Foreign.

Podcast is brought to you by Head Start Basketball.

Let's say you're Cooper Flag.

You're crushing it in the league.

You have everything working for you.

You're globally recognized.

If you're Coop and you're trying to work in Spanish speaking markets, a brand's not necessarily going to look at you just because you're Cooper Flag.

They're going to go to the guy who might be bilingual in the NBA, who speaks Spanish, who comes down here working with local Spanish speaking celebrities, loves that type of music, so on and so forth, far before they go to even a LeBron, right?

So our goal and our mission is is to make and help these people become culturally relevant to be able to be looked at at the top of the food chain.

Andrew Spalter is the founder and CEO of East Goes Global, an international operating partner that helps the world's leading teams, talent and brands expand, operate and monetize across global markets.

East Coast Global serves as the international operating partner for over 20% of the NBA supporting teams including the Phoenix Suns, New York Knicks, Cleveland Cavaliers, Boston Celtics, Dallas Mavericks, Sacramento Kings and New Orleans Pelicans, as well as a roster of elite NBA talent spanning multiple eras of.

The league, from legends like Dwyane WADE.

And Tracy McGrady to today's international superstars including Kevin Durant, Luka Doncic, Cooper Flag, Devin Booker, Jalen Brunson and many others.

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Start with wealth for Coaches Hi, this.

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And you're listening to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

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Grab pen and paper as you listen to this episode with Andrew Spalter, CEO.

Of East Goes Global.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel this morning.

But I am pleased to be joined by Andrew Spalter, CEO of East Goes Global.

Andrew, welcome to the Hoop Heads pod.

Thank you for having me, Mike.

Really appreciated, absolutely thrilled to have you on.

Looking forward to learning more about you and your business.

So let's start with the business side of it.

Just give people an overview.

Maybe you aren't familiar with East Coast Global.

What are you guys all about?

What do you do?

I'd be.

First of all, I'd be surprised if a lot of people are familiar with us.

We are a small but very, very mighty team.

We lead international marketing and partnerships across sports, entertainment and brands.

Obviously, you know, Mike, I'm chatting with you.

So this is a sports focus.

I'll keep it really inclined with that and where your listeners want to hear from.

But just to give everyone a high level, we represent about seven out of 30 NBA teams internationally, both across marketing and partnerships.

We also represent, I would say close to 20 NBA athletes, again on marketing and partnerships.

So we're running international channels for them, we're running international marketing campaigns for them and we're also leveraging and bringing them branded opportunities, partnership, ambassadorship, sponsorship, etc.

From international markets.

Perfect.

Well said.

Gives us a high level overview of what you're doing and we're going to dive into the details of what all that means in just a second.

But before we do that, take me back in your life and walk me through the steps of how you got to where you are.

What was the genesis of East Coast Global?

How did you get this thing started?

Just take me through your background.

Yeah, so I big music guy.

I was always involved in the music industry.

Even in college and going to Syracuse University.

Um, I was in an entertainment management program there and it, you know, that world just always fascinated me that there was a business behind the music industry Just as today and being so heavily ingrained in sports, I'm fascinated that there was a business behind, you know, what you watch on tv.

So kind of similar ball game, obviously different at the core.

But long story short, I was in music management for a few years.

I was working with an artist named Jesse James.

She was randomly on a TV show in China in 2017, 2018, and what we thought was just going to be a quick, you know, run in the mill.

We're going to get out there, shoot the show, she's going to perform, compete against a handful of competitors and in vocal talent ranges really turned into four and a half months stint in the middle of China in a city called Chung Sha, which has about 8 million people, so the size of Manhattan, no one's ever, you know, not many people outside of China have heard of it.

And I could not believe that when I was there, I'd call the record label, I would speak to agencies, caa, uta, Endeavor, et cetera, and really get to this point where I was like, guys, who can help us?

Like, we're here, we're an international performer on this TV show who can help us with marketing on local channels.

Because in China you don't have access to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even TikTok, which is Chinese owned, two totally different platforms between China and the US and then also leverage this growth on and being on TV towards branded and paid opportunities.

And at the time, and still to this day, there virtually is no one that does what we do at the scale that we do it on.

And truly, and what started in China now are global markets across the world.

But that entertainment, that kind of light bulb moment that genesis was, no one's really doing this.

No one really understands the Western way of doing business as well.

When you're just working with China and there are very few teams like us who are based in the US being able to do sales and landing these clients and then take them out into market.

That learning curve look like once you realized, hey, there's a market opportunity here, how long does it take you then to go from boom, that light bulb moment to okay, we got to put together a strategy for how to take advantage of that.

