some adjustments. We brought in a chief revenue officer. For instance, Brian Baron, who's now the president of the team, we looked at the way we sold tickets. So, I actually ran ticket sales for a couple of renewal cycles. I did all the compensation and the KPI goals for ticket sales, sponsorship, partnership sales, group sales, and it was really effectively running the the ticket sales for a little while there too in terms of how to structure it, use CRM, all the nitty-gritty things that they don't teach at business school, but those are the most important things to revenue monetization, especially in sports, right? How to who to reach out to customers, how to tier them, etc. We moved our team from paper tickets to digital tickets to fully digital as I like call it. So it used to be, you know, you had the paper ticket and then it went to, okay, we're going to have digital tickets, but people would just bring pieces of paper that they had printed out and now we went to digital tickets while we were there when we moved to tickets.com, which is an MLB entity, which was a lot of fun. I did our food and beverage deal. So, you know, I think Northwestern has a real close tie to Levy. We looked at League, we looked at Aramark, but we ended up staying with the AMA Delaware North, which was, you know, a massive deal for a franchise. A lot of people don't think about food and beverage in particular being a large revenue source for a team, but they really are. I mean, especially in today's world, they're usually the second or third largest revenue source at a local level for a sports team. So, that was a lot of fun. And then I even got involved with a little bit of the baseball side very briefly with, you know, looking at arbitration, looking at, you know, free agency and helping negotiate, you know, or helping our scouts negotiate different things when we had draft potential and so forth. So that was a lot of fun. But after that, I moved back into we had a family situation, so we had to move back to San Francisco. So I actually moved back into my old media route and I moved to the Weather Channel. So I ran I was doing business strategy and development there at a global level for the Weather Channel property. So Weather Channel at the time was owned by Blaine Blackstone.

(6:46) We ended up selling to IBM and then it got bought or sorry got bought by IBM but then we moved the digital side to that to that entity and that was a lot of fun. I went with that. We did deals around the world. I remember going to Brazil and Argentina and Mexico. I did deal with Rogers to expand the weather company's reach. So if you think about the app, the app is one of the most downloaded app in the world and the property of the weather.com and weather channel had actually a couple hundred million active unique visitors and so we were trying to get to a billion which is an ambitious goal but we did deals with Facebook live. I remember negotiating one of the first Facebook Live deals ever to put our content onto Facebook.

(7:28) We negotiate deals with Snap. We put the weather on Google in more prominent fashion. And we had the weather on Apple. If you remember the weather icon on your iPhone that's there, it used to be powered by the weather channel. And we got it into Facebook, which was not a trivial task back then, which was a lot of fun. And so after that, my boss actually recruited me to a company called Ziv Davis. And Z Davis is, for those of you that don't know, is an internet holding company, publicly traded, but acts a little bit like private equity in the sense we bought companies for growth, which was a lot of fun. So I worked on our uh Zift Media Group which owned brands like Mashable.com, PCmag.com, Ask Men, and then expanded my duties to to sort of cover all of the Zifts ecosystem, which included IGN, which is the gaming site, the some of the entities around more tech that we were looking at, and looking at things like Humble Bundle, UCLA, which is the speed test app, etc.

(8:26) And that was a lot of fun because I got to buy companies or look at buying companies. Looked at about 80 transactions. We bought four, which was fun. And then had to kind of jointly run them as well, which was also something that was cool. But I don't recommend buying companies and and operating them at the same time. I got a call in 2020, early 2020, from the owners of the Buffalo Bills from Kimpagula, which was a great honor. And and that's how I ended up moving from San Francisco back into sports and moved to the Buffalo Bills. And I'm originally from Toronto, so that was a huge thrill. The Bills were my team and my parents happened to live in Buffalo. So it all worked out.

(8:59) But then COVID hit and so it kind of was on pause for a few months and then re-engaged and I moved out to Buffalo in July of 2020 and my first sort of task that was given was the 2020 COVID rules which was like a 75page document I think from the NFL about how to operate during that. But my roles there were I was running the business side. So, you know, all the monetization, all the revenue stuff, ticket sales, marketing, community relations, stadium ops, even the security, etc. And that was a real fun job because I reported directly to owner and we were a team that was in a smaller market in the NFL, but we had a lot of opportunities, right? Josh Allen was, I think, just finishing his second year when I got there. So, I was there for his first first his third year, and he was ascending to be what he is now, which is a superstar. But the Bills were also ascending on the off the- field stuff. You know, our brand was growing.

