Episode 222 Snippets: Andrew Stallings of Athelo Group

Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 222: Andrew Stallings
@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 222 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Andrew Stallings, Founder and President of Athelo
Group, an agency working with athletes and brands.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.

Andrew’s Career Path
“I came from a smaller town in Tidewater, Virginia, Newport News, most
commonly known for being Michael Vick's hometown. I was lucky enough to
get to know his family pretty well. He was in high school during the time that I
was coming up through middle school and it's always cool to watch him...
“I always knew, much like everybody, that I wanted to work in sports. And I
think from an early age, we all have those moments that kind of defined us
where we're like, you know, man, whether it's watching a Super Bowl moment,
sharing a moment with family, seeing your hero hit the ice — there's always
that moment that's like, man, I would love to either be an athlete, be a coach, or
work for a professional sports team.

“It's usually not until we probably hit late high school, or maybe going into
college…or maybe it's in your early twenties, you kind of begin to start
researching how do you exactly do that? I feel like I tell the story a million
times, but I [attribute] a lot of my success to the East Coast Hockey League
(ECHL) and the affiliate The Roanoke Express.
“For those that don't know [the ECHL] is AA affiliate hockey league in
North America, specifically in the US, still active today…When I was in third
grade, my dad switched jobs [and we moved]. I had no friends, I was in a
huge learning curve in school and socially. The only thing that I could really
do was go to these hockey games with my dad. It was like our kind of coping
mechanism for the struggles that I was going through in third grade.

“So, I'll never forget, he got season tickets to the Roanoke Express — and AA
hockey is probably what you imagine. They beat the living hell out of each
other…But I got to see the world of professional sports through a different lens at
10 years old. The cheerleaders, saw me every game and they'd let me come down to
the tunnel and high-five all the players. I would always bang on the glass behind
every game, so I got to know the head coach and he invited me to practices where I
got to skate around at 10 years old with some of the players on the weekend.
“Some of the players, you know, 19, 20-year-old guys took me under their wing as
this little cool kid…When they were on injured reserve, I would come do [physical
therapy] and skate around and just clap for them on the bench when the rest of the
team was on a road trip. So I really got to understand the professional aspect of
sports early on. And that was like, man, I want to do that. I want to be involved in a
team. I want to get to know the operations, management, et cetera.

“My dream to this day is to own a minor league hockey team. I don't know when, how, what, please
don't ask me how the planning for that's going because there's definitely not one at the moment. But
that's the dream…
“I ended up going to school in northern Virginia — Marymount University. It was the last school I got
accepted into; I had to beg the Dean of Admissions to let me in after like 12 other schools turned me
down. I ended up writing a letter, a handwritten note [and] I was like, ‘Hey, please let me in. I'll do
this.’ I got a conditional acceptance, went to northern Virginia. Most of my family was in Northern
Virginia at the time, my favorite sports teams were in northern Virginia. It was a no brainer if for
nothing else, I'm gonna have a blast socially.
“I juggled about five different jobs throughout college, I was slinging fondue at The Melting Pot. I was
coaching women's high school basketball. I was doing freelance journalism for a bunch of hockey
blogs and fantasy sports blogs. And then I started interning at Sirius XM radio in my senior year, and
ultimately that's where our paths crossed. I took an internship and turned it into a full-time
opportunity on the NASCAR side. So I know when you were with the Ducks doing social early in your
career, that was the same time when I was a producer on the NASCAR side.

“It was kind of around that time in [my] early twenties where I'm like, okay, I'm still balancing like
three jobs on top of this full-time job — and everybody that doesn't know about the world of sports
or media — …everyone will say it, especially early in your career, it's about survival. It's about how
quickly can you build your network and how much can you survive off of next to nothing? So I'm
juggling all these different jobs, oddball jobs. I'm bartending till two in the morning, going to the
radio studio at four in the morning. It was a mess.
“But I ended up learning the value of community very quickly, and I built a great rolodex and
ultimately hit my ceiling after about four years or so [at SiriusXM] and got a great opportunity with
Octagon to leave everything I had in DC [and] come up to Connecticut. I didn't even know how to
spell Connecticut nor did I know where it was based out of. I thought it was like up near Maine, so it
was eye-opening to me that it was right next to New York City when I came up here. But I ended up
moving up here, took a great opportunity to work on the events and experiential and hospitality
team. [I] umped around the agency for a lot of years, did a lot with Anheuser Busch, and ultimately
switched to another agency called Mosaic, doing experiential marketing with Anheuser Busch in the
US. And then I went to Constellation Brands where I continued to work in beer and did field
marketing for a few months.

