Dan Beckerman, AEG

What's the day like for a CEO who has to manage a company that owns 11 sports teams, Staples Center, American Airlines Arena, LA Live district, The O2 in London, O2 World in Berlin, live-entertainment company promoting hundreds of concerts and events, and over 100 other different venues and organizations? Well, there is only one man who can answer this question and that man is Mr. Beckerman. Meet Dan Beckerman of AEG.

Dan was named a Chief Executive Officer of Anschutz Entertainment Group about 6~7 weeks ago and he came to UCLA Anderson to talk about his new job, his business, and his story.

Dan Beckerman, CEO of AEG

He was a student here at Anderson about 20 years ago and before that he was a tax accountant at Arthur Andersen. Coming into business school, he wanted to do something different after school and thought about what would be fun and what he really wanted to do. What did he think would be fun and something he really wanted to do? Sports Management. I, as 30-something year old male who loves sports, instantly understood how he could have arrived at such an answer. But how does one get into sports management? Lakers and Clippers recruit NBA players, but they don't certainly recruit MBA students and I do not know any of my classmates who are recruiting for sports teams. Is there certain process you can follow to get into sports teams or sports management?

Dan did not know how to get into sports management either. There was no internet back then, so he went to the bookstore and bought media guides that had names, phone numbers, and mailing addresses of every team, every league, and every sports. He quickly put together a resume so that it looked like he had some sort of sports experience and he wrote letters, more than 500 of them to different teams in different leagues. In those letters, Dan wrote that he really wants to get into sports, that he has a finance background, but he will do anything and whatever those teams can offer him. 

Then, he got rejection letters after rejection letters. He actually brought those rejection letters and showed one to us, one from Washington Bullets. He keeps these letters in his office and having them in his office makes him feel humbled and makes him realize how lucky he is. 

After all the rejection letters, he got one letter that was positive, and it was from Los Angeles Clippers. He interviewed with Clippers about 20 different times and they decided to take a chance on him and let him run Finance department of the Clippers. He took the job even though salary he made was less than what he made in his previous job and what he made in summer internship. His friends thought he was crazy to take the job with such low salary but he felt great about the decision and he reflected that it was the smartest thing he has done in his whole life. If anyone is thinking about making a career decision based on how much salary one can make, I would like to point that person to Dan's story. Ask yourself what you really want to do and be willing to do whatever it takes to do that, even if it takes writing more than 500 letters.

Dan was very happy with Clippers and he could have stayed with Clippers forever, but he met Tim Leiweke who completely hooked him in with his vision of what they can do together in AEG. Not just managing sports teams, but building arenas, and doing lots of different things. And Tim was right. They did million more things than Tim originally promised. They built Staples center, bought more sports teams, got into music business, built soccer stadiums, built arenas in Germany and London. With the owner Philip Anschutz's vision and backings, they helped AEG evolve to a company it is today, with real estate and venues side of the business that generates tons of cash flows and the contents programming side of the business with 11 sports teams and events and concerts that range from Coachella, Stagecoach, to promoting and managing tours of artists such as Rollingstones, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Bon Jovi. 

It was a great personal story as well as a great business story. So for those people who are inspired by Dan's career and want to build the next sports or entertainment empire, what can they do? From what I heard from Dan, it does not seem easy. Persistence seems to be a must-have quality because Sports and Entertainment world is very small community and very hard to break into. Also, you would need a game plan. Instead of going to a team and saying that "I just want to be in sports management", if you have a vision of what you want to do and how you can do it in sports management context, go after it in a strategic way and it will make the entry easier and allow you to have an easier conversation and better outcome with sports/entertainment organizations.