welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony you and today we're going to get some insight into entrepreneurial ship my guest today is rick giles he's the president of the gazelle group and welcome to the show  so usually i start my guess where they went to college so would you go to school so i went to school here in princeton and originally from massachusetts just outside of boston and came down here graduated in one thousand nine hundred three great so let's just go back in time when did you start thinking about college and the process of college start was a freshman your high school or senior high school it was later when i was i was at a very small rural high school and i was playing football and so football was going to be a consideration i was thinking almost entirely of schools up in new england so i had and i think the only time i've been on a plane was to go to disney world with my family once prior to my senior year and then it was shortly before christmas break of my senior year at the princeton coach visited my high school and asked if i would be interested in princeton i didn't really know a lot about  it but i said sure i can get the application together got the application in by the deadline and and then came down on a visit in february but my thought process prior to that was sort of very new england vocus some ivy league schools some division two division three schools but a good academic schools where i would also have a chance to play football yeah so so princeton wasn't just your only choice it was just one of the choices right and in fact it was one of the last that i that that i would consider i i didn't think i would go to school on prince and i thought here i thought i would would go to one of the new england schools and and i said been to some of them the summer before my senior year maybe even the spring and i had seen some football practices and then i came down to princeton on a visit it was  valentine's day weekend and i can remember it very vividly because i flew into newark airport and of course you get off the plane in newark and you start driving down route one and it's not really the prettiest and i was think about all these beautiful new england campuses that i had visited but but then you drove down route one and at that time route one wasn't quite as built up as it is now so sort of getting a little bit better as we were getting farther south and then we turned right on washington road it was a very snowy weekend so the trees that were arching over washer road had a lot of snow and we sort of drove into palmer square and had dinner with a number of other recruits and current players and coaches and spent the weekend had a wonderful weekend loved everybody and that i came home to massachusetts and told my parents i'm going to princeton if i get it like why did you never even mentioned princeton all the way to princeton five hours away we thought you were going to university and you're playing football there yes ok so how is it like so it's great back then it was different than it is today so we had a large recruiting class because at that time they had freshm football program so freshman weren't eligible and then player practice with the varsity we had our own teen so really enabled us to establish ourselves on campus without having the pressure of our sleep a ball and it also was a great bonding experience because we're all sort of going through the same things at the same time again i can remember when there were almost a hundred of us freshmen and we stood up in the thing is called the faculty room of nasa hall where the board of trustees have met and where george washington held the continental congress and we had to introduce ourselves one by one was very nerve wracking experience and and then the next day we started practicing and it was sort of football as we'd always known it then a week or two later classes started so give us a chance to sort of ease into our college experience which is great and something that freshmen nowadays don't don't get a chance to do yeah sure so now you graduate from princeton university and  start to think about jobs during my senior year back then things were not as focused and not as planned as far ahead as they are today so we didn't really start thinking about interviewing until the spring and and i can remember being all over the board about what i wanted to do and so i found this program that will sort of a combination of of of going to graduate school at n y u and then at that time was a big  t accounting firm and so was the name now then and now they've been sort of swallowed up by others and it gave me a chance to sort of get a degree as well as get sort of practical business experience so i did that for a little over a year and a half got my degree from and why you and then knew that i didn't want to work in the accounting firm for the rest of my life so i jumped over to merrill lynch  and became at that point i think i was calling to account executive which then became a financial consultant and basically i was selling i was selling stocks and bonds in the retail environment so i was making lots of phone calls every day trying to get meetings and trying to get people to invest their money with the twenty three or twenty four year old and and so i had a great manager he's actually a princeton grad as well frank collins and  our office and we were in at seven seventeen that that when you were it was then the steuben glass building right across from from trump tower and so i learned some invaluable skills at that time just to the power of persistence and commitment and some of the things that sort of carried over from my football career to just that you know you had to sort of grind through your ass efforts in your activities in order to get the results that you want so  did that for a few years and i'd always sort of nibbled around that want to do something that i love work in the sports business and back then the sports business was far less mature than it is today so i wrote letters to the leagues and the teams and said hey you know i'd love to work with you and i love sports and predictably i got no responses and i got a phone call randomly from a professor at n who offered me a job in his consulting firm and he was located up berms located up in greenwich connecticut and professor bob how and i said bob listen i really appreciate you offering me this position but the only reason i'd leave merrill lynch in new york city right now is if i had a chance to do something i always wanted to do and that's work in the sports business in a sort of that throwaway line at the end of this phone call offering me a job that le him to say well why don't you call jay love the that i n g in cleveland and he will tell you what it might be available to a twenty five year old stockbrokers from new york city but so i called the call you pretty free cell phone so it was phone call one day and said gee you've