“But right at that transition point between Mosaic and Constellation, it was kind of like
peak Gary Vaynerchuk time where everyone's like, you need a side hustle…And I'm just
like, man, wouldn’t it be great if instead of making my $51,000 a year and working 18-
hour days, that money's never gonna change — what if we created a side hustle? Me and
my buddies who I played hockey with were like, yeah, let's stick it to the man.
“And ultimately I was just like, cool. Let's help athletes in very niche sports communities.
And the reason that we went that route was because, truthfully, a lot of my friends were
into NASCAR, they were into action sports. They were in CrossFit, boxing. I had friends in
the NHL MLB, NBA, but for anybody that has done their homework or knows those
spaces, you can go be an NFL agent and you can go represent the third-string running
back from the New York Jets on the practice squad, but the problem is that there's so
much red tape. And to this day, it's getting a little bit better, but there's a lack of creativity
and it takes a massive continent of shifts in order to make change in those sports.

“For the other sports like volleyball and everything else, there was an underrated market of
representation. There was a lack of creativity. There was a lack of just overall respect for the athletes. And
then I'd worked with so many brands over the years on the agency side and then going in-house a little bit
[and] I'm like, man, brands are always complaining that they don't wanna spend $500,000 on a Super
Bowl tweet with Tom Brady, but they don't even realize they could spend $50,000 and be sponsoring
three of the best volleyball players in North America for a multi-year sponsorship agreement; and do
things at scale with different avenues to activate that just completely can be different.
“So it kind of served as a full-service agency. Athletes opportunities were the two words that we took [and]
smashed them together to make a funky little run on a word called ‘Athelo’ that most people can't
pronounce out of the gate…[The business was] truthfully was something that snowballed, I think I had
like two or three, I call them friends, but they were client,s when I went to Constellation — I was probably
in my third or fourth month at Constellation, and I went on my honeymoon. After I got married, I came
back, landed on the tarmac at JFK, all of my voicemails loaded, and the HR team had accidentally called
me on my honeymoon to deliver the news that I was part of a 90-person layoff. And luckily I didn't get
that on my honeymoon because that would have ruined my entire trip. But I ultimately got that news —
sitting in first class, my glowing wife is just so happy, we're married, everything's great and I'm sitting
here like shit. I am broke, I have no job…it was kind of my sink or swim moment.

“I had two buddies that I started this company with. I quickly realized that I had
to make a roadmap in order to get to the last step, which was to buy them out.
And I had to do this in a span of three months. I gave myself a very tough
roadmap to be able to accomplish all this. And ultimately at the two-and-a-half-
month mark, I was able to sit down with them and luckily be able to buy them
out with no resistance or hesitation. Then from there, just everything snowpiled.
We have to date about 25 athletes on retainer that we're working with and
growing, about 110 different brands of properties on retainer and agencies that
we work with on a variety of different projects. And it's still bootstrapped. It’s
mostly me managing the athletes day to day. We have different contractors and
freelancers that help us out on different parts of the business. I have a senior
director of operations that helps out with a lot, but I just realized, like, I don't
need a 100-person staffed agency in order to define success.

“Because luckily when COVID came and this was a thing, and this was my full-time job,
we were playing in sports that — I don't wanna call them COVID-proof, but they were
quicker to activate and get back to sport than the NFL or NBA were. Then on top of that,
the brands were eager to look at what we were doing. We were scalable because our
overhead was so minimal. Our athletes were also desperate for any money at the time.
“So, you know, we didn't hurt ourselves in the long term by belittling value. We just
showed creative scale and showed opportunities to kind of do things a little bit differently,
Obviously now that the world is somewhat back to normal Yeah, sure, some people are
going back to the big New York City and LA ad agencies. Some people are going and
blowing big marketing budgets against TV commercials. That's fine. But you know, we get
more inbound calls now because we were that asset and option to a lot of marketers to a
lot of athletes. Just to be — I don't ever like to say a one-stop shop, but at least a unique
asset and tool for consideration of creativity and differentiation.

“So, like I said, it's fun. It's different. Definitely not bulletproof. We
fail a lot. We lose every day, more than we win. But the good news is
that the wins seem to overcome the small losses here and there. So it's
incredibly humbling to be able to sit down and reflect on it with stuff
like this with you. We're just trying to be better than we were
yesterday, as cliche as it sounds. That's literally my goal is if I can
sleep better than I did yesterday, that's a huge win.”