(9:50) We got to do a lot of cool things with the growing brand. So, we took our app from zero to almost 400,000 registered app users. Again, my app background was helpful there. Our monetization, we were able to increase our revenue by about 50%. Through a variety of things that we did on pricing and analytics and obviously selling more and marketing more of the team. And then we helped build a new stadium, which was a lot of fun, too, and get the deal done with the state of New York and Erie County, which was a really cool thing. And then lastly, I left I left that in 2023 and got recruited here to the the Royals, which I'm now the chief operating officer. And here I oversee our stadium operations, more of the operational side, our food and beverage and retail business, our analytics, technology business and strategy, and then our ticket game ticket operations, which covers single game tickets, and I help out with overall ticket sales. So, it's been a fun journey. Um, I really love sports. I have that I have a unique blend of of sports, media, and tech throughout my career. But, you know, I draw from those experiences to help me do the best I can to help the Royals monetize as as effective as they can and uh be as successful as we can be. I think actually that last point is where I wanted to start the kind of the questions that I had, which is as you mentioned, you have a media tech search, you have a lot of background outside of sports that's helped you within sports.

(11:11) So can you talk a little bit more about that in terms of how you've leveraged I mean you talked about it a little bit already but how you leveraged your background outside of sports to achieve success within the sports field and sports industry. Yeah, you know, a lot of days, Adam, I mean, it's it's weird, right? Like I have this whole career that I was a senior executive at in sort of the media tech world, spending a lot of time in New York, San Francisco. I was commuting between the two. And I have to kind of shut that part of my brain down because it doesn't it doesn't it's not relevant here. And a lot of people in sports actually don't even know about all that stuff. And I'm not a self-promoting guy, so I don't talk about it. But there are days when I do draw from it. You know, for instance, right, I I mentioned we bought Doubleclick at Google.

(11:51) and and I had worked in the financial markets. I did my summer internship at UBS in trading, right? And you think about the buy and the sell side. Well, some of that's analogist to ticketing pricing, right? Like there's a whole algorithmic model or set of models that is going on today with how you monetize ticketing at a primary and secondary level. And because I have that knowledge of how those markets work and how transactions work and how alos work and the product side, that's helped me be better at at sort of thinking through and helping our teams here at the Royals and even at the Bills in terms of how to price better, how to think about yield maximization and monetization and drive the biggest economies of scale because I've run companies that were really lean that had to use limited resources to maximize IBIDA. you know, I ran a, you know, we were running businesses at at Ze Davis that were 40 41% EBIT dot margins, right? So, I'm used to thinking that way. And so, I think about how do I, you know, grow revenue with as least amount of expense growth as possible. That's a little bit different, but that's that background that comes out. I don't explicitly say it that way obviously, but that's kind of how I think.

(13:00) >> Yeah. I mean, you've used a lot of terms already, whether it's Ebida, buy side, sell side, yield maxation. The reason I bring it up is obviously one of the big topics that's happening in the sports industry is the growth of private equity, the financial of sports. You talk about that, you know, from your perspective just even both from working on the team side, but obviously your previous background you're seeing like you're talking about, you know, we talk even margins and optimization. Those are terms, you know, you're typically associated with private equity or financial, you know, capital.

(13:30) >> Yeah. I mean, when I was at Dip Davis, that's all I thought about. So what you know I was and and even the sabers which we owned as well you know I would think about that but the reality is right like it's it's there is a obviously you have to worry about the financials and the bottom line and so forth and savvy investors like we've seen in private equity worry about that but there is an element that you know at least in baseball in particular right this is my second go around baseball you know the way I view it is the more cash you can bring in the more financials and better sort of operator we are really can be funneled back into team team success and hopefully payroll and things like that.

(14:06) That's how I view it. Again, obviously that's an ownership discussion and you know every owner handles it differently. But for me and how I motivate our teams, you know, I think about okay, if we do the best job we can, we get more people in here that hopefully can be helping us win, right? And and that's how I look at it. I think the private equity model, you know, it's been interesting, right? You know, Bills and a lot of other teams in the NFL have taken money. There's there's these great firms, Arctose and AR and Sixth Street that are now involved in this and I think there's going to be more and more of that just because sports is a great asset class and sports is always going to be an asset class that's a interesting b actually has some pretty cool financial elements and opportunities there and three you know I think these assets especially with the national revenues going up and the media side and so forth there's some attractiveness there right So, you know, I think these are these are really cool assets. They're also limited and and there's some intrinsic value around that. But I really, you know, for me personally, I think it's really cool because you see all these folks that that are coming in now that are thinking about sports differently as an asset class and that's, you know, personally interesting for me.