Yeah, I remember in 2018, in like March, I was or April, early April, I was flying back to the States, drawing up a, a business plan.

Obviously before chat, GPT and you know, things like that, and actually putting my thoughts to paper and really hit the ground running, built a super terrible WIX website.

You know, myself a deck myself, did all the things and but what was unique was after the success of this program and when I sent this blast out, at the time I was thinking small, I was thinking, let's just do music in China, that's it.

And I wasn't thinking about entertainment agnostically or anything like that.

Really overnight when I sent an email blast out to a few hundred people, a lot of people responded and went, hey guys, we want to work this market.

We saw the success.

This is opportunistic for us.

We're seeing streaming revenue come in the world of sports taking off over there.

So it was really quick to our first, you know, three to five clients and then from there really quick to 10, to 20, to 30 to 50 and so on and so forth.

How do you bridge the gap from entertainment to sports?

So to get to the NBA and representing teams that eventually representing players, what's the leap across the bridge for that?

I think, you know, a lot in business and in life comes with luck.

You know, right timing, right place and you prepped enough to be at that right time and right place to be able to take it on and say yes to something.

And our story was super similar.

Four years in, we were super close to someone at the Philadelphia 76ers in A, in a decision making role over there.

When it comes to social and digital and international, he, he calls me one day and he goes, andrew, you're never going to believe this.

Our guy who's running our Chinese channels came into the office today, said he's moving back to China tomorrow and can no longer do this.

We don't, we're not, we don't have time for RFPs.

We need someone to jump in in 24 hours.

This is something you want to do.

Right time, right place.

I had someone on my team who used to, who's from Shanghai, used to work with NBA China and 10 cent sports.

On the basketball side, one of the biggest basketball fans you'll ever meet.

He started as a project manager in music and entertainment with my team and today he's the director of our entire NBA division.

So he's been with us for almost five years.

But that was the catalyst and the genesis to the world of NBA.

One team led to another, led to five more, led to all star campaigns, really successful all star campaigns.

And then that's when I think a lot of teams said, holy cow.

We, you know, this could really help us and our clients.

And then when you have the team side of things, it's a lot easier to go to individual players and go, we're already Working with the team.

We should be working with you because by far, out of all the players on the team, you are the most loved in this market.

This market, this market, this market.

So when you work for a team and you're creating campaigns, give me an example of something that you do for the Sixers or one of your other teams and where you do it on which channels.

Because I know that first from looking at the research of what you guys do, that a lot of the social media platforms that we have here in America are not available in China.

And clearly the NBA as a league, teams, players, the number of people in China, the potential market that is there for them to be able to utilize, to sell product or do whatever.

Just walk me through again what you're actually doing.

What does a campaign look like for a team or for a player?

Cool.

Yeah, great question.

So for with every one of our clients, it's different and just like you said, like this team wants China, this team wants Latam, Spanish, just Spanish speaking markets.

This team wants Spanish and Portuguese speaking markets.

This team's going to play a game in the Middle east.

So they want to activate the Middle east market, you know, so everyone looks a bit different.

Some markets like China in particular, you don't have.

Without a vpn, you're not getting access as a Chinese consumer to Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Google, Spotify, you know, TikTok, so on and so forth.

So we run the equivalent types of platforms and market.

WeChat, Weibo, Doyen, Red, Bilibili, Kwai, Net, East, QQ, I mean the list goes on.

We run about, I think it's like Today we're running 700 international channels on a global scale.

And what it looks like is what you'd imagine comes with social media management, marketing and overall offline and online campaigns.

Everything from ad spend to giveaways to Q and A to fan events to even, you know, we work with the Phoenix Suns, we love them as a partner, have worked with them for a few seasons now.

We were in Maau in China with them just recently at the Chinese, at the China NBA games, right.

Or the NBA Maau games.

And so we're really from.

Some of our teams were just posting on socials, right?

Some of our teams were running the Spanish speaking Instagram account for them and so on and so forth.

Others we are full blown in their arena, in their venues, shooting content with their players, doing collaborations, brand collaborations.

It really just depends.

But that's why it's like, you know, when I started this, I Was like we're agnostic across end to end marketing solutions, partnerships.

But really the hat that we wear is the international operator for a team, a player, an athlete, etc.

That's how we're looked at.

How do you deal with the potential regulatory issues in different foreign countries?

So obviously every country has different parameters, different things that you're allowed.

Not allowed to do.

How do you deal with that?