When he made that leap and bought out his initial partners in Athelo
Group
“I'll give you the very personal side of it. I knew I had to write checks that
day to those guys. I knew that I was meeting them at a bar before we were
playing hockey together in a 10 o'clock adult men's league game that
night. As you can probably imagine the guy that's writing two massive
checks, at least massive in my mind at the time, to two guys that are
getting out kind of like the sticky bandits — they're like we did next to
nothing, we'll take a check, see you later. How do you think they played in
the game that night? They were happy as all can get. They were great.

“I will never forget writing those checks and just being so upset, so pissed off. Like, I was
just angry at everybody. To me, there was a lot of self-induced pain and pressure that I put
myself through to make this work. I was not confident it was gonna work and I think that
was the hardest part. To this day I still believe that a lot of the success of this company was
in large part due to my community, my connections, and, I mean [the other guys] helped
build it from an operations and branding standpoint. But the meat and potatoes, the
overall intestines, if you will, of this company, really came in large part from me.
“So when you have to write those checks, it sucks. So you're saying like…we're all still
friends, but I sat there and I probably pounded six beers before that game and I just went
and played the game. I remember having a horrible game, spent most of it in the penalty
box…It just sucked. Just, like, mentally, you're going through it. You're going through these
motions. You woke up the next morning and it was the first real splash of accountability. It
was like, okay, you don't have to wake up at nine o'clock, Andrew. You don't have to be in
the office by nine o'clock.

“It was the first real smack of accountability as being somebody that was like, I
had a severance package sitting in my bank account. I was fine, you know, for
the time being, I could have sat there and just applied for jobs on Indeed or
LinkedIn. And there were times that I did. But a lot of it was just inspiring the
next few weeks of like an exercise of true accountability. There is no one
coming to save you. There is nobody coming to help you. It is one hundred
percent on you. And when you get through that fear of loneliness, it's actually
really amazing. I don't know how to explain it. For anybody that started a
business or anybody that's gone through just a radical transformation in their
life, whether it's getting back to the gym or a diet or a breakup, you hit this
moment where you realize, like, I don't wanna say it's rock bottom, but there's
no other way but up, right? So you go through this and just every single thing
you do is not a negative. If you fall, it's a learning lesson.

“So every single day moving forward, I just looked at everything like this is
learning. This is growth. Like, I'm gonna really F up a lot of this stuff. And I did,
and I still do. Like, I get people who will hit me up and say, you know, this is
messed up on your website or that, and of course I crack down on people who
are overseeing that stuff, but no one's perfect. And I think that's why so quickly
in my career and to this day, I hate people that are always like, oh, what are you
an expert in? Why aren't you focusing on just this? I hate that term. I hate
experts. I think that we all should be challenging ourselves to maybe own and
focus on one category and area, but we should always be evolving different
facets and areas of learning and teachings and opinions on what we learn and
do because you're not gonna be able to accomplish anything, whether it's
professionally or personally, if you're too stubborn or close-minded to really see
that or address that.

“So, you know that day [when I bought out my friends] always sticks in my head
because I still see those guys. I still play hockey with them and they're still at their
9-to-5 jobs. And, you know, they're happily married, they have kids. I don't hate
them, they're good dudes. They're great guys. But you grow apart. You certainly
grow apart in a lot of ways. And you know, it kind of will always forever sting. And I
don't know, maybe one day… I think anytime you go into business, people will
always say like, don't work with family or friends, there's a high risk. Luckily the
reward has paid off to date, but, you know, I probably lost two really great
friendships to that. But who knows, whether it was this or something else, if those
friendships were even going to be what they were at this point years and years later.
“So I always just try to remember and remind myself that it was never gonna be
bulletproof. It was never gonna be perfect. Just the universe has a way of feeding us
stuff and you have to just take it, run with it and make it your own.”

On athlete branding for the athletes in the more niche sports when Andrew was starting
out
“It's tough because I could probably talk for a whole podcast episode on this; it's probably
one of the more frustrating things that we deal with and it's a twofold topic. The first thing
is how should an athlete, a creator, an influencer, or just an aspiring individual that wants
to monetize their social media or personal brand — how do they manage it? What's the
right way to manage it? What are the industry norms? What is the education behind it?
And there is a massive void in terms of what the value is and what the perceived value is
across a lot of different verticals. You can ask what certain people at different [social
media] followings, sports, variations, ages, races, sex, whatever do, but no two people are
even remotely the same. I have seen athletes with almost identical social media, followings,
identical audiences, and identical engagement rates in assets, and I've seen one brand offer
them $50,000 for an activation campaign [and] I've then seen them also offer like $1,000
to the other individual.