(15:17) >> Yeah. I mean, you talk this about more holistically than any specific example, but sports as an asset class given that you've been on both buy side and sell side transf right. you've been the buyer, you mentioned of businesses, you were part of a company that got acquired. Can you talk about like just in general when you say sports is an attractive asset class, like what does that mean and how does it compare to some of the other companies outside of sports that you worked with? Yeah, I mean like so just from a purely financial perspective the you know when we used to buy companies at we had very very very tight and and focused financial metrics right you know percentage of IBIDA for instance etc. in sports, right, it's a little bit different. A lot of teams typically will trade on, you know, revenue and and all those kinds of multiples, right? So, there's a little bit difference there and the traditional metrics that you see in business don't sometimes apply to sports because a these are private enterprises and b at the end of the day there's a there's a value, right, associated with owning a team and team success and things that are maybe out of the control of people like myself. So, I think that's really really intriguing. You know, I'm sure there's a whole host of well, I know that there's a whole host of tax and other financial things that I that are well beyond my understanding of of this, but there's elements there that are really intriguing as well. And then look, I mean, you know, I I've never been in a position where I've had that type of wealth and so forth, but there's some intrigue, right, around owning an asset. You see this in Europe, you see this here. I think you'll see it around the world, uh, where they're unique assets, right? It's I think Steve Cohen has said that they're they're like art or or whatever. I mean that's I don't I don't fully understand that analogy, but there there's some unique elements to owning these assets that create some opportunities financially.

(17:04) >> Yeah. And talking about unique elements in the sports business, just going back to when you first were recruited by the Cleveland Guardian or then Indians now Guardians, you know, like what was attractive? You mentioned like you work in sports, you obviously have now several leadership roles in sports. What was interesting and you know you were at Google, you've been you did a lot you know you're traveling the world and I want to get back to that part of it also but what was interesting to you about sports and working in the business in sports from kind of from the jump or from the start when you first got the role >> Cleveland >> well it wasn't the money Adam that's probably the biggest thing I remember I took a I think I think about like a 90% pay cut like n and so you got to really want it but I was I was really blessed that I'd had the career at Google. I was fairly young when I graduated Darden. So, you know, I had some opportunities that way and most importantly, I had a I met my wife at Darden who who has allowed me to go on this journey as well and she's an active partner. So, I'm very grateful for that. So, I should give her a shout out too as part of this. But I think, you know, what was attractive was a couple things. I mean, one, I was really intrigued by sports, right? I knew that was an interesting thing to me. It was something that got me going. And it was a business. I was interested in the business side too. And I think that's an important distinction. You know, I was interested in the baseball side. I'd play a little baseball, you know, in my past. And so I really like loved the game, but I wasn't trying to be Theo Epstein at the time or some of these folks that are now GMs and president of baseball ops. I was more interested in the business side. I like the unity economics. I like talking about ticket sales or sweet sales or sponsorship or media rights or what have you or real estate. And I saw the opportunity of sports as kind of two things, right?

(18:51) They were, this is like in 2012, 2013, like they were two things. They were media assets, right? Because they were eyeballs and they're real estate opportunities because you brought a lot of people in. And so for me, that was really intriguing. But really at the end of the day, if I'm being honest, like the team in Cleveland, I mean, Andrew and Mark Shapyro, who was his boss and our sort of larger mentor, they had built this team of folks. Jeff Wallen is a Northwestern grad. We hired a few, well, actually we hired a lot of Northwestern grads, but we just had a, you know, just a really cool team there of people that I knew I could learn from, that I really enjoy that were super smart, and most importantly, we would see a holistic side of the business. So I had one of those unique roles that I got to see baseball and the business side come together and be a part of any major decisions at that. So for me the money was kind of a secondary thing clearly. The bigger thing was building up a career and learning how to run a business, right?