been pretty persistent i meet you he was located including i meet you my new york office tomorrow so so i was at that than that they put their office was seventy first big beautiful brownstone right next to actually bill cosby's brownstone on seventy first street between the the madison and i walked up there and spent a couple hours sort of talking to people and at the end of that he said why don't you come to cleveland and we're not sure we have anything available for you but come to cleveland and meet some people and we'll see where that leads and i thought then he was going to tell me well call so and so and they'll make your travel arrangement there and spent the day and in cleveland least back then they had this big sort of corny halloween parade at lunchtime through the main streets of cleveland and so i had never been a cleaner and and i got a quick twenty minute tour on the way back to somebody drove me on the way back to the airport and i didn't know there was no particular position it was just working at the sports market coming i'm jean marc mccormick the founder of i'm g and really sort of the founder of sports marketing in general had written a book what they don't teach you at harvard business school and within that book it was sort of stories about how he started i n g and that was really the only way to learn about sports marking no internet nothing so so i had read that book and and the next monday jay that they call me and said well we love to have you come join us and we're not sure exactly what you're going to do but  we will offer you this position and it was for twenty five thousand dollars a year so it was like a ten to fifteen thousand dollar pay cut from what i was making in new york at merrill lynch and i said ok he said just call back by friday so i had a week to decide and and so on friday a bunch of my princeton football buddies we were all getting on a bus to to to go to atlantic city for a bachelor party and i had to make this decision before i got on this bus and so talk to one of my buddies who is from akron ohio and he said he said what's the downside you know you've never been to cleveland it's not that bad of the sort of how he build it up and said if you don't like you'll be back here in new york and in a couple years and so i took the job worked at i m g in cleveland for four years moved back here and and worked in the new york city office for another four years it was an incredible experience m g when i started was about four hundred employees and in the first four years we grew to about sixteen hundred it was a period of amazing growth around the world government t v stations i looked around and we had just had our first child i was commuting from princeton junction i was leaving before she woke up i was getting home after she went to bed i'd always wanted to start my own business and i said if i don't do this now i will blink i will have four kids i will be here another eight years and there is no chance i'll ever do it and so i decided to start and to this day which is now twenty three years later there's a piece of notepad paper that is on my bulletin board and it out across the top it says ideas and there's a list of ideas and that's how i started to sell i filled out that list of ideas up at a little cabin on a lake in maine during august and we sort of transition i got back and told my very frank the person i work for and i'm ga that i was going to leave and start my own business and stay through labor day and labor day moved into my office and then started that tuesday officially you got a lot of holidays that you you make major decisions really it's one thing when you know you had the valentine's day and fifteen employees right now depending upon sort of how busy we are and what that means is we do sort of two main things one is that we produce of that and so we produce sporting events a lot of college basketball events that's sort of our core business and we produce two november one of december one in march and we produce small around the country and and we've produced other events over time college football we've been involved in the america's cup another job and again mostly college basketball just college best will coaches correct and none of the elite coaches just yeah i mean we've got coaches from the big ten in the a c c but we don't have any of the hall of it's actually the longest running in season of and madison square garden we've been there for twenty years we've had all the best teams you've had i think three the teams that have won our event that have gone on to win the national championship we have sort of read the being the season helped to tip off the college basketball season we were the first major college event at the barclay center when that opened and that's the legends classic we've been there ever since so now how does a person that played football most of the time get involved in basketball so one of the reasons is that basketball is less regulated environment in college athletics they're more games more interred conference match ups football is very tightly controlled there are fewer of those match ups there are very few neutral site  matchups whereas in basketball neutral site tournaments are sort of part of the basketball culture so so the point of entry for us was that way back in one thousand nine hundred four i had this holdover relationship with the atlantic city convention authority and they were trying to do events down there at different times of the year there slower times of the year and looking for different demographic so i came up with this idea to do a college basketball bent in december so would be a younger demographic not the sort of frank sinatra type of band not the slot machine demographic that would appeal to different parts of the country by bringing in schools from around the country and and so we did that for two years at the atlantic city convention center the all the legacy commence there were mike tyson used to fight there was a very basketball friendly arena and after those two years we sort of realized that as much as that's what the  atlantic city convention thore wanted to do the sort of constituency of the lake city wasn't really looking for that kind of stuff they still want to boxing and frank sinatra so then we moved it to the metal lands and then to madison square garden where it's been ever since and so that sort of entry got us into the college basketball market was really through the atlantic city relationship and then our our presence in college basketball expanded from there so what's the future look like for the ghazal group so college athletics right now as has a lot going on and i think there are a lot of challenges that college athletics is going to undertake over the next few years the revenues and finances of the business have grown immeasurably and you know we've been fortunate to benefit from that so we will continue to look to expand our presence in college athletics