“And the perception is always how educated, how confident and how
willing are you to risk and walk away from any offer that's presented to
you? I think that's the hardest thing, right? Every single athlete that we
work with, they are in the business of making money. And as much as I
beat into a pulp that our relationships with our athletes are not money-
driven first, they are very much money-driven at the end of the day. They
are a big driving factor to what we do because this is their livelihood in a
lot of ways. So what we have to always remind them is that money up
front is always gonna be the hardest thing that we ask them to dismiss.
We look at every relationship with all of our clients and athletes as an
investment, an investment to their personal brand and an investment in
their education.

“And I've told every athlete that I've ever encountered [that] my goal
[is] hopefully you learn enough, you gain enough and you become
knowledgeable enough by having seats at the table with us in
meetings with these brands and these companies and different
properties that in a year, two years, maybe you don't need us. Maybe
you can do this on your own. Maybe you're just like, all I need is a
lawyer to just double-check my contracts and that's it. The hard part
is that even though you learn a lot, things are always changing, right?
So it's like, even if you gain enough knowledge into one area, there's
always something new that comes along.

“So it's very different. But in terms of our athletes, you know, many of them
have either done it solo and have just grown tired of the game, the
negotiations, the back and forth that they really don't want to engage every
single minute on the hour with the brands. Not because they just don't like or
enjoy it, but the brands can ask for a lot. The agencies ask for a lot. I mean, a
good example — I'm dealing with an agency right now, the turnaround times
to get approvals and clients and contracts — it's hours. They literally emailed
us and they're like ‘Is this athlete interested in this? Great. Let us know by
4:00 PM Eastern today’ I look at the clock. It's 2:15. I'm like in what world?
I'm like, they're at training camp right now. I don't know. I haven't even got a
chance to review this brief. And it's just really tough because the expectation
is like, go-go-go demand. Like, I'm paying you for a service. I want it.

“Athletes get tired of that. They need a buffer. They need somebody to
defend them. And it can't be their parents or their uncle or cousin all
the time. They really need somebody that's knowledgeable and that's
willing to not just be a one-person army, but know when to pull a lot
of different levers and bring them to different conversations in order
to defend them. I always call us somewhat magicians in a lot of ways,
right? It's like you're going toe to toe in a Pokemon battle — which
Pokemon matchup based on who you're going against, are you gonna
pull? Like, are you gonna pull the squirrel? Are you gonna pull a
Charizard? Who knows? Because no two conversations with people
are the same.

“You're reading people, you're reading the trust, you're reading the humility of it. There's a lot of
ethics that go into what we do. So many of them use us because they need that trust. They need
somebody that's gonna go there, find their best interest. Others look at us as a creative resource.
They're like, ‘Hey, I already have all these deals. I know I got great deals. I just need somebody to
be constantly upselling, showing how I can bring more value, how this is growing, that's growing.
If my TikTok’s not working, my email newsletter is. If my email newsletter isn't working, guess
what? We're starting a subscription box service in the next three months. They just want us to be
constantly in that person's ear to help build them.
“The last thing is that the athletes — I've said they gotten tired. They really just wanna learn, they
also wanna have that protection. But at the end of the day, they really just want to sit there and
not have to focus on this as much as they probably should. And that's probably the hardest part
about what we do is that even when we come in, some days it's Athelo Group handle everything.
Just let me know, hit me up once a week, phone call, text me, okay, bye. And then outta nowhere,
they will come back and be like I want updates on the hour every day, this and that.

“So you're really managing a lot of versatile and volatile personalities on both ends of the spectrum,
both the athletes and the brands. You're the constant middle man. And you know, our team is
always trying to just make sure that we help both sides understand that we're not here to be the
sneaky lawyers that are just this is the number, this is the contract, here you go. We really are trying
to lead with empathy. We’re trying to lead with — I always call it the four Es — it's evolution, it's
enhancement, it's entertainment and it's empathy. We're always trying to kind of build and go off of
those areas.
“But yeah, I mean, typically some athletes have either had no managers or agents, or they have and
they've been put on a roster, been on the shelf with 45 other athletes and they literally get their team
deal done and that's it, and they just want more of a hands-on experience. So that's why what we do
is a little bit different. The reason we don't have that many athletes, too, is on top of that we also
have retainers built in all of our contracts. We're offering PR services, digital strategy — we're not
just managers, we really offer an abundant amount of services. And instead of doing just stuff where
it's based off commissions on influencer deals and your team deal, we're really offering a breadth of
services that, to date, a lot of our athletes capitalize on and they go from there.”