(19:45) And this happened to be a sports business which I loved and that was intriguing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And two things that came from that discussion from what you just mentioned that we want to talk about but first about building a business and learning to build a business in the business sports. what a what was that like to learn about the business you mentioned like learning about CRM and some of the things you didn't learn in business school but two you know one of the through lines that does come through and one of the things that obviously we'd like to talk about is data analytics data and analytics so how do those kind of com combined as you're learning to run the business in Cleveland >> yeah so ironically at Google actually I'd worked on CRM we tried to build our own version of that >> um you know and we had looked at you know buying companies in that space but I'd worked at CRM and so I kind of saw that and we had our first tools called GRM Google reformation >> and I worked a lot with salespeople there and so again this is where these like really weird analogies I can draw that I could draw but nobody would ever understand you know I was working with salespeople all around the world at Google about you know documenting you know the interactions and the conversations and figuring out okay how do we optimize that and how do we do yield management and how do we think about this customer in this way and how do we sell our value proposition? I would go on sales calls. So I learned that like I remember going in Australia and even in Japan, you know, I learned to speak a little Japanese. We went around and did that. And so when I shifted to Google back in the States and I was running search, you know, was partnership, right? Thinking about what leagues cared about and how they wanted to go there. So the the two of those experiences actually kind of helped me when I was at the Indian at the Indians even though that was a totally different working 100 plus year old franchise with people that have been there for a long time that kind of needed only the Indian and we were looking at okay how do we take a small market franchise and how do we optimize it how do we you know increase ticket sales right how do we follow up on leads how do we think about client engagement all of things kind of mel welded it together into our CRM which was built on dynamics and thinking about okay how do we understand these touch points? How do we incentivize our teams to to meet the fan where they are in this case the stadium? How do we bring up ticket sales and renewals from traditionally in the offseason to maybe in season so you had that natural touch point. So we moved our renewal schedule up from what had traditionally been in October into the season in August and then even into early late July. And that was a more effective way of connecting with the fans because they were already engaged. You could present the value proposition of next year's pricing and next year's product. And we measured that. And so when we measured that, we started creating data and analytics. We had a great analyst named Tiva Shin also Northwestern grad common theme here. and and he put it all into Tableau and we were studying that we could see that and then disseminated that information across the organization to make the best decisions. So you know all these experiences kind of helped me early on to to be able to look at that and then all those things helped us figure out okay best pricing optimal product strategy how do you do product development in terms of the stadium and and and so forth. It helped me think about food and beverage. You know, we did we we were actually one of the first teams that did value pricing. We did a 4321 concept. You know, we had dollar dogs, $2 refills, $3 hot dogs every game, and $4 beers. And we we put that out there and I remember talking to our concessionire about it. And you know, obviously that that's a concern for them because they're looking at, okay, if you're bringing that price, then my yield and my my unit economics are are challenged. And we said, no, the unit volume will go up. And we had unit volumes go up 250 plus%. And it kind of negated that conversation. We were so successful at it that I know the Atlanta teams I know took that and they really marketed that and they get a lot of credit for that. So I always give them a hard time, but that's that's sports, right? And so I think just understanding the numbers, understanding the business and then making decisions out of that was really one of the greatest things I learned out of that Cleveland experience. And I was really encouraged by the folks that were there from a management perspective.

(24:04) >> And then making decisions that's one of the things we also like to talk about is how did you how do you use numbers like particularly to communicate those insights from the data to people who aren't don't have quantitative backgrounds or strong quantitative backgrounds. You mentioned building Tableau and or building an instance in Tableau, but how did you how do you think about translating quantitative insights and data analysis to so it can permeate throughout the organization? Yeah, I mean ironically that that's also something that I had to work on at Google which you think of as a quantitative place but again working with sales people right you want really good sales people who have a mix of quantitative and qualitative right but gravitated toward that relationship and all that kind of good stuff right and I and I again I had done that too I' done business development so just thinking about how to present it and present facts was something I also learned at Google right because I used to go in the query logs and understand, you know, all the different things and different trends and I mean, you could see everything right in that in that world, but being able to present a story around that to go to a stats inc or partner at the league level and say, "Here's the story around this was something I started cultivating there." And I think in Cleveland, I certainly got a lot better at it because you have to explain it and you have to make it easy to understand and you also have to make people who aren't in the data feel more comfortable with it and so that it's their idea, right? And that that takes a while. That's that's something I've continually tried to evolve on too, but it's a hard thing as well.

