Daniel Hennes: Digitizing the Athlete-Booking Industry (Full Transcript)
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Ronen Ainbinder 0:41
Today's Snack features an electric entrepreneur who's based in Los Angeles, California.
He is the CEO and co-founder of Engage. Engage is like the Airbnb of events. This company digitizes the process of booking athletes and talent for anything from a speech to a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
They currently work with over 2000 athletes, speakers, and agents, including Terrell Owens, David Ortiz, Bo Jackson, and more!
In today's conversation, I plan to ask him about what it's like to work directly with athletes and agents, the booking industry, the challenges of coordinating events, and so much more.
So go grab your favorite Snack, whether that's a beer, coffee, chips, or taco, and join me in this conversation with Mr. Daniel Hennes!
Daniel Hennes 1:12
Love the intro. Love the enthusiasm. It's great.
Ronen Ainbinder 1:30
How are you, Daniel?
Daniel Hennes 1:31
Good. How are you?
Ronen Ainbinder 1:32
I'm doing fantastic, man. Happy to host you on the show. Let's kick it off with an icebreaker man, I want to ask you, what's the best thing you ever bought for 100 bucks or less?
Daniel Hennes 1:42
The best thing I ever bought for 100 bucks or less? Ooh, I would say I mean, this is where I would say a good quality dessert. Whether it's a good set of ice cream for my favorite spots in LA, there's this restaurant up in Los Angeles that serves butter cake. And that's my favorite dessert ever. So that's the best thing I've ever bought. Even though it goes away. And you have to buy it again. And you don't get it for forever. So it's the best thing I've ever bought for under 100 bucks, not even class.
Ronen Ainbinder 2:06
That's awesome. Is that your favorite dessert?
Daniel Hennes 2:10
Yeah, I mean, I'm a big dessert, ice cream. I'm a big chocolate ice cream person. But this butters with this butter cake. It's at this restaurant master has the greatest dessert in human history. It's not even close.
Ronen Ainbinder 2:20
That's insane. I wasn't expecting this answer.
Daniel Hennes 2:23
I'm a yummy guy. There you go.
Ronen Ainbinder 2:26
Let's go! Um, I'm so excited because I want to talk to you about so many things, especially, of course, Engage, the story of the company. I think it's a unique idea. I haven't seen it anywhere else. And I want to just ask you specifically, what was the aha moment when you realize that this is something that could potentially be big? And what drove you to build Engage?
Daniel Hennes 2:54
Yeah, it's a great question. I think what sort of drove us to build Engage was my college experience. I went to USC. And when I was a freshman there, I told you this before we started. Still, my freshman year roommate was this incredible kid Jake Olson, who was completely blind and played long snapper for our football team; unique story. And I started managing his speaking Engagements and events right away. And then the junior year of college, a couple years back, he played his first game, and a story went super viral. We started getting flooded with speaking to parents' requests. I picked up Brian Harris as a client; Ryan played in the NFL for 10 years, won a Super Bowl, the Broncos, and did a lot of speaking. So I started looking for a better way to do the speaking process and found that there wasn't one called a bunch of athletes, Agent speakers we knew to get a feel for the industry. And that's what sort of led to us founding Engage, I would say the sort of like aha moment, like where we thought it could get bigger and bigger than we thought. I would say it's very recent, I think, last year when COVID started, that ended up becoming, at first, we were panicked, right? Because we're an events business, what are you going to do, but that ended up becoming the best thing that ever happened to our business, because all of a sudden, every athlete agent, celebrity speaker, they were all unemployed at the exact same time, looking for unique ways to monetize their fame and their following. So they turned to technology as a solution for bringing them deals, and agents became much more open to embracing our platform. And it led to literally our talent base growing by a factor of 10. So I think that was kind of the aha moment where like, wow, we got lucky that it was the right time, but like, we might have something great for this time. And now, going forward.
