Golden Knights president on team business; NBA vs. NHL; Raiders in Vegas (Q&A)

LOS ANGELES – There’s a lot happening in the life of Vegas Golden Knights president Kerry Bubolz.

He recently closed on a house in Las Vegas. He is trying to get situated in a new part of the country that involves a different type of lifestyle. He’s also readying the NHL’s expansion franchise for a seamless transition into their first season in 2017-18.

“You know what, just with the amount of work that we have to do to get ready for next October, it’s almost like going to the NBA Finals again just in terms of the amount of time and effort and energy,” said Bubolz who was hired by the Golden Knights after a 13-year stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers. “It has been a ton of fun – we’ve been on the ground full time since November 1 and so you got all the work related and transitional elements that you’re going through.”

Since Bubolz arrived in Las Vegas from the Cavs where he was the president of business operations, he has hit the ground running, setting up sponsorships, ticket sales and trying to figure out a broadcast partner.

Bubolz has a hockey background with the Cleveland Monsters – the AHL affiliate of the Columbus Blue Jackets. He notes that this team was a new franchise and his time there should help him in Vegas. He had also worked with the Dallas Stars and Carolina Hurricanes in sales the past.

“We literally started from scratch in terms of the name, the logo, the building out of the business team,” Bubolz said. “Now, we had an advantage in that we had an NBA organization so we had infrastructure and data and relationships, but it was still a startup.”

We spoke with Bubolz about business operations in Vegas, what owner Bill Foley expects of him and how his team can succeed in such a crowded entertainment marketplace.

We also asked Bubolz about the trademark issues involving the Golden Knights and what he thinks about the possibility of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders moving to Vegas.

Q: So are you all set up in Las Vegas?

BUBOLZ: You know what, just with the amount of work that we have to do to get ready for next October, it’s almost like going to the NBA Finals again just in terms of the amount of time and effort and energy. It has been a ton of fun – we’ve been on the ground full time since November 1 and so you got all the work related and transitional elements that you’re going through and even just on a family front, we just closed on our house about 10 days ago, so it’s a lot of work and moving is not easy. I have a ninth grader who is transitioning so it’s just the two of us right now. I have an older daughter who is staying with my wife back in Cleveland. She’s going to finish out high school. She’s a senior and she’s going to finish out. So they’ll move out in June so we’re anxious to kind of get everybody together. But at least over the next whatever, four months It’ll just be me and the ninth grader, so just managing her and all her schedule stuff in addition to what we need to do to get ready for next October. We just have a lot going on.

What’s it like jumping from the NBA to the NHL?

They’re different maybe more so I’d say kind of the team side. I think from the business side they’re very similar. We have 82 games on both sets. The schedules are fairly similar in terms of the timing of the year. The revenues in terms of ticket sales and sponsorships and media rights and those important streams that are important to the business, those are very similar. So in terms of what I do on a day-to-day basis, to me it’s very, very similar to what I was doing in Cleveland other than we’re building an organization. So there’s more time spent on hiring and infrastructure and CRM (data management) systems, interviewing the different vendors. So we don’t have any of that and in Cleveland all of that stuff was already in place so all of our time was just on the selling and the marketing where we’ve got to build in some of this infrastructure. So hiring your business team – every single position you’re interviewing multiple people obviously. It’s part of the process. It’s just a lot of time and energy. It’s fun. We’re having a blast.

What specific task does Bill Foley have you doing?

I would say the most important kind of big rocks in what he wants me focused on is driving our two most important local revenues, which are sponsorship and ticket sales, so making sure that those are strong, and they are strong. The last piece is we have to go out and find our partner on the TV side and so we’re going through that process.

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The TV partnership isn’t easy, right?

No, it’s not easy and those are kind of the obvious players that are out there from Fox Sports to Sinclair Broadcasting to the different groups like Comcast and DirecTV. We’re talking to everybody trying to figure out what’s going to be the right fit to not only distribute the games when we want and how we want to build the organization and its availability in the market, but also there’s an important economic component to that, as that is one of those ‘Big Three’ in terms of revenue rocks within an NHL organization.

Are you picking the broadcasters?

We will, absolutely. Our first process is to get the deals done. We’re working on both the TV side and we’re also in the market working on the radio side. There’s four large kind of clusters of different radio station groups that are in the market. We’re talking to all four. Once we get both complete, then we’ll start the process of both the radio, radio color, TV color, postgame, pregame all the ancillary programming and build out the team for that. What I can say is I’ve been blown away by the interest already, I shouldn’t even say on a national basis because it’s really more of a North American basis in terms of people that are interested in coming to work here. Some of them already have great jobs in the NHL, it’s like, ‘wow.’ And that shows the interest level in what we’re doing.

How do you sell a team that’s not playing games and how do you keep that interest robust without games?

I think a big part of it, and we’re fortunate in that both from the traditional media to the digital media that’s in the marketplace and then how we’re looking to position the team again through a lot of those same channels, that we already have kind of a natural way to tell our story and keep it live. There’s just a lot of interest and more importantly a lot of excitement about the team, so having visibility as we’re trying to sell tickets hasn’t been an issue. It has been off the charts.

Did the trademark stuff with the name hurt some of your momentum or publicity?

Not at all.

Honestly we haven’t spent a ton of time on it. The NHL is on point with that process. They’re working on it. We anticipate success. I’m spending zero time thinking and working on it.

There’s been a lot of noise about the Oakland Raiders coming to Vegas. Is this something you welcome? Is this something you see as an issue?

I think at the end of the day these are really two different businesses. The NFL is vastly different economically in terms of how it relies on local revenues vs. an NHL or an NBA team, otherwise you wouldn’t have the Green Bay Packers. I think that’s a really good example. We look at it as being if it’s good for Las Vegas, then ultimately it’s going to be good for everybody but we’re not looking at it from an economic kind of challenge situation. Now if this was an NBA team playing the same time of year with the reliance on the same kind of local core revenue, then it would be a different discussion.

