A Selling Success
By Terry Tush
Brian Watson usually has the best seat in the house. OK, maybe he’s not actually in the best seat, but he does have a say in who gets the best views when it comes to some of the most popular events in the nation’s entertainment capital.
The Spears School of Business graduate oversees Event Suite Sales in some of the top venues in the world as vice president of event suite and special event sales at AEG venues in Los Angeles, including the Staples Center, Microsoft Theater and L.A. Live.
Watson’s career has been a whirlwind. He took an entry-level ticket-sales position with AEG a few months after moving from Houston to southern California, and it didn’t take long for his supervisors to spot a future star.
“I decided that getting into the sports business would be interesting, so I jumped in, and I have been here ever since,” Watson says. “I am fortunate that I have had a lot of opportunities to move up in my career, both as I have grown and as AEG’s presence in downtown Los Angeles with the Staples Center and L.A. Live has grown as well.”
Watson was working in Houston for Young Life, a Christian ministry, after earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration and management from the Spears School of Business in 2002. After four years with the ministry, he and his wife, Suzanne, decided to move to California.
“We had this itch for adventure, so to speak, and [Suzanne] was involved in some things in the entertainment world, so we just decided in 2006 that we were going to move out to L.A., even though we didn’t really have a job, either one of us, or a specific path in mind,” he says.
Watson was initially hired on the ticket-sales staff for the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League. In addition to owning the L.A. Kings, AEG owns the Staples Center and was developing L.A. Live, a $2.5 billion entertainment district in downtown Los Angeles that includes the Microsoft Theater and features nightlife, restaurants, the Grammy Museum, a movie theater and three Marriott hotels.
AEG gave the responsibility for selling tickets for the new venues and special events coming to what is now known as Stubhub Center in Carson, Calif., to the Kings sales staff. Needing one person to focus on these new events, management chose Watson.
His first event was the 2006 UCI Track Cycling World Cup, not quite as widely known as some of the current day events he gets to attend, like the annual GRAMMY Awards, the NBA Finals or the NHL’s Stanley Cup Final. “Track cycling is something I had never even heard of, and I didn’t know what a velodrome was but I learned quickly,” he says. (Editor’s note: A velodrome is an arena for track cycling races.)
That’s where his business administration and management education — and marketing, for that matter — came in handy. “My first major project was trying to find the folks in L.A. who were excited about a niche sport, and then build relationships with them. I was trying to get myself in that community as quickly as possible so we could successfully sell tickets, fill the velodrome and make the event a success,” Watson says.
The event was successful, and so was his next assignment (a women’s tennis tournament), and the next (the largest road race in the United States), and the next (the L.A. Riptide professional lacrosse team).
“I was willing to take on any project,” he says.
In 2008, Watson was promoted to oversee and manage suite rentals at the Staples Center, home to the Kings and the NBA’s Clippers and Lakers. He and his team of five were responsible for selling 18 event suites for the three professional teams, plus any other events at the center. Those sales are worth $7 million-$12 million per year to AEG.
As the department grew, so did Watson’s leadership role. Today, in addition to overseeing suite rentals at the Staples Center, he and another vice president of sales lead a department of 24 full-time and eight part-time employees responsible for ticket sales and hospitality at L.A. Live, the Microsoft Theater and the Hyde Lounge inside the Staples Center.
“Anything that has a ticket element, especially if AEG has skin in the game, we tend to take a pretty big role in making sure it’s successful, as far as ticket sales and hospitality,” says Watson, who now also oversees the L.A. Kings group sales department.
“The funny thing is now we’ve grown to the point that we have this whole department that focuses on selling the ‘other events’ I was hired to focus on in 2006. It’s been a great experience to show how … if you do the best job at what you’re doing and look for opportunities to help in other areas along the way, that tends to get you noticed, and opportunities kind of present themselves to you.”
In October, Watson will celebrate his 10th anniversary with AEG. He says none of what he’s accomplished in the past 10 years would have been possible without his OSU education.
“I’m doing sales and marketing; certainly there were classes that helped me understand how to do that and prepared me for that vocation. I am working in a field that seems natural from a business degree. But more than anything, what the business school at OSU did for me is really teach me how to think,” says the 36-year-old.
“The business school certainly needs to prepare highly skilled workers for the highly skilled jobs of this century, and a lot of that is understanding technology and understanding things that are vocational in nature.”
Yet at the same time, what I experienced was an atmosphere where certain beliefs about business and about life were challenged in different ways so that I learned how to think. I learned how to see different sides of the same issue, and how to build consensus and solve problems. Those things are valuable in leadership, business and life.
Watson adds, “When I look to hire people, I want people who are bright with a great attitude and can work hard. But they don’t necessarily have to have the specific experience of selling tickets or selling in sports and entertainment. That is relatively easy for us to teach. But what I do want is someone who knows how to think for themselves, knows how to solve problems, and can build relationships and communicate with people.”
Although it’s been 14 years since Watson sat in on his class, associate professor Andy Urich is still impacting his life.
“He’s such an interesting guy and engaging personality. I think his goal is to teach people how to think for themselves, not to think like him. I still get a chance to talk to him every once in a while, and there are certain things about business and about life that we disagree on, but I love that he’s always challenging people to be independent thinkers,” Watson says.
“I had some OSU professors, particularly in the business college, that really focused on [challenging students to think for themselves], even beyond the actual material of what is a marketing plan, what is a business plan. There was more to it than that, and that was something I really valued from my education.”
It’s that attitude that has taken him from an entry-level ticket sales position to helping direct a staff that oversees tickets, suites and hospitality for hundreds of events each year.
“It’s great. I actually didn’t see myself as a sales guy necessarily coming out of school,” says Watson, who lives with Suzanne and their three children — two sons, Desmond, 7, and Duncan, 2, and a daughter, Charlie, 5. “We get to interact with all types of clients from the fan organizing a group of friends to see their favorite team or act to the CEO using our events as a platform to grow their own business. Life is about relationships, so to be in a business that’s really about building relationships, with those clients, with partners that put on events with us, and with colleagues on our own team, has been fantastic. I don’t know if I would have been as successful selling copiers, but the sports and live entertainment area makes it a lot of fun.”
Especially when you control who sits in the best seat in the house, as Watson does inside the Staples Center.