On athletes developing the sports side and the brand side
“I think the one thing a lot of our athletes typically cater to when I'm
pitching them or explaining to them how we're different is the trust
factor, right? Like they want to know how can I turn over my brand,
my business? Why should I trust you? And I tell them out of the gate,
they shouldn't, and they really should join us for meetings with new
brands, new properties, new projects — if for nothing else, they
should build that trust and rapport with us, but they should also
gauge and see how we work.

“But on top of that, to your point, that's where they maximize the value with the
brand partners by showing up. Like, if you have an athlete that shows up to the
meeting and pops on the Zoom call for the first meeting, man, like if I'm a brand
manager, like, yeah, it's great to talk to an agent or a manager, whatever. But if
the athlete shows up, too, I kind of think that's cool. I'm like, man, I respect the
hell out of that. That gives me the opportunity to be able to build my own
relationship with the athlete if I'm the brand. And that's what the brand wants,
the athlete knows that subconsciously they may or may not want it, but they
need it. They need to make sure that they have that rapport because, without it,
they are fully submissive to whatever their agent or manager says. And then
what happens if your manager or agent drops you and you're not seeing email
chains? If you're not on Zoom calls or vice-versa, what if you fire your agent or
your manager and you just don't know what happened behind the scenes?

“There's a lot of what-ifs. So you get to that point where you build that
trust and that cadence. But I tell all of our athletes — like, one of my
CrossFit athletes was with me for the last five days in San Francisco
and in Sonoma, we sat down with her sponsors, she was with me at
all-day meetings, content shoots, talking about 2023 planning. She
was there, and you know what, she probably solidified her
relationship with both of those brands for the next five years because
of it. It was having her there listening, engaged, not on her phone but
fully dialed in and understanding and asking questions that probably
set herself apart from any other athlete that they're gonna work with
in the next five years.

“That's the good stuff. That's the secret sauce is that if you have a manager that
wants to include you in those conversations — where necessary — I will say not
every meeting they should be in — but right place, right time, right players in the
room, they should be there. They should learn, they should be able to
understand the brand, the company, the morals, the people that they're working
with and representing, because if they are [then] social content, messaging, and
really explaining to their own audience why they work with a brand is gonna
come second to none. It's not gonna be just hashtag ad. It's gonna be let me tell
you a story about a time that I went to San Francisco and sat down with the CEO
of this company. People love that shit and we don't see enough of it. It's too turn
and burn. It's too quick. It's too transactional. And again, I'm not saying that
there's an immediate solve to it, but when you can find those opportunities that
work on both ends of the table for the long game, that's the good stuff.”

On brand building as a professional athlete
“I have a good example for you. I have a female surfer who's currently ranked number two in the
world right now. She's got probably six events left in the year. She's going for a championship.
She's 22 years old and probably does not want to even fathom dealing with brand development
and, you know, anything but money; like, money and competition probably is where her only
mindset is in a lot of ways.
“The great thing about this individual is that she has fully bought in to us helping her understand
that right place, right time we need to be capitalizing on new media avenues. We just got done
doing a piece with Muscle and Fitness this last week. Where in the world would a number two
Costa Rican surfer find herself in Muscle and Fitness magazine other than that opportunity? Like,
no one in Muscle and Fitness is probably watching surfing too often, but they've just learned
about this athlete this week. [At the same time], she really cares about her country. So what were
we able to we do? We're able to go through UNICEF and she's becoming the first female global
ambassador from Costa Rica.

“Stuff like that, ,It moves the needle. It takes time. But what she's doing is setting herself up
for the long game. At 22 years old, anything can happen. Anything can happen at any
moment. Your leg can be bit off, ACL gone, concussions, then what? She's setting herself up
for the future. And that is what a lot of athletes are beginning to do is not worrying about it at
so much the down and decline of their professional career, or even after — they should and
they will be looking more and more at the pinnacle of the climb at the very peak of their
success. And you're seeing that a lot with people right before they get there. Again, this
athlete hasn’t won a championship yet, but she's well on her way and she's gonna be a
competitor to do that. And whether she wins a championship or not, she's using this clout
and this rise right now to pretty much ride this wave in 15 different directions rather than just
one way, and that's ultimately what is gonna set her up for success.
“And it's super important because timing of when you start investing into your own brand,
not just financially, but from an educational side, is pivotal. It's absolutely pivotal. And it's
critical to what we're trying to help them understand every day and what we explain to them.
They're not all like that. I wish they were, but they're not all like that day in and day out.”