Ronen Ainbinder 4:33
That's interesting. Do you think that the technology element or the not-on-person element of events, as you mentioned, is going to stay after COVID? What's the What? What's your approach? What do you think about that?
Daniel Hennes 4:47
I mean, look, we're still seeing a lot of virtual events that are being booked even into this fall and even starting to talk about early next year. I think what's going to happen is we'll see a hybrid where the unique high-end conferences, you're always going to have that impression. An element because there's something special about that. But I think whether the event will be in-person and live stream first accompanies employees across the country, I think that'll exist. But I also think for smaller-scale events where companies don't want to spend 50, grand, or even 25, grand, and talent doesn't want to leave their bedroom, I think there will always be a market for these quick sort of zoom calls, WebEx calls, we even built our own live stream software for that reason, like, I think there's always going to be a market for those sort of virtual events.
Ronen Ainbinder 5:29
Let's talk about the events industry. I think it's a very unique one, very interesting, covering many different industries, such as entertainment, music, words, even business and all different things like there are events, almost in any industry. So, I want to, I want to ask you, in your experience, of course, what are three or four of the most relevant challenges that you found in the event industry? And how are you guys trying to, like, get around these challenges or trying? How are you guys trying to solve those challenges, when and how you're facing them?
Daniel Hennes 6:05
Yeah, I think the challenge is, so there are challenges on two sides, right? You have challenges as an agent, right? One of your challenges as an agent is finding deals for your clients. It's negotiating deals for your clients in an efficient way. And it's sourcing deals for all of your clients, not just the top 1%. So those are the three challenges on the agent side. On the event planner side, how do you find the right speaker or the right person to make sure that they deliver the right message? How do you make sure that you're not getting ripped off by some middleman? And how do you make sure that you can, negotiate the process appropriately? And position yourself well for the agent. So we sort of existing, solve these problems, just by bringing, I would say two things, technology one, and transparency is the second thing. So like, our technology makes it super easy to process payment and sign contracts and chat about the experience, making all the logistics super easy so that agents can spend less time on the logistics and more time servicing all of their clients. So technology makes the process super easy. And our technology makes it super easy for companies to find speakers and athletes and agents who have their athletes out there to be found. So we make it super easy. The transparency aspect, basically, one of the things a lot of speakers bureaus will do is they will list names on their website of people they don't even represent like if you go Google Jake Olsen's name, he pops up on a bunch of speakers bureaus that we have never even spoken to that list him and claim to represent him. That's dishonest. So on our platform, people know when they come to our platform that 100% of the people on our website, my partner and I either know personally or know their current agents personally, who have permission to list them on things like this. So because of that, we avoid the sketchy middleman, somebody saying they represent person x and charging an extra 30% fee. Like we bring a lot of transparency and technology to a very sort of murky analog industry.
Ronen Ainbinder 8:06
Wow, that's fascinating. Man. I'm sure that your network is quite unique.
Daniel Hennes 8:12
It's a small world in sports if you do right by people and you're ambitious and honest if the world gets small, very fast.
Ronen Ainbinder 8:20
Yeah. But I'm super interested in that element that you mentioned because, man, I remember meeting Terrell Owens at a Michael Jordan's camp in the summer.
Daniel Hennes 8:31
Yeah, they're good friends,
Ronen Ainbinder 8:32
Yeah, good friends. And I saw him there, man. And he had zero time for even pictures. So I wonder, I wonder specifically, like he was retired and everything. But, still, like athletes that are currently active athletes playing in the higher leagues or whatever, they're super busy. So they don't have time, or their agents don't have time for trying to negotiate deals or trying to see how they can set up things for others. So I want to ask you, in your experience, like what, what's the good thing and the bad thing about working with athletes? And if you can, like just separate it into also athletes and agents, that will be, I think, interesting for the audience.
