What is Halftime?

This is the written script of the first Halftime episode of the Makers of Sport® podcast. Halftime was a short show on the off weeks between interviews where I wrote and read on topics in professionalism, entrepreneurship and business for creatives in sport. The episode aired January 5, 2015; the audio is on SoundCloud and the show notes live at makersofsport.com. The show's opening and closing announcements are trimmed here.

Halftime is a 20 minute podcast conducted by myself that will appear on the weeks there are no interviews. As of now, interviews are conducted every other week. This being a sports-crazy audience, I felt Halftime was the perfect metaphor for those off-weeks playing on the typical sport’s 20 minute halftime break. Think of this series as a pep talk between the interviews.

So why Halftime? Why this show in addition to the interview shows? Well, the business side creativity is often times overlooked on podcasts, blogs and in many online discussions. We as creative people tend to get smitten with the visual aesthetics and the “cool factor” of the work we see coming from the sports niche – the awesome photo manipulations, digital art, uniform designs, team branding and more.

The non-sexy part and the reality is that there were business transactions and conversations that happened behind the scenes on much of this work. Even though we all love what we do and would do it for free, the goal here is to make money. That is the goal of Makers of Sport as a brand, to encourage and help you to be professional, business-saavy, yet also help you grow in your creative craft in the sports niche, be it design, illustration, marketing, motion graphics, web design, etc.

The minute you decide to take money for your craft or talent, you are no longer an amateur but a professional. Design is an art alone. Art is subjective. With design, there are goals involved, strategy and a certain set of parameters that must be met to achieve something. Clients and/or your superiors if at a full-time job expect professional results and communication. When we as creative people do not give them professional interactions the entire industry suffers, and we as creative people tend to viewed negatively as “crazy art types”. In order to be successful at this business if that is your goal, you HAVE to have business skills. These are not often taught in college design programs but rather learned on the grind. Out in the streets so to speak.

Right now you may be asking, who is Adam? Who gives you authority to give pointers on what works and what doesn’t work.

Well, I have been working in sports directly or with sports-related clients my entire career. I began my post-grad career at a Lexington, Kentucky sports marketing agency called Host Communications. I was the lead designer for the Southeastern Conference working on game programs, posters and miscelleanous visual communication for the corporate conference, as well as some of the most successful college athletic programs in the business, including the University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, University of Texas, University of Michigan just to name a few.

During my tenure there, the company was referred to as Host Communications, founded by Lexington Kentucky businessman and Athletic Hall of Famer, Jim Host. If you don’t know who he is, I highly suggest looking him up as he did a lot for the college sports business.

In 2006 just before I left, the company was ranked by the Sports Business Journal as the number 3 sports marketing company in the nation behind global brands IMG and Octagon sports. Neither of those companies focused on the college athletics business. As mentioned, I left that company in 2006 when I was 23 years old to start my own independent design consultancy. Soon after I left, IMG bought Host Communications making it their college sports marketing division, IMG College. You will hear me refer to my past as IMG College on the podcast, that is simply because Host Communications no longer exists in its current context but became IMG College.

In the following 9 years of my career leading to today, I was a freelancer and/or business owner working on the creative side of the sports industry. I will go more in depth on this on Episode 25 of Makers of Sport Podcast when Joe Bosack is going to return and intercept the mic turning it back on myself for a get to know the host type episode.

However by now, if you are a listener, you get a sense of my personality from my deep conversations with the prior guests of the podcast. Therefore, you know that I am a huge advocate of professionalism in the creative industry, specifically in this sports niche.

Because of this, I decided it would benefit many who are interesting in growing in their careers to share what I have learned over my 10+ years from both mentors and running a business. Even during my brief hiatus from full-time freelance in 2013, I was still a partner and creative director at a 20+ person web company working on large scale technology projects in many industries, including sports.

As of this episode, the sports brands i work with include my alma mater, the FCS National Championship football program, Eastern Kentucky Colonels; 3d Lacrosse, a multi-million dollar lacrosse training company which was recently ranked in the INC Magazine INC 500 and just partnered with USA Today Sports to launch the Great State Showdown. I also work with JMI Sports, a California sports marketing company that recently won the marketing rights to University of Kentucky Athletics and is responsible for sports facility developments at the University of Oregon, Duke University, Syracuse University, University of Alabama, a few MLB facilities and more.

So with that little bio, and with all I have learned, I want to share. To do my little part of giving back to this awesome niche and community. Am I the level of Todd Van Horne at Nike or Adam Clement at Under Armour? No. But I do know a thing or two about networking, conducting business and being an independent professional.

One thing I am an advocate of and will focus on with this Halftime series is entrepreneurship. A trend outside of the sports world if you think about the Silicon Valley or big technology startups, is that we are seeing more and more designers and creative thinkers being valued from the ground up in businesses – integrated strategically from day one and not brought on to put icing on a cake. Companies and executives are realizing that bad ideas and bad products will not sell with good marketing and design. The idea, product, quality and design have to baked in from the beginning. This is the new way.

In this industry, especially when it comes to team sports, design is still often viewed as a commodity – a fun, sometimes meaningless execution of what executives want. My mission with Makers of Sport is to bring talent to the forefront, get a behind-the-scenes view of the businesses acumen of the talent and also to foster community and professionalism that will advocate for this new way in sports. This Halftime series is part of that mission.

A few years ago I read a book by called A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future. It was written in the 90s and mentioned and that by today, left-brained, robotic tasks will be outsourced, that creative thinking people will be the rulers of the future because of their ability to problem solve. And when I say creative thinking people, I don’t mean just designers, I mean developers, marketers, business people and more. Mark Cuban is one of these types of people. Steve Jobs was one of these types of people. You will be one of these types of people. We have to use our creativity to solve problems. Not make superficial, “cool stuff”.

As this series progresses, I intend to share my thoughts, experiences and in some cases struggles with topics such as imposter syndrome, pricing freelance work, productivity, networking, location limitations, the like drug (such as craving likes on sites such as Dribbble, Instagram, Behance or your drug of choice) and many more professional business topics. These topics will be mostly geared towards those looking to become a bit more entrepreneurial and maybe freelance, however, professional business topics such as these can be easily applied to in-house gigs at professional or college sports teams, startups, etc.