On what brands are looking for, especially for the less mainstream athletes
“The best architects in the world are the ones that have multiple tools in their belt.
And the same goes with management and representation. If you're leaning
specifically on social media following as your main asset, or even what you're doing
on the playing field, you're dead in the water. Brands more than ever wanna know,
and they wanna work with, and they want to converse, not be spoken to — they want
to converse with agencies and teams and athletes and influencers, whoever, that
have a diverse portfolio of assets for them to activate against. They don't all need to
be built out. You don't need to have a million followers across every single platform
you work with. You don't need to have audiences with massive buying power. What
you do need to show is that you're working towards and you're trying and you're
steadily building and finding the success to be able to provide case studies to these
brands of what is working, what can work, and what can be better with their help.

“And I think that's the most important thing is that when we talk to a lot of brands,
sure, that surfer or that CrossFit athlete or that NASCAR driver is, you know, they're
great. But they're not looking at their name. They're not looking at just their social
media. They're looking at how can this individual or how can this agency bring forth
more assets to complement existing campaigns, further brand’s activation ideas and
stuff that we have — how can they complement and be a supplemental resource to
us? Because a lot of brands get overwhelmed with new partnerships, building a brand
new partnership, or even just a campaign overnight — a lot of people forget [a
campaign is] a heavy lift for the people on the brand side. They gotta get it approved.
They gotta get budgets, they gotta get wording, messaging, legal procurement,
shipping, distribution. That’s just off the top of my tongue, you know? And I think
too often people think that it's just easy to email Puma and say, ‘Hey, I want to be the
next global ambassador because I'm the number two surfer in the world.’ You can't
do that, right? Like, you can't just convince Puma to shift their strategy overnight.

“What you can do is to converse and to build and find new strategies. Look, we're
doing very well, but we haven't even touched the iceberg because what we're doing
from an agricultural perspective is that we're still looking at everything from a coffee
bean perspective. It takes five years for a coffee farmer to really make good money and
value because they have to plant, they have to harvest, they have to crop. We're still in
year four and our plants are just starting to sprout. We are planting seeds day in and
day out for our athletes, for our brands, for our agency partners, and we're still trying
to figure it all out. And I'm telling you when that next year or two comes, I'm excited
because that's when all of this networking, all of this energy towards education and
community and value and building, I hope, is going to be able to pay off more than it
already has. It's the long game. It’s the long game for everybody at the table and you
have to understand that the people that eat their dinner the fastest are the ones that
you never want to invite to dinner. It's always the people that take their time, chew
their food, ask questions, and they're there for the conversation and the experience.”

“I think it's important to note that, all too often, I see this every day and I tell a
lot of interns that come in through our agency that help out with the business
development side of things and the partnership side of things — I spend a lot of
time educating them because they're so eager. They're like we're in sales, we're
cold-emailing, cold calling, like go-go-go calm. But I'm like, no, no, no — we're
planting seeds, we're going the distance. And they get frustrated with that
because obviously they're here for six months, a year, and they're just like I'm
not gonna see this through. But they have to understand that the patience of
these opportunities requires a lot of research. A lot of studying a lot of these
brands, budgets coming, going, opening, closing — there's a lot of volatility; you
have to think like a brand and a lot of people struggle with that because they've
never worked on a brand, they've never really built their own personal brand.

“I think that's a big struggling point for a lot of people on the agency side and also the
management side is that they've never worked on either the property or the brand side. They've
never sat on that side of the table. I think a big part of my success is that I've been able to work
with some incredible brands at scale over the last few years. I've been able to learn from a lot of
great properties, a lot of great leaders, both junior and senior. And I've been able to apply that
and ultimately cultivate that you need to be patient. You need to be doing your research. You
need to be looking at like, you know, typing in that brand name into Google News every day and
looking at the first three pages to see what's going on because, you know, if their stock just took a
50 cent on the dollar plummet yesterday, you probably don't want to reach out to them this week,
talk about stuff and be like, ‘Hey, I saw that just happened. And I think it's really great timing for
us to talk about six-figure sponsorship.’ He's gonna tell you two words, ‘Get beeped.’
“So I always tell people it's the long game that pays the best dividend for this. You have to be very
educated. It can be super frustrating because things change by the minute and you're not always
gonna be able to see it from the outside, but that's also why having a good community and people
on the inside to educate you and talk to you about it can really help you out down the road.”