Daniel Hennes 9:15
Yeah, I would say there are only two. I mean, we love working with athletes. So I'll say they're only two difficulties—one big one small. One of the big ones is when they're in season and active, it's basically impossible to do anything with them, as you have, I mean, for baseball players, right? You can't do anything for baseball guys, basically 183 days of the year, because they're in season. So one of the issues is like time and logistics. The other issue is that many of the athletes we work with do not use email, which is just very difficult to communicate, like detailed long things via text. So not using emails, frustrating, but those are the only two things. The upside right is their creative individuals, and when you let them work with you to create something they like. You'll get a lot of buy-ins. And I think Terrell Owens is a perfect example, to have this reputation being hard to work with and this and that. But for us, he's been one of the easiest, most outgoing people we've worked with. Because our approach has always been Terrell, what do you like doing? Let's help figure out how we can help you make money doing what you enjoy. And if you help people make money doing what they like to do, you have a good recipe for success in any business in any industry. So I think the benefits are, they're such powerful, fun people to be around. And when you give them when you help them make money, do something they like, their energy is infectious and contagious, and they tell their friends. They become ambassadors for you to become advocates for you. I mean, Terrell did so much to help our business grow. So when you have the right athlete who gets what you're doing and wants to be your partner, a lot of good things can happen.
Ronen Ainbinder 10:49
Yeah, it's like democratizing the platform you already own and its popularity and knowledge.
Daniel Hennes 10:56
Exactly. That's the whole thing. I mean, that's our whole thing. And that's why I like one of the things we do to your point about democratizing it. So well said, one of the things we do is, we do these sweepstakes, where basically you get as a fan, whether you have $5, or $500, you can enter for the chance to win, like a zoom call with you Donna's house, I'm in the Miami Heat, or we did a bird ride with Terrell Owens where you could enter for the chance to win. Or you could enter for the chance to win autographed cleats from your favorite NFL player. So one of the things we did is like all of these guys have followings. And so we took that we're like, Okay, how do we raise some money for charity, and democratize that access. So a lot of talent will come to us now and say, hey, I want to give away an autographed jersey, donated to charity, and give all of my fans the chance to win. And we do a lot of that stuff and enjoy it.
Ronen Ainbinder 11:42
I want to ask you. And I want to know if you can go a little bit deeper on the negotiation side. Since it's since I think it's a service at the end of the day. It's, it's basically a service if you probably a productized service, but more like a service. So it's very, you have to shape it unique to each of the demands, requirements or So how exactly does he work? Do you think so? Do I sign up to the page, then I reach out to, let's say, the big puppy and I send him, and I was like, Listen, man, it's my birthday, I want you to be joining a zoom call with all my friends or something like, how does it how exactly does it work? Do I say like, Man, this is what I have? Can you do it for me? Like? How does it work?
Daniel Hennes 12:29
Yeah, great question. So basically, the way it works, if you're, let's take David Ortiz as a great example. If you're interested in booking David, you will go to his profile. You would see the different experiences he offers. So you would see that he does a custom thing. So you can submit whatever you have in mind, you see that he does a speech, you see that he does a q&a, you go to his profile, you select the experience you want. And then once you click Request, you're taken to a page where you fill out, date, time, location, a message for the talent, your budget, if there's travel involved, and how you want to split the payments is at 50% upon acceptance and 50% upon completion, 100%, upfront, etc. So you would fill out all those details, you would submit that offer. And then that would go directly to David's agent who would get a notification; hey, wrote and submitted an offer for David, click here to view the details. And David's agent could go in and chat with you and say, this part looks good, we need to tweak this, this part looks fine, he needs this, and he can update the offer and send you back a counter through the platform. So all of those details can be done through the platform. And then once you guys agree to terms, you will both approve it. And then you're also able to process payment through the platform; everyone gets an invoice right away so that it's all tracked, no more like remembering to write checks or hunting down checks. So like we just bring a lot of efficiency to the fulfillment of these events.