The NFL has to go through their process so once they finish that, if it becomes a reality, then we’ll spend more time on it but now it’s just part of it.

How would your experience in Cleveland with the Monsters help you with this and what is your experience with startups in the past?

So in Cleveland back in 2006 we bought an AHL franchise and we literally started it from scratch in terms of the name, the logo, the building out of the business team. Now, we had an advantage in that we had an NBA organization so we had infrastructure and data and relationships, but it was still a startup. About five years later in 2011, we launched an NBA Development League team in a new market in Canton, Ohio. Same thing – name, logo, lease, hiring of the business staff, selling of the tickets and so even though those weren’t on this level, those were two examples where we literally did it from scratch. I feel like we have enough experience from that perspective and then going back to the Cleveland example – we were really fortunate in a strange way as I look back on the 13 years I was there because I was able to work in a very, very low demand environment before LeBron (James) 1.0, then we had LeBron for seven years and then he left and he went to Miami and then we had to get back to … it was a different type of marketing as a team. We basically broke the team down and rebuilt back through the draft and in terms of what that looks like and then he decides in 2014 he’s going to come back. And so we immediately went back to a high-demand situation. So learning with those different situations has just given me a lot of perspective on really how we need to build this business and candidly we made some mistakes along the way in Cleveland, and we can learn from those mistakes …

What were the mistakes?

I’ll give you some examples. When LeBron left in 2010, I just felt that we were too heavily reliant on more of the full season ticket base and we didn’t have enough diversity in our ticket products. I would much rather have a slightly smaller full season ticket base and have more people that have 11-game plans, 22-game plans, setting aside tickets actually for group ticket sales and in that instance, youth basketball, for the community church programs and whatever – and also actually holding seats for the individual marketplace. Just making the tickets more available because at the end of the day, even as Cleveland goes through it now, LeBron can’t play forever. So at some point he’s going to move on and the lesson that we learned along the way … whenever that point comes, whatever point that is because the product has been much more diversified, I believe that there won’t be as much of an impact on their business in Cleveland because they just have more people involved and I just think that’s a good thing for business long-term, I really do.

How do you deal with the casino element in Vegas? They’re huge potential partners, but there is this negative association with gambling, which has been chipped away over the years. How do you deal with them from a sponsorship perspective? A marketing perspective? Is there some finessing there?

I don’t think there’s a lot of finesse. I think that as you look around the NHL and the NBA, the vast majority – this is one of the highest performing sponsorship categories that’s out there. In Cleveland we owned a gaming company under Dan Gilbert. He owns five casinos now, under Rock Gaming.

In the NHL for example you have Gila River Arena in Glendale …

You have numerous examples already. You used the term ‘chip away.’ I think a lot of that has already happened. In our market I think the only unique finessing is that you have so many great gaming companies, and we want to be partners with all of them. That’s easier said than done because they’re competitive entities. They’re on the same side of the table when it comes to selling Las Vegas, but once you get here they’re competing in that local market for everything. From the shows, to the hotel rooms, to the gaming, to the restaurants so the finessing for us is just how we play a role in that but we want to work with all of them.

In the market you have so many distractions and competition for your entertainment dollar. How do you approach that?

I think what it does it just raises the bar because there’s a heavy expectation on event presentation. So hockey’s a great game but we have to be great in other areas so our video presentation, our music our player introductions, how we integrate our players and kind of showcase them throughout the game. Tampa is probably one of the best I’ve seen in the NHL, Tampa, Nashville, Chicago are really good with what they do with that side of it. So we’re looking at those models. But to me it just raises the bar. Yeah, we’re going to have to be great to meet that expectation of the market demand or I think it’s going to be shame on us if we don’t meet that expectation.

Vegas’ visitors have been mentioned as a possible ticket base. Are we going to see Golden Knights ads in Canada for snowbirds who come to Vegas? Or in Europe for the long distance travelers?

I don’t think you’ll see that. The vast majority of the tickets that have been sold already are local already so we’re anticipating that between 85 and 90 percent of the people that come to games are going to be from local Las Vegas. Now, they may be transplants from Boston, Chicago, Canada living in Las Vegas now but the vast majority of our business from a business planning perspective is focused on maximizing the local market, which we will, and then we’re setting aside certain product for that leisure traveler, that convention traveler, but those are pretty limited in terms of what those would look like, but we do want to have that product available. As a matter of fact, we were at NHL meetings several weeks ago and I bet we heard from 20 teams already saying ‘look, we want to bring our sponsors there. Our booster club wants to come.’ We already know we’re going to have a lot of interest from that end. I think the trick is going to be managing to make sure everybody feels good about it, so it’s going to be awesome.

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You won’t be able to start marketing players until the expansion draft. Is it tough to have to wait that long to start to show the guys on your team to your local fans?

I think philosophically we want to be very team oriented in how we position the team, but obviously until we get to that second to third week in June we’re not going to have any faces of our organization but as soon as that happens we’ll go from zero to 30 guys pretty quickly. Then you’ve got the amateur draft and you’ve got the free agent period that’s going to take place. Once we have that and we have the group that we feel is most likely to be a part of our NHL team vs. what we would do at the minor league level, then we will start to position those guys to make sure there’s great communication with George McPhee, our GM, and our owner (Bill Foley) and we’re all on the same page and start to position it out, but you won’t see us hang our hat on one or two guys. We will be very team oriented. And even if we were a more mature organization and we had an elite player or two or three like some of the other teams that are in the league we would still be team oriented in how we position. It’s just a philosophical position.

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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @joshuacooper

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