On the convergence of the creator economy and athletes growing the opportunities
for individuals to monetize themselves
“I think it's very overwhelming, in a lot of ways. I think that there's great potential
right now because a lot of people look at this world in this current economic state
as you and I sit here on June 15th, 2022 at 4:01 PM Eastern and we say, like, man,
we can so quickly pull out the negatives. We can sit here and say this is going
wrong, this is going wrong. But what's exciting for maybe psychotic people like me
is that I look at everything right now as a Renaissance era. This is the best time to
be trying new things, to be testing the roads that aren't really paved just yet. You
can fail unequivocally and it is okay. It's totally okay to be trying stuff right now.
And I think more than ever is the best time to be trying new things that aren't
traditional. Not just, you know, Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest or social media in
general, people want experiences.

“That's something that we've been having a lot of conversations with
brands about is, you know, Why don't we go to Montana and do a
summit with an athlete and build a three-day immersive experience
around this, have your brand own this and get content around it and
do this limited edition super VIP merchandise drop that can maybe
serve as an NFT, if that's your thing, and can unlock access to seeing
this athlete at all of their events in 2023?

“Again, that's something that's just off the top of my head that we've
discussed to some degree with some brand. And I think the more that you
can provide layers to any of your thoughts is super pressing and
important. There's always the purpose of influencer marketing in those
agencies that are like ‘Hey, I got 15 grand here, 50K here, 500 bucks
there;’ it's quick cash. I think it's becoming more and more unauthentic
every single day. But it's really important for you as a representative of any
athlete or any person that you work with to do your absolute best, whether
it is a short-term or long-term partnership, to find the authenticity, find
the pivot, and be prepared when things don't perform the way that the
brand is expecting them to be prepared to offer up alternatives, be able to
give more and more before you're just sending over that invoice.

“Because that's the stuff, right? Like, you might be educating them by
saying ‘Hey, if this is just an Instagram campaign, I get that you want
to carousel, but I've been seeing great value with Reels. Do you mind
if, for you, on the house, I just experiment by mixing your product in
on this Reels and let's see how it goes?’ A lot of people won't do that.
But if you're one of those more lesser-known creators with value and
upside, take the risk, what's it gonna do? It's gonna be an extra hour
of work for you and you know what? You might have gotten yourself
three more campaigns because of it. So you have to always be willing
to overdeliver a little bit.

“But I do think it's very, very important to understand your value. I was
talking to an agency today for one of my athletes for a three-month
campaign and we are going back and forth and we're just at a
difference of like $3,000 or $4,000 on this campaign and she told me,
candidly, ‘I'll be honest. I have another individual that I just got for
double the social media following at half of the price of what I'm willing
to give you and double the assets.’ And stuff like that, it goes either one
or two ways. I either cringe because I'm like, man, I really hope that
there's not somebody out there that's really just giving the farm up for a
lesser amount of money because they don't understand their value.
And it's also kind of poo poo on the agency for taking advantage of
them.

“But at the same time, that does happen. But if you're in my business, you're a
degenerate gambler, so you're looking across the table and you're playing
poker. ‘Are you just blowing smoke? Like, are you just trying to say that so I
settle?’ So it is constantly a game of poker when you're in negotiations and, you
know, I do my best to offer pro bono consulting to athletes that DM me, DM
our accounts or send emails. We probably get like 20, 30 emails a week from
different athletes and, and people that are anonymous and I do my best to
answer all of them to just be an asset and a resource. But it's tough; obviously,
you're still trying to provide an immense value for those retained athletes and
clients, but I guess you can call it the Gary Vaynerchuk model. You never
wanna turn people away. You always want to be approachable. You want people
to think that, you know, Hey, you at least know somewhat about what you're
doing.”

Andrew on NIL and endorsements coming to college athletes
“Notoriously, I've taken a stance against NIL. Not the process. I'm all for
athletes getting paid and making money, to certain degrees, but I think right
now it's the number one example of just what the wild west is; there is no
structure, right? There is no regulation, really, from the different layers that
this all involves, and it's very spread out and it's very scary in a lot of ways. I've
seen athletes get hit with legal papers from brands and agencies, and they're
just like ‘What the heck? I didn't know any better. I just signed this contract
and I did it.’ And, you know, it's scary, man. I give a lot of credit to companies
like Opendorse that are trying their best to be resources and allies, and that
there's a lot of lawyers like Darren Heitner is doing a lot of good work in the
NIL space as a lawyer, as well.

“I personally, just from a business perspective, I'm too bearish…I'm
trying to figure out right place, right time. When that time comes, I'll
be ready. But for right now, we are just watching from afar. And I tell
athletes that hit us up – we get a lot of college athletes that hit us up
[saying] like, I wanna do this, I wanna work with this company, I
wanna do that and it's like God bless you. I get it, I understand. I wish
I could do more to help you. But the number one advice I always give
them is to do whatever you can to make sure that you have a lawyer or
a family member that's in legal or someone look over every single one
of your contracts. Please do not just sign something for the sake of
signing something.”