Ronen Ainbinder 13:50
Sounds fun. And I wonder what you think of this industry, the booking, and events industry? Of course, after COVID is going to look like, let's say, let's aim for five and 10 years, what do you think is going to change? What do you think is needed over there? What do you think is going to happen? What other kinds of technologies or start-ups are you eyeing in the space in that you think it's going to be a thing later? Or maybe you are even going to incorporate what you guys do? What do you think is going to happen there?
Daniel Hennes 14:23
So I think the whole booking industry is slowly but surely trending towards what I call disintermediation, which is you don't basically five to 10 years from now, right? There's no need for a speaker's bureau. Basically, the way a speaker's bureau works is if you want to book them through a speaker's bureau, you go to the speaker's bureau, you call them, and they make some recommendations. You have someone you like, then the speaker's bureau doesn't ever let you talk to the talent or the agent. They're the middlemen this whole way, and they make the process more efficient. They mark up fees 30%. It's like looking at what happened to travel agents when Expedia came along, right the travelers business doesn't exist anymore. Or look at what Uber did to the taxi industry; the speaking industry is ripe for that exact same type of disruption. I see a significant trend towards technology in the long term as people get younger and more open to using platforms. But overall, from a talent side, I see talent as a whole becoming more comfortable using platforms to monetize their fame. I mean, one of my good friends and mentors is Steven Galanis, who's the CEO of this company, and Stephen's whole thing is, people are more famous than they are rich. And it's an excellent point. And I think over the next five to 10 years, we'll see that gap closing where platforms are going to make it easier and easier for athletes, celebrities, speakers, anyone with a story and a following, to monetize that as platforms are gonna make that a ton easier. And, because that we look at companies like Cameo, that Stephens, an investor of ours, so cameo, I think they're doing an amazing job in their space. They could be a partner; you look at a company like open doors, their partner of ours, Blake Lawrence over there's incredibly bright. Helping with social media, endorsements for talent, like, all of these different areas of the like, talent earning ecosystem are slowly but surely being disrupted by technology. And we plan to be that technology in the speaking space, though.
Ronen Ainbinder 16:14
That's awesome. It reminds me of a tweet I saw recently. I don't remember who it was, but he said that your net worth is equal to your follower count. And that makes a lot of sense if you think about it. And if you have a big follower count, and you have an in you can't compare it to your net worth, then you're doing something wrong, right? Because you have a platform, you have exposure, you have exposure. So yeah, you have to find ways in monetizing, and I feel like you guys have, like, hit the nail on the head when it comes to that. And
Daniel Hennes 16:44
I would add something to that; I would say it's your follower count. But even more importantly, it's how we engage your audiences. It's one thing to have a million. We see like athletes that we work with that have 100,000 Engaged followers are way more successful on sweepstakes and giveaways than athletes who have a million or even 2 million followers who aren't engaged like engaged followings key.
Ronen Ainbinder 17:07
Awesome. Man, I have the last question when it comes to Engage. And I want to know your opinion on the classic chicken and the egg dilemma, which is, what do you grow? First? Is it the demand or the supply? Right? Because if you have tons of athletes, but no one's coming to book, then then you have a problem. But also if you have, if you have like 1000s of people, probably if you have 1000s of people, it's going to be easier if you start to get athletes on the platform, but in your experience, houses, how does that dilemma look like Engage? What? How do you guys like trying to solve it? What's the approach was the conversation just walk us through it,
Daniel Hennes 17:46
Our whole thing was we always wanted to build the talent side first. Even before we had companies, we knew that if a company came to us, we needed to fill their demand; we needed to have the right people on the roster they could see. So our whole thing was we always wanted to build the talent first. Now because of that, because we were building talent. Before we had a client base, we were always very transparent. We were like, Look, we are a start-up, we are this amount old, we have done X, Y and Z like, here's what you're getting into, there are no guarantees that your client ever gets a deal on our platform. Like we were always very transparent. But I think agents always respected transparency. And also created something with no downside where we don't charge a fee for agents to use our platform; they can list their clients on a bunch of different platforms. So there's no downside to using our platform. And then what happened. I mean, we have guys who were on our platform for a year before they got anything, and now they're making 10s or $20,000. Because we've built the client base now for them. So what we're seeing right now is we're seeing explosive growth on the corporate side. Now that we have the right talent, like if you get the right talent and have the right relationships. It's genuine and authentic, the corporate sort of spending side will come as long as I mean, we have a brilliant person running our marketing, we have investors who fund a lot of our sales staff, as long as you will hit the pavement and hustle and sell that part will come if you have the town. And that sort of always been our approach is just like building one side first. And now we build both sides concurrently. We're always adding more talent. We're always adding more customers, but at first, it was to build the talent, get them on board. Be upfront with everyone, so they know what to expect. And let it roll from there.