Again like different with every client, every type of sport.

Right.

So here's a great example on within the NBA, if you're running a team channel, you can't share an in game video highlight on the channels that you're managing for them during a game or after a game.

It's just, it's something that they have written in stone.

You can't do it.

They different distribution rights on different platforms and one platform has the rights to that, um.

Cause that obviously creates the most buzz and awareness.

Whereas the NFL just, you know, a handful of years ago teams were awarded international marketing rights.

So new.

The New Orleans Saints can only actually really work in France.

The L. The Rams can only work in China and Japan and South Korea and so on and so forth.

And teams have to bid for those rights and make a case for them.

So leagues, every league's different, every team's a bit different and it's never like a one size fits all.

But we have to be agile, proactive, progressive and understand where, where we can and where we can't like implement ourselves.

And it really helps.

Look, I'm just one guy behind a team of 30 people on east coast global and all of our people on our team are native and local to.

This one grew up in Shanghai but now lives in Los Angeles.

This one grew up in Puerto Rico but now lives in New Jersey.

This one grew up here and so on and so forth.

South Korean lives in Toronto and Tokyo and lives in la.

Right.

So it.

Everyone's different.

But we need to, I mean that's a huge proponent is we need to understand the nuances both culturally and you know, on paper.

Tell me about building that team of talent.

You have to get people that have not only the ability to work and communicate, so you got to be, I'm assuming, bilingual and have an understanding of the country where you're from, the country where you're thinking.

So, so tell me, how do you build that team?

What does that recruiting process look like for you to be able to get those people in place?

Yeah, so I, you know, I was lucky.

The first, the first person that I ever hired was an Graduate student at usc, coming here for, you know, internationally from China.

We again, we only work China for the first amount of years.

The second hire her best friend, the third hire her other friend.

The fourth hire other.

It really helps when you're working, living in la, you know, and presenting people an opportunity that they really want to work towards.

But then over the years it gets a lot granular.

Right.

How do you find who runs the leading Twitter or X channel for this team in that language?

Who's a super fan, who would be great to have in the organization and things like that, who have worked with other companies internationally but have never had, you know, this, this kind of like grand stage working with a US team?

How do you keep on top of the latest social media trends?

What's hot, what's happening?

How do you work the algorithms?

What's the process for that?

Do you have somebody that specifically is looking at that or is it the person who's sort of your liaison for each country or how does that process work?

It, you know, it's, it's like I was saying earlier, hiring way smarter way, you know, more native people that are on these social platforms every day.

Because to me, you know, I, it's been years since I've had apps from other countries on my phone for the sole reason that I was bogging my team down.

I'd be in my own algorithm, not thinking to myself, I'm a Westerner who's using this platform, my algorithms could be all over the place and versus a local team member native in that market using their phones, their algorithm, their community.

You know, it's like there's not a ton.

I would argue if you're native to China or South Korea or this, that the China and specific China specifically, chances are you're not, you and your friends are not all on Instagram, just matter of fact.

Right.

So for me to use an eastern platform, you got to have people that are from that market actively using on a day to day basis who get the top trends in that space.

Makes sense.

All right, let me ask you a little bit about your work with specific NBA players.

So when you have a player that you approach or that approaches you to, to get involved in this, when you sit down with them and meet with them and their team, their agent, whoever it is, that is kind of figuring out what you guys want to do, what are those conversations sound like?

What are players looking for from your company?

What are they, what are they hoping to accomplish?

Yeah, a number of different things.

Some people, they just, they just want their reach on socials domestically to reach their international bands.

Right?

So that, and that's easy.

That's hey, we're going to launch these channels, we're going to throw you into campaigns, we're going to request exclusive content, so on and so forth, things that are locally driven and we'll really be seen like really be put in a good light and put you in a good light.

Others are, hey, we do want that, but we also want it to lead to something.

Why am I paying to grow into this market if I'm not seeing any revenue or dollars coming in?

And so it.

But that's our business is built around marketing and partnerships and we're really firm believers that they go hand in hand.

After all, in a country, any other international country.

And you are, let's say you're Cooper Flag, right?

And let's say you're Coop and you're in, you know, you're crushing it in the league.

You have everything working for you like so on and so forth.

You're globally recognized.

If you're Coop and you're trying to work latam Spanish speaking markets, a brand's not necessarily going to look at you just because you're Cooper Flag.

They're going to go to the guy who might be bilingual in the NBA, who speaks Spanish, who comes down here, who has family in market, so on and so forth.