(25:32) >> Yeah. And the other point I wanted to get back to which you brought up in your time with Cleveland that permeated your time with Buffalo is the real estate element. So can you talk about, you know, real estate as I we've talked about previously on this podcast and I've written about and focus on a little bit of my current company, but can you talk about even then when you talk about you saw it as a media and real estate company? What was it like to think of the Indians and then later Buffalo kind of real estate entities? >> Yeah. So, like just to be clear, we never actually pursued any real estate, but but one of the things we >> from a trend perspective, you could tell, right, is and I and again, this is where the data kind of comes in is like there not too many businesses around the world that are drawing, you know, x amount of people. So, let's just say two million people, right? like a baseball team does or you know a million people like an arena does or almost I think it was like 700,000 people like a like a football team does. When you have those opportunities with that are so captivating with sports teams that people are coming to your venue there's a really there's a lot of other opportunities around there. So, I'm not surprised over the last 10 plus years that districts have developed and and things like that have have occurred because you're bringing people in to to something that's really captivating and you have an opportunity to do stuff around there. So, we looked at that, you know, I know for the Buffalo stadium, I mean, the the key thing was to get the stadium up, which is what's happening, but we also, you know, owned the hockey rink there and there's a really they they had already started doing some stuff around that. And there's again, it's opt there's a lot of opportunities to to engage a captivated audience. So, that's what I meant by, you know, seeing that 10 10 plus years ago.

(27:10) >> Yeah. And with Buffalo, I mean I guess that you mentioned that might have been part of the reason to get involved with Buffalo from your perspective when you know Kim came to Google called you. One, I guess that's interesting that she called. That's obviously a very cool experience, but two, you know, how how did you think about the real estate element and potentially the building of a new stadium and also you mentioned being from Toronto and being able to tap in more into the Toronto kind of DMA from the Buffalo side. How did that all factor into your decision to go with the Bills?

(27:37) >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, she actually texted me, which was really fun. I almost deleted the text, which which obviously would have changed the trajectory of my career, but I mean, her and her husband Terry, who own the Bills and the Sabres, are wonderful people, and I was deeply honored to work with them. And so, that was first and foremost, but then second, you know, when we started working on the new stadium there, I mean, there was conversations about what to do there and so forth, and they're still ongoing, so I'll be respectful of that. But the Toronto piece was really interesting because, you know, obviously growing up in in Buffalo, growing up in Toronto, being a Bills fan, you know, I knew there was a connection there. And there only, you know, for those of you that don't know, you know, it's only about a couple hour uh drive from Toronto to to Buffalo, depending on how the border is.

(28:23) And so for me, that was really intriguing because it was my childhood team and there was a connection. And so, you know, during my time there, we did focus groups. We did surveys. We did a lot of cool things around engaging that market. We did a watch party at Real Sports, which is the bar next to the Squish Bank Arena that drew like a thousand people. I had a great marketing team that in Jordan McCarron who, you know, was driving that and and and doing a lot of game watches and we did a lot of stuff with the community. So we did flag football events across the border.

(28:57) We wanted to put people in our logo and do events around that. So you know we knew there was a vibrant fan base there and we were studying the data and actually figuring out okay where to focus on different events and so forth and I think you know that's what they're doing now up there which is awesome. And you know one of the questions you know people often students who listen to the podcast are like I want to work in sports. There's clearly substantial differences between working in sports and different leagues and different teams other than obviously Buffalo and Cleveland literally being different sports. What are some of the different challenges that you know the NFL team would look at versus an MLB team that are maybe not obvious or you know something you didn't think about as much before you joined an NFL team?

(29:38) >> Yeah. And I got exposure to the NHL too with the Sabers. >> That's true. NHL too. So, so I think I'll say hockey and baseball, especially baseball, obviously we have so many more events, so many games. So, so much more inventory. So, the challenges are really how do you monetize that? How do you maximize, you know, getting people in the doors, right, and so forth? It's hard to do that on a Tuesday night against XY team in in April when it's cold or in hockey, you know, October, November when football is is is really huge. So, I think those are those are unique challenges to those, you know, leagues. And I imagine the NBA is probably the same. I've never worked in it, but I can see how that would be very very similar. You know, football, I think, you know, I mean, it's number one, right, in in North America and especially here in the US. most markets.