Ronen Ainbinder 19:28
I love it. Man. I love it. What are some of the like marketing strategies that you guys are using? What's the main, what's the main source of marketing that you guys are eyeing, or what's, what's the strategy?
Daniel Hennes 19:41
So it's two key things. First, we do a lot of digital stuff, a lot of social media, Google a lot of digital stuff, for speakers and events, right? that matters. But then the key is to have a group of guys who I personally represent, manage, who do a lot of speaking. So there are hundreds of 1000s if not millions of dollars to be made. Just by monetizing my current client base and making sure I'm staying in touch with people at Microsoft and AIG, do they have any needs? Is there anything I can do to help? Is there anything I can do to go above and beyond, so it's always running Google ads, email marketing, and all that stuff to get new clients? But it's also making sure that every existing client we have has a good experience with us feels value knows where available to help knows where responsive. So that's how we do it. We like to make sure that everyone gets the VIP service for our current clients and that we're doing a lot digitally to bring in new clients.
Ronen Ainbinder 20:32
Is your focus 50-50? Or are you focusing more on your current clients and existing customers that pay already, or you're trying to find new ones? What's the worst?
Daniel Hennes 20:40
So I am focused pretty much solely on handling the incoming stuff from existing clients, people who come to us. So one offers, I am focused on doing deals that are coming in our marketing team, our CMO, right, he's focused on the other side. And that's what you have to do as a start-up, you have to divide and conquer and a lot of ways, and he's focused on making sure our digital ads are set up. Well, making sure we're getting good traffic, making sure we're getting good inquiries, seeing which topics are getting the most clicks. So like, I have someone else who's good at that. Do that because it's not what I would be good at. So we sort of do both things, but I don't do both.
Ronen Ainbinder 21:14
Love that man. Well, what an awesome halftime snack this has been, man. Time has flown by so fast. And I can't believe this conversation, man, without asking you a more personal question. And I want to ask you, what do you think makes a great leader? Characteristics? Skills? Traits?
Daniel Hennes 21:38
Look, I mean, I think I don't think anyone has a perfect answer to that question. I would say some of the important things to me, one like if you want to be a great leader, think about others before yourself. It's hard. And it's something I'm not great at. But I always try to think about, like, how can I look out for my team, make sure what they have what they need like the best leaders lead to serve, I strongly believe that the other thing you need, especially if you need to start up, you need a lot of passion, a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of knowledge. Like if you're a leader, you need people to respect you not because of your title, but because they know how planned and how well thought out you are and how much you know. And they also draw your energy and enthusiasm like nothing. One of our investors always says in business, like polite persistence wins the day like you need to have the energy and the enthusiasm to stay on top of everything. And people will buy into that, whether it's clients or your own team of people around you, you need to have passion and enthusiasm and authenticity, and the rest you can learn.
Ronen Ainbinder 22:36
Dude, that's awesome, man. What a legend. Daniel. Man, I want to thank you so much for coming to the halftime snacks. Man. It was an absolute pleasure to host. You can't wait to see what's going to happen in one, five, and 10 years out of you and Engage. I can't wait to see if you guys are looking for investors; please let me know. Even though I don't have any money. But, man, it would be fun to have more conversations in the future. So you're always welcome to the afternoon snacks, man. And yeah, man, thank you so much.