Like all of these things, working with local Spanish speaking celebrities, loves that type of music, so on and so forth, far before they go to even, even a LeBron, right?

So that you know, our goal and our mission is, is to make and help these people, people become culturally relevant, to be able to be looked at at top of the food chain.

So once they become culturally relevant, then that's where you can go in and start to sell shoes or sell, get endorsement deals, that kind of thing.

Is that what we're talking about here?

Yeah, you nailed it.

So you look at someone like Dwayne Wade, who's been an amazing client of ours for the past couple years and hit he's known to have a huge shoe deal with Lee Ning, right?

Brokered however many years ago, selling so many shoes every year and really one of the big faces of the brand globally, Li Nang has a huge presence across Asia, right.

So how do we tap in, shoot content with him locally, post more about his shoes, post more about his brand, his clothing with the company, so on and so forth and really make him stand out amongst the rest and showing that he's a guy who's willing to promote products that he believes in.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, I think when you start looking at the ability to go cross culturally, Right.

It has to be something that the player is invested in.

Correct.

100%.

Because we can't sell smoke.

Right.

So like if you're a player and, and you want to work the Middle east, but you've never gone there, right.

You never, you don't know what's going on there.

You're not in partnership with any businesses there.

You have no money coming in from that market.

That's a ground up build.

And that's going to be a lot more difficult than if you were going there and had business entities in market and had partners in the space and invested in companies in the space and so on and so forth.

Absolutely.

So what's, what do you see as being the biggest challenge in working with a particular player or working with NBA players in terms of penetrating some of these foreign markets to be able to get them to reach the goals that they're looking for?

I think, you know, that's always like a conversation that we're having with ourselves, but I think it really boils down to the dichotomy between the league, the teams and the players.

Right.

So the NBA course, you know, they're so fixated and crushing and international growth from the league level, but no one's telling the teams, hey guys, we're working these international markets.

You should, you should probably get local channels up and running.

You should probably do these local marketing campaigns.

It's really then shifts onto the team and someone on the team to go, okay, we have a game coming up in the Middle east, like how are we going to do this?

And there's no, there's no playbook, there's no, this is how you're going to do it.

This is how you're going to succeed.

And then the team has to go, okay, we're trying to work the market.

But what do fans love?

They love players from the team.

Sure, they might have their team that they're the, you know, the super fan of and so on and so forth, but what's the catalyst that it's going to be the players.

So, so I think at the core, and you see this across different leagues, not just the NBA, but it's, it's this dichotomy between we're the league, we're super excited about international growth, we're the team.

How do we, how do we fit into that international growth?

And then from the player side, well, I'm just going to take a flight there, play a game and call it a day.

And so we're, we're trying to.

That's.

I think the hardest thing is to fit ourselves into position where we're between the players and teams and also between the teams in the league.

And that's where I think we're able to work agnostically across teams and do that great work, but also with players directly and do that great work too.

To those who understand that and see those differences, that makes sense.

I can see the value for the league, right.

In spreading their reach internationally.

Bigger, bigger market potential, TV deals, all social media, all the things that go along with the league being able to market itself outside of the US I completely see that.

I completely see it from the player standpoint too.

Right.

If you can penetrate and get into a foreign market and then you have some type of endorsement deal or partnership, there's obviously revenue and benefit there.

The team is the one that I guess I see I have a harder time picturing what the benefit is necessarily to a team.

Obviously if you have more fans, maybe they're buying more merchandise and that kicks back to your franchise, but you're not necessarily trying to sell tickets like when you're marketing to your team in your hometown and you're trying to sell out that kind of thing.

So give me a little bit better idea of from a team perspective, what are the teams trying to gain from what you guys are doing for them?

And in terms of the marketing piece.

You know, Mike, I think that's like, that's a really great question and point to make.

And I think a lot of people don't like they, for they forget, like I would say like the general population, general fans of the NBA forget teams are businesses at the end of the day, right?

So at the end of the, when they're coming to us or a third party agency or non exclusive agent or things like that, how do we make the most revenue?

How do our players put us on that stage?

We're one of the best teams in the league to then go out and get brand dollars.

Do we have people in different markets who are helping us get those brand dollars?

How are we bringing more revenue into the organization to then funnel that money into making better draft picks, into making higher trade or giving like a higher salary cap towards our players so we can go and bring in the best talent to then make us a better team?

And you know, we found that over the past few years when we started to work in the, the world of soccer where every one of These teams, it's really interesting, a lot of them could not care less about marketing because they know that the more money that they generate from a partnerships perspective allows them to bring in the best of the best players to make them the best teams, that they're the leaders in getting the deals.