(30:26) I I challenge you to find a market where the NFL team is not the number one team, you know, other than maybe New York and LA and and certainly Toronto, but I think for the most part, the NFL team is going to be number one. So, obviously in Cleveland, you know, the Browns are number one. Here in Kansas City, obviously, we have the Chiefs and in Buffalo, the Bills were there. And so, those are those are different challenges, too. I mean, it's one or the other. It's just you know there at least for the bills we were thinking about brand development you know answering revenue streams I talked about the app and the marketing and I looked at it as okay we have 70,000 people and again I came in during co right we had no fans so we had 70,000 people that theoretically can go to the stadium but you have an infinite possibility in the digital ecosystem and that's why we pursued the app as hard as we did now it's a top five team engagement on the app because then you can actually use that to to create all kinds of sponsorship opportunities and activation and connections with fans that happen 365 days a year. Not just with that again in baseball, I mean the biggest challenge for us is right, you have so many games you want to get people here and the engagement on a regular basis is slightly different. You know, we're taping this podcast on a Monday. The Bills just played the Patriots on a Sunday night football that draws what 2530 million people on NBC, right? those audiences just simply don't exist in baseball or any of the other sports on a regular basis. And so again, it's just it's a little bit of a different part of the equation that you got to work on, right? One is a little bit brand development. There's obviously this element of selling tickets, but still there's more attention to it. Whereas the other one, you got to really cultivate that fan base. You got to grow it and you got to work through the analytics and the numbers and the data because there's more of it. And then you got to come up with some meaningful insights to really go out and get it get the fans here. And then yeah, one of the things I did want to circle back to that you mentioned both in your responses with the Bills and just generally in terms of your career background is your international experience. Clearly the domestic four leagues have made international growth and expansion a big part of the overall growth strategy of the leagues generally in the team specifically. How do you think your experience working in these different markets and traveling to these different markets, has that impacted you or impacted your thinking or how do you think that could help you know in the future development of either the teams you're working for or sports leagues more generally?

(32:48) >> Yeah, I you know I don't that's that's part of my brain that I don't use that much going back to that. But you know it's interesting I mean there's little correlations, right? Like when I worked in Japan obviously I was exposed to baseball. I actually played on a semi-pro team with double click fun. You know, you get to see that and you get to see the passion the sports have. But again, there's opportunities that happen, right? So, I know the Japanese market, World Cup's happening, you know, there's opportunities there here in the US, right? for for a lot of teams to to leverage these international markets that are going to be coming in to the states to hopefully drive baseball sales. You know, like there's there's opportunities there to to be able to to do different things. You know, I've had exposure when I was at the NFL. They had this HMA program where they're looking at international markets. And so that's where I drew from my experience in working with Mexico, Brazil, Japan, the Asian markets, Australia, and so forth.

(33:43) We didn't bid on that at the Bills. we because we had Toronto and that's Canada and that's international but you know I know I talked to a bunch of teams about their process of how to look at that because it is hard right I mean setting up shop internationally I remember when we were setting up our Google entity in Mexico and Brazil way back when you know it's hard like I mean there's a whole you don't think about these things right you have to set up your bank account you have to set up how you're routing the local currency how do you do local language contracts like how do you do terms and conditions in that these are all really meaningful things that have to have be in place that are also costly, right? That before you go out and do revenue stuff, which is the sort of sexy stuff to work on and getting media blitzes and things like that. So, you know, that's how I think about we we don't have as much opportunity here with the Royals on that yet, but hopefully down the road.

(34:32) >> Yeah. And bringing it back domestically to the Royals, you know, talking more about kind of what you're doing now on a day-to-day basis in detail you mentioned. Although one thing also I want to bring it up in the is in the context of Major League Baseball, you know, improve seemingly growth in attendance, growth in low viewership. There's a lot of positive tailwinds happening with Major League Baseball generally. One, are you feeling those tailwinds locally at Kansas City? And then two, yeah, more about what you do more on a day-to-day basis, particularly given now that you've wrapped up another season.

(35:01) >> Yeah, I think you know the I mean baseball's in a great spot. I mean, it's a well, first of all, it's a great game, but and I'm also clearly biased, but you know, the the pitch clock, the the fastest games, I think, are really tying into where the world's going with this and and people's attention spans, whether we like it or not, are shorter and shorter. So, the game and the quality of the game and the quality of the product, I think, is awesome, which is great. The I think the opportunities now are, you know, again, how do you get people in and how do you get them captivated? and how do you get them to come back?