do more events represent more coaches high expand into into different sports we're also currently now thinking about reaching down into youth sports and sort of trying to capture some of the growing market in  sports before before you know kids get to college age now do you do men's and women's or just men's you focus on just men we've really been focused on men's we've done some women's events but like any i think good business the sort of money side of it is a little bit more on the men's side yeah and how about the coaches do you do you get more of the men's coaches then the female coaches they are coach cons are all men we haven't had any and the male clients again you know they just tend to be paid more yeah and there tends to be more movement on the men's side as well you know it's so how does that whole dynamic work with with coaching i mean they just call you up and say hey i want to move want to go to another school that's how it how it all happens or is there there are a lot of dynamics involved so part of it is what openings are occurring so there's a ladder guys started smaller schools and move up to the mid major schools and then up the major programs and some of the movement is driven by winning guys who who have successful programs who move on to other programs some by losing teams that aren't having success in a part of their code so really depends on where your client is and what jobs are opening so we might if we have a client who is successful at the mid major level then when a major program opens those are the ones that the jobs that he's going to be interested in and they're also going to be interested in him and if that major program has been successful so they might a mid major head coach but if they've been very successful then they might want to try and hire away another high major coach so the the coach movement that occurs at the end of the college basketball season is very fluid and dynamic in terms of who's available and who's hot at that time it's amazing that that one run in the n c a a tournament  one win in the n c a a tourney can escalate your value incredibly in the open market now do a lot of the coaches utilize people like yourself or could they do it themselves as well so very few coaches that doom sells most coaches have agents a lot of assistant coaches now have agents we also represent some assistant coaches because they're looking to become head coaches the schools also don't do the searches themselves anymore so most of them employ search firms so often the search firm and the agent are having a lot of discussions before the school and coach candidate actually meet to try and talk about levels of interest compensation terms of a prospective contract so that by the time the candidate and the the school meet it's pretty narrow down so they might at that point be choosing between two or three candidates and they know that that that all of those candidates are really interested in the job so they're not wasting time also from the candidates perspective it doesn't affect him adversely because his name is not out in the public domain yes as a candidate for that job he can evaluate it very privately covered confidentially you know it's fantastic now so i said at the beginning it was it was entrepreneurial ship and so do you like working for yourself i love it i think i've been very fortunate  as i said i had that one page ideas and that's still on my bulletin board and so i valving thought about whether or not we should have this should have had or should have been a business plan and what i've been able to do over the course of my career in our at our company in particular is you know i have found that business instincts are more important than a business plan and so we've been able to have good business instincts to have good people working for us and i love getting up and i love doing my job and when people come to interview with us i often tell them that they're handicapped because i love to work  don't just love what i do but i love to work and as a great feeling as i have many or some friends who don't share that same feeling when they go into the office every day and you still i'm assuming you still keep in contact with i m g and they're all the people there are and so on i do i'm g s undergone a lot of transition in twenty three years as you would expect including the death of mark mccormack and has gone through it a few acquisition since then so it's funny when i go back to those original days when we were up and coming and running hard and growing i m g there are so many of us that were ad i n g at that time that are now spread around the rest of the business you're working at places like c b s or risky and or other sports marketing companies or people like me who started sports marketing companies so a few years back we actually had an i m g alumni event in new york city in central park and i think there were like three or four hundred people there and actually if you were still at i m g you weren't allowed to co it was only alone who created that event was a guy named doug perny so he was also the one he had been a long time employee i was there eight years he was by there twenty plus years and  he came up with the idea sent an email somehow got everybody's email sent an e mail out to everybody and just said do you think there's an interest in doing an interest really picked up a new it was a lot of fun trading old war stories yeah if it passed they so we're coming to the end of our show and usually ask my guests what advice you want to give to the parents out there their sons and daughters are planning on going to college they might have entrepreneurial aspirations what advice you want to give those kids yeah i think there's a couple  things i mean i have four kids and i have one that's graduated college to the broader tall one in college and one on the way and so one of things that i've learned what i say to people is don't put too much pressure on your kids let them give them the chance to find their way give them the chance to give them a chance to try one thing and realize it's wrong and do another thing i've tried to do that with my own kids it's not easy because you want to make every decision for them and you want their lives to be absolutely perfect and the truth is that very few people's lives heart perfect so if you let them be imperfect they tend to find their way a little bit better so i try to say you know look at a broad range of options look at lots of schools  think about lots of different careers take risks try different things put yourself out there a little bit don't feel that you have to take the safest most conservative when as i've said to my kids the best school is not necessarily the right school and it's important to try and find the right school for you where you're good at that for the school in the schools are good for you and and then that will lead you into the next step in your life and finding the right career