And that's where I think it really boils like blanketed statement partnerships, partnership dollars with teams.

The longer story is partnership dollars that they can get more money so that they could bring in more amazing talent so that they can be the leading team in that space.

Sense, right?

If you're a global brand, you think about in the NBA, right?

If you're the Los Angeles Lakers compared to the Memphis Grizzlies internationally, you're much more recognized as the Lakers, which allows you to bring in more revenue, as you said, and then that just continues to feed upon itself.

So the more you can capture the attention of those overseas markets, the easier it is then for you to be able to generate revenue from that partnership.

That part of it definitely makes sense to me.

Without, without question.

What are you.

Are you hearing anything at all?

I don't know how tapped in you are to.

Obviously, the NBA has talked about potential overseas expansion at some point.

There's been talk of again, starting in a completely new European league that's sort of under the NBA's umbrella.

There's been talk at different points about maybe putting a franchise somewhere outside of the United States other than Canada.

I don't know how much you're tapped into that kind of talk.

But what have you heard, if anything?

I've heard that.

I've definitely heard that.

That something that's oftentimes in discussion.

I'm a firm believer, and I say this on almost every call that I am on, and I leave it with, you're not going to grow another 10 million fans domestically.

You're not.

It's just matter of fact.

And so when they look towards international games and international markets and it's a huge success.

Awesome.

If they were to have a team that's based in the UK to make it easy for them to get stateside or, you know, every team has to fly over there every once in a while or whatever it is, I think it's great for the program and league to launch an entirely new version of the sport.

Sport is entirely new entity.

I could see why that makes sense.

Because in other markets, like why is the Big three so successful, right?

Like, why are different leagues within the world of basketball and the sport of it so successful?

But on the main stage with the best players in the world.

There's only one NBA.

So I think we'll see, I definitely think in our lifetime going to see a shift.

I think the, you know, people demand it.

Do I know exactly what it is?

No, not a clue.

Every time I think about the international piece of it.

Right.

Unless you're talking about Mexico City or, or somewhere that is relatively easy to get to in terms of flights and time zones and all that stuff.

I just think about the logistics of putting, even putting an NBA team in Europe and just the travel that that team would be forced to undergo.

And then you think about just all the teams that would have to fly there if you're still going with the same 41 home games, 41 away games.

The challenge to me of adding an international team from somewhere in Europe or Asia seems pretty daunting just from a travel standpoint.

Unless we're going to revive the Concord and get back to supersonic trips, supersonic travel or something.

Right.

It's, it's kind of crazy.

Yeah.

And I, you know, Mike, like to that point, I also think that there's a beauty in the realization of like the max potential of things.

Right.

And Yep.

Like if I were, if, you know, if I were to ask you and you were sitting in this decision making chair for the NBA, do you want another 10 million fans across international markets, Are you good with the however many fans that you have today and just pour more into that versus like trying something new and it's just going to be okay.

And it will never be the equivalent to what we're seeing today.

Right.

I would probably err on the side of we're great here, let's double down here.

What can we think of that's outside the box versus replicating what we do internationally?

Yeah, that makes total sense to me.

I mean that's one of the things that I'm sure you as a business owner are thinking about that all the time.

I know I think about it in terms of the podcast or my basketball camp business or anything that I do.

Part of it is, hey, I'm good at this.

This is working.

Do I really want more?

Do I want the added time, responsibility, just challenge that's right in front of me.

Right, right.

For sure.

That maybe distracts me from the main thing that I'm trying to do.

And I'm sure you see that all the time as a business owner.

Right.

You see an opportunity and you have to look at it and evaluate.

Is this something that we want to bring into our portfolio?

Does it make sense or is it going to distract us from the main thing that we're trying to do and continuing to grow that where.

Yeah, I, I can only imagine.

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Tell me about something when you go back and you look at the history of your business, what's a decision somewhere along the way that you made that you agonized over in the moment that ended up to be the right decision and really went in a direction that propelled you forward?

So a decision that you thought maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't, and you ended up saying, hey, I'm going to make this decision.

And then it, it worked out in your favor and really took you in a great direction.

Yeah.

For the entirety, the entire length of the business today, every time we get on a sales call, it's what markets do you guys work?

And at the time when we were just selling China, it was what other markets do you guys work?

And I had always erred on the side of we just want to be the pros in one market.

That's us.

And then that's that mindset slowly started to reframe itself to, well, if they're all asking for it, something like something's here and I couldn't see.

I didn't understand.