(35:34) >> And so my strategy analytics team, you know, spends a lot of time thinking through these things. >> We're, you know, going through data. We're looking at per game modeling for next year, >> thinking through, okay, how do we, you know, optimize this place in terms of revenue as well as attendance, which are both important. And then how do you work through that from an operational perspective, right? How do we make our food and beverage and retail offerings better? So we've used data to inform ourselves that people in this market really like local stuff. So, we introduced a barbecue concept here from Joe's Barbecue and shout out to them.

(36:06) They're amazing. And we've taken a a stand in right field that was getting very little traffic. We replaced it with Joe's. And it, you know, the traffic and the revenue, you know, increased five 5x on that area. And without cannibalizing anything in the ballpark, you know, from our stadium ops perspective, we use data and analytics to look at, okay, we have an app called Raven that everybody in the ballpark, you know, on a game day, there's might be a thousand employees across please parking, your attendance, ushers, etc. that if there's anything that happens, they're required, right, to to actually go into our app and log it. And so now we have all this rich ecosystem of analytics that we now have to actually study and figure out and curate but actually can understand patterns right how many games people are looking at wheelchairs is that third base is a first base side is the food quality and lines better on first base versus third base what's our queue management those are the things that that I spend a lot of time on now thinking through that to help drive the more the larger revenue and as well as the ticket side as well are there any surprising insights that you found in terms of you know you mentioned some whether it's stless barbecue or local.

(37:15) Are there any other insights that you found that have helped or move the needle from a game day operations perspective or in terms of come back? So I'll bring it back to the NBA thing. Obviously I went to DAR but I'm sure you guys learned this at Kellogg as well, right? You know you you take your operations class management, right? So a simple thing, right? Well, a lot of stadiums typically have what's called belly. You go up to a stand and you have three rows, four rows depending on how many POS and you stand there in line and you buy your food.

(37:46) That creates lines, right? Cuz in at certain points during the day or or dur during a game, you have longer lines that back into a concourse which creates more congestion which hurts our fan experience. Well, going back to my operations classes, I learned that snake lines actually work. So if you have a snake line and you have one sort of point that leads to four different points of sale that can be a potentially again I say potentially more effective way of doing things and that's what we've done and that alleviated congestion in our in our courses. It helped the line cues and it created a better better experience for our fans.

(38:22) So we're looking at that now the next evolution has actually really used technology. So we've we've got this Q technology for next year where has some cameras and it's tracking infrared movement and things like this is a lot more sophisticated that actually can see like the movement patterns. So now we actually can be sure the snake lines work better than the belly apps and actually put numbers against it. And we're doing that in a retail stance. I could see in our retail location, we haven't launched it fully yet, but I could see how many people were going to the coming into the store and what percentage of those were actually going to the register. And that helps us make better decisions, right? And how do we staff? How do we optimize the experience? How do we get people in and out quicker?

(39:05) >> Yeah. And as we're getting towards the end of the episode, we wanted to ask our last question, which we also ask all of our guests, which is you're in a position, a management position. You're looking to hire folks. you've hired folks in the past. What are the types of skill sets, backgrounds, particularly for those, you know, looking to get into sports or move through their career in sports or move up the career ladder in sports? What are some of the skills, backgrounds, experiences that you're looking for in candidates that you're looking to hire?

(39:31) >> Yeah, I I mean, the pool of candidates that I see on a regular basis coming wanting to come into sports, I mean, is way smarter than me. So it's pretty remarkable to see the evolution but I think there's three things that I think will help any candidate right one is thought leadership providing you know some unique thought around things respectfully right but putting it in a manner of hey I think you could do it this way this way etc pushing yourself that way so that sort of second part of that is equation is intellectual curiosity right like just wanting to learn more and ask questions and get exposed to new things third and then the third is is I think something I really learned at sports and have carried it and I think I'm getting better at it hopefully is just the empathetic leadership and being a leader that understands sort of how everybody's operating and how they the different people and the different skill sets that you're going to have to be exposed to. I certainly don't know everything in this industry. So, you know, you have to learn how to present things better, too, because as an MBA, sometimes you get castigated as this or that. But at the end of the day, if you if you can show people that you're you're there to help them and have that empathetic leadership and that servant leadership, you can be very very successful. And I think that's an important a more important trait than ever. It's something that's really really important in sports. Something candidly that I've had to learn as well being in the industry now nine years.

(40:58) >> Yeah, Jay, a good place to end it. lesson for everybody who's listening to the podcast. So Jason, thank you for your time. Thank you for being a guest and we appreciate all the insights you gave to our audience. Yeah, thanks for having me, Adam. [Music]