I wasn't thinking big enough.

I wasn't thinking like, well, they're asking because they have an international budget for these select markets, not just China.

China's huge piece of it.

Why don't we do more and become more ingrained within their team versus just one agency handling one market for them.

That reframe in my mindset, helped propel the new business to entirely new heights, entirely new rooms, entirely new conversations.

And that to me has been a really exciting and fruitful thing.

Makes sense.

Completely makes sense, right?

That you take it and you look at it and you're just, I think that there's a tendency for all of us to.

It's almost the opposite of what we just talked about a minute ago.

Right.

You kind of just see your core Business, you look at it, you see it, that's what you're picturing.

And then something that's outside of it, maybe you don't see the opportunity to take what you already have and scale it in a different way into a different market or just again, something that's tangentially related, but maybe not exactly the same.

I think that makes sense.

Yeah.

And throughout the years too, you know, it's going back to what you're saying about like getting on those tangents and the bright and shiny objects and trying to leap after those.

It's, it's really being methodical and like I said, right place, right time.

And you know, for us, had I started with truly global markets eight years ago when I launched the business, I don't think we'd be anywhere where we are today because we cracked the code with China, which is arguably one of the hardest markets.

And then to be able to take that go, hey, we're going to do this in, you know, 10 other countries, territories, et cetera.

That could not have been like a tomorrow sort of business launch.

And so, yeah, so we, you know, we mastered that in the leaders when it comes to China, sports and entertainment, marketing and partnerships.

And now today, with the expansion into other markets, it, it's just again, like I said, like, we're speaking with bigger teams, bigger leagues, bigger clients, bigger opportunities, and, and could not have done that had we had taken that tangent in that road eight years ago.

Absolutely.

It makes total, total sense.

Right.

You had to ma.

You had to master one thing, figure it out in that environment, and then that allowed you to take that framework and move it to other places.

And that's completely, yeah, completely understandable from you on a personal level, thinking about your growth as a business person, as a CEO, starting out with a small company and one client and you're doing your thing and then all of a sudden you get this light bulb moment and now you're overseeing a much bigger entity.

I'm sure when you first started, you never could have imagined that, hey, I'm going to be working with X number of NBA teams and all the people and groups that you're working with at this point.

So how have you personally, what's something that you feel like you have grown in, improved an area of being a business person that you have improved upon because of the circumstance of kind of how your business grew?

I would say letting people be the best that they can be in the roles that they're in.

Right.

Like, I can't.

There comes a point in whether you're two employees, 5, 10, 20, 30 like us, or even a hundred, like a ton of different companies today, or a thousand or whatever.

There comes a point where you just gotta let people do their thing and let them live.

Give them KPIs, give them goals, what your strategy is, what's the overall goal of the business?

How can you help me get there and have them be the best leader that they could be and kind of like, let off the reins a little bit, knowing that it will be successful for it.

Just as an example, yesterday, our team, two of our team members, they were with Dwyane Wade, shooting content with him.

I still have never met him, you know, like.

Like, my team's been with him a ton, like, shooting content.

And.

And the other time before that is Chris Paul, then it was Luka Doncic, and then Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart and all that sort of stuff.

And, like, it's so fun.

I rarely meet these guys anymore, and just because I'm not.

It's not my role to do otherwise.

I'm standing there shaking their hand, saying, hi, I run this company.

You know that it's like, all right, cool.

Yeah.

But so I think.

I think with that, like, being a perfect example of this literally happening yesterday, giving off those reins, trusting your team, executing on your vision, and now shared vision alignment.

It's so funny that you say that, because, Andrew, I've had so many conversations on this podcast with basketball coaches who is typically who we're talking about and who a large portion of.

Portion of our audience is that I'll have coaches when they're young, that they want to manage everything.

And I think when you're a person who has had success in your life, when you're young, oftentimes that's related to your ability to get things done right and to understand and know I got to do X, Y and Z, and that's why I'm successful.

And so you equate your success with what you do, and rightfully so.

But I think what I found in my conversation with coaches, and it dovetails with exactly what you just said, which is when I'm young, I want to have my hands in every single aspect of my basketball program.

I want to coach the offense, I want to coach the defense.

I want to be in the locker room.

I want to be doing the budget, I want to be organizing travel, because I feel like I have to control it.

My name is on the record, My name's on the program.

And then I've had so many coaches that have 15, 20 years of experience and inevitably get around to the fact that they'll say to me, mike, I became a much better coach and my program became so much better.

When I hired my coaches, I knew what they were capable of doing, and then I handed off the offense to them or I handed off this aspect of the program to them.

And yes, I guided them in how I want them to do it, but then I stepped back and allowed them to do their job.

And then I have one coach that comes on the podcast all the time.

He's a high school coach in Illinois, Rob Bros. And he always says that he's on this giant ship and he's just the rudder in the back, and there's all these people working on the ship and doing all these things, and they all have roles, and he's just in the back just kind of steering and making sure the ship is going in the right direction.

And that's exactly what I hear you saying, is that you have to trust the people that you hire to be able to do their job.

Yeah.

100 or, you know, because you are at the times there's so many euphemisms you can throw at this strength in numbers, but you are your own worst enemy.

And, you know, the list goes on.

And I think it's a good combination of the realization of all those things kind of put together and what makes the team.

When you talk to players and whether it's you or whether it's your team, do the players have an understanding of what they want to accomplish or is it more?

They hear, hey, I'd like to get into these markets.

Yeah, tell me what I'm trying to accomplish.

In other words, does what they're trying to do come more from them, or does it come more from.

They approach you and then you say, hey, here's what you should be doing?

Yeah, it.

I think it's a bit of both, right?

It's like, you can't.

In our space, you can't convince someone to go.

Can't work at an ice cream shop and sell ice cream to someone who doesn't want a cup of ice cream.

Like, it's that.

It's, it's, it's consumerism.

It's, it's.

If they want something, you're in today's day and age, you're going to go out and buy it.

You could order it on your phone.

It's going to be on your doorstep in 10 minutes.

Like, that's the world that we live in.

And for us, you know, how do you train a sales team to not pitch to people who don't want our services, don't have international budgets, who don't.

And so it, it really is what you were saying.

It's going after the people who do want what we provide and that that's when it's going to be the best.

Because they're looking for something that we provide, we provide it, we're filling a gap and that's it.

But otherwise we, you know, we, we can't pitch to a wall.

Makes make.

Makes sense.

Makes sense.

Have you, have you been approached by any college athletes with all of the nil stuff, is that a world that you've looked at, been approached by anybody in the college space, or is that something that you haven't dipped your toe into yet?

It, it has been from the agent side of the business.

They're all curious, hey, can we activate this in international markets?

But the fact of the matter is that the international distribution of the broadcast of games and just following along is really tough comparatively to that of a major league sport.

So we haven't, we've never worked with a collegiate athlete in eight years.

And I think it just largely due to distribution awareness.

You got to be a real fan or from an international perspective, went to that school, it's your alma mater, you still follow along.

But that's, I mean, internationally, it's, it's an uphill battle.

Yeah, I could see that.

Right.

Again, we, we think of the, the, whether it's the NFL or the NBA, even Major League Baseball, just being a much more international brand that's recognizable all over the world, as opposed to what we see here with collegiate athletics during an Olympic year.

Have you seen how do the Olympics play into.

Again, the.

We think back to obviously, the dream team in 92, which kind of was the, the genesis right of the beginning of distributing the NBA globally.

But how important are the Olympics?

When you think about the next Olympics coming up, the previous one again, where you have the game with the United States beats France in the gold medal game and Wemby and the whole thing with that, just how has that played into, in any way, shape or form, again, marketing the game globally and affected your business?

It's really exciting, but predominantly from the brand side of things, right?

Like, so many brands are coming to us now because the World Cups in just a few months, and they're like, we want to activate with soccer players and teams and how do we do that?

And you're the connective blue and so on and so forth.

So that I think that to me is like when you look at a global stage, it's when the most eyeballs are on it from an international perspective and where our services really come into play and are really appreciated.

So yeah, I don't.

But to your point, it's, it's an interesting.

Because we haven't done much like we will do a lot with our athletes that are going to play for the team, so on and so forth in the next few years.

But I think from the team it's, it's, it's a short window.

It is a really short window that these guys are on the global stage.

And for us, development and growth is about continuity.

So yeah, I would love to broker a deal where we, you know, we do something with all of Team USA on the NBA side of things.

But it, the, those are long term.

Delta still, you know, the official Olympics partner and has been for however long.

Right.

How are you, who's going to come in there and bring another airline deal to that table?

How many airlines pay for that?

Yeah, yeah.

All right, let me, let me flip this around.

We've been talking about it from the perspective of what athletes, teams, leagues are looking for.

On the other side of it, do you have it flowing the other way where brands are coming to you and saying, hey, we would like to connect with athlete X or this league all the time.

Do you have it coming in that.

So what does that look like for you?

All the time.

So we have a partnerships team now, thankfully, which are the ones in offices, beating the pavement, meeting with these platforms, these teams, these brands, et cetera, and it's all about understanding their businesses.

At the end of the day, hey, you know, we're in the middle of Q1, so what are your Q2, Q3, Q4 and year long goals?

What are you looking at next year?

What's the growth over the next five years and how could we implement ourselves in a growth market like the NBA and international markets, so on and so forth, and pitch our clients for those opportunities?

You know, just like a great example of this would be the other day Josh Hart posted a electric car on and I think he did a deal with Lucid.

We've worked with Josh Hart.

He's awesome.

It's great we work with him.

Knicks, Brunson, the roommates, podcast, so on and so forth.

And we were thinking to ourselves, we're like, huh, Lucid is only sold in these markets.

Who's his European and Asia partner for a car company and so on and so, so we reached out to A car brand, a number of them.

And we said, hey, guy loves cars in the NBA, global stage, New York Knicks, so on and so forth.

Um, and he doesn't have a deal for these markets.

You guys saw in these markets, is there a campaign that you want to do with an NBA athlete?

And a handful of them were like, yeah, this sounds great.

So it's chicken before the egg sometimes.

And you know, whether the chicken's the brand or the client's the brand or that, that chicken.

But it is a combination of being really, really, really proactive as much as we can and putting ourselves in the right rooms at the right times.

When they're discussing their plans for the next upcoming quarter and or year, that makes total sense.

Again, like, yeah, I just was curious again, how it goes back and forth that Obviously you have two sides of a 10kb approaching you to be able to make.

You guys are the connector between those brands.

Totally.

Athletes, teams, leagues, what.

However you want to.

However you want to phrase it.

Yeah.

Final two, part question, part one.

When you think about what you get to do every single day, what do you see as being your biggest joy?

And then when you look ahead over the next year or two, what do you see as being your biggest challenge?

So your biggest joy, what you love, what you love about what you do?

And then what do you see as being the biggest challenge, opportunity, however you want to look at that?

I don't, you know, to answer your question to part one, I don't necessarily see like a specific thing being the biggest.

Like there's like, I, you know, I could point to that all day long.

I love my morning coffee.

Right.

Like, that gives me a lot of joy.

I love what I have for lunch and that and the walks that I take and my walk with in the morning with my wife and dogs and all that sort of stuff.

But when it comes to summing up work, it's just like work in general.

Like, I think what I do is really freaking cool.

Like, I'm super excited about it.

I'm super jazzed by it every single day.

It makes me really excited.

The people when I, you know, I didn't even know shoot with Dwayne was happening yesterday.

And I get in, like my director of NBA text me a photo and he was like, look at the boys.

I'm like, this is awesome.

Right?

And so I think those little moments, the business in itself, I'm excited about growing the business more international markets, more partnerships, more RPs, more brand deals, so on and so forth.

Every part of it to me is exciting.

Even the challenges and hurdles which gets to, you know, what are the challenges that we see over the next two years?

It's staying in our lane.

It's like that NBA example.

Should we stay in our lane or should we grow internationally?

Should we launch a new league, so on and so forth for the next few years.

The amount of bright and shiny objects that are going to be coming at us and hitting us, you know, in the head are probably going to be a lot.

The how do, how do we stay, you know, focused?

How do we stay focused but also be smart enough to jump at the right things?

How do we prep ourselves to be able to be open to jumping at the right thing?

Does the right thing even potentially look like a bigger company, kind of similar to us, but needing a global solutions partner and us working directly in house with them is in.

So I don't know and I don't have those answers.

But I think the, the fact of the matter is it's like we're just going to stay doing what we're doing and chugging along.

And if we strike gold and hit that moment, that makes a lot of sense for our company, we'll try to leap at it and see if we land.

And hopefully everything else is just noise.

And we have some pretty large headphones on.

Yeah.

That's what makes your, that's what makes your day to day fun.

Andrew.

I can, I could tell just trying to figure out what's next.

I can, I can see that.

I can see the joy from that every single day.

Without question.

It's a great time.

Absolutely.

All right, before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share how can people connect with you?

Find out more about what you guys are doing, share, social media, email, website, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Thanks, Mike.

Just honestly, our company just East CoastGlobal.com handles.

At East CoastGlobal, we check Instagram, LinkedIn.

We're only on those two platforms in the western world, so that's where you can follow along, shoot us a note, reach out, et cetera.

Awesome.

Andrew, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule this morning to join us.

Really appreciate it.

And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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