About understanding rates for sponsor deals with athletes
“A lot of it just comes with experience. A lot of it is just coming from
continuous conversations. I know that sounds probably completely
opposite to what I've said this entire podcast of, you know, there
needs to be structure. There needs to be this all-knowing, but it's one
of those things where you can't really explain it. There are certain
benchmarks, there are certain old wives tales in terms of like you can
base algorithm off of engagement rate to social, to reach to — there's
a lot of things.

“I think the number one thing that we always do is just ask the brand
what are their goals? What are their marketing goals? Like, if it's all
social media-based, it's all social audience-based, there's a bit of
manipulation that you can even do to that…There's paid marketing,
there's whitelisting, there's targeting. So if I do a deal with an athlete
and we have to hit 1 million impressions on two Instagram posts,and
it's a $10,000 deal for this athlete, chances are from a safety net
perspective I might take a thousand dollars off that go to my digital
contract agency and say, ‘Hey, I need to make sure that we are like
whitelisting and targeting this to hit this benchmark and goal against
the audience that they want.’

“And again, it's a win-win, but a lot of agents won't do that, right? They're like, ‘No,
no, no, we'll roll the dice.’ But like, If you have a lot of those hidden benchmarks
and goals in your contracts, these days, you need to be strategic in how you go
about doing that. Maybe some of them just really want brand awareness. We have
great connections with out-of-home agencies and really unique areas where we can
activate in super unique markets with high foot traffic. So a lot of it's just asking
those questions. You have to understand how they're measuring the return. For
some people it's just big numbers, that's all they want. Other people they're like,
man, we want signups. We want link clicks. We want sales. I think the worst
nightmare you can ever have when working with a brand or an agency or anybody
is if they are a hundred percent sales-driven and nothing else, [it’s] probably best
for you to walk away because they are not seeing the bigger picture of the
authenticity of a relationship and they probably haven't done the homework on
your audience.

“You probably don't even know the best way to communicate
something because we deal with a lot of brands where it's just quick.
It's like, ‘Hey, here's the money. Here's the contract. This is what we
want to do. Here's a creative brief. This is exactly what we want the
caption to be. Go.’ And it's like, Hey man, this isn't an Airbnb. You
can't just rent my social media page and just do whatever you want.
You have to literally let us have some creative say and back and forth
and dialogue. So, a lot of it just comes from speaking with and having
constant conversations with people in the social space.

“I think it's a testament to how you and I ended up here over a decade
later, but Twitter has been the best avenue in my professional career.
Marketing Twitter, social,Twitter, sports Twitter — I've made so many
great connections. The DMs are your best friend. You have to stand
out, you have to be creative. But I always say don't be afraid to ask
people for advice. There' are so many people I know at influencer
agencies that are willing to give me the intel — they won't share exact
athletes or influencers or agencies, but they'll give me case studies.
They'll say these are deals that we got. This is what it looks like. And,
you know, you can't really get that unless you have a good network to
use to your advantage.”

Andrew’s favorite segment, content, or campaign from his time at SiriusXM NASCAR
“I think when you're a producer in radio or media in any degree, you're often measured on
your guests. [If] you get a big guest on your show, that's huge. I will always remember that
my program director gave me a call and was blown away because I had been chasing Roger
Penske, the owner of Penske Racing and owns IndyCar now…but he was not, I guess at the
time, for many years was not doing a lot of public-facing interviews or at least was not doing
a lot of phone interviews. And we were able to get him not once, but twice in the matter of a
year to do some hits on our radio show for the morning drive.
“So that's always something that I pride myself on. But looking back on it, I wish that I was
able to push myself a little bit more creatively back then, because it was such a blank canvas
and it was one of the first areas that I was able to go through from a marketing and media
standpoint. But I think there were a lot of fun projects that we did from voiceovers and
mashing up stuff and songs. You almost felt like a DJ most days, which was really cool.”

Excluding the supplement brands Athelo Group works with, the best protein bar is
______
“This is tough because I know we're not on a video podcast, but you can see in my
office the boxes of different protein supplements that I have lined up here. I can't
give you a specific brand, but I will tell you any brand that has killer peanut butter
recipes and flavoring is a home run in my book. I definitely love anything peanut
butter.
“I will say — and this is not an ad and we don't entirely work with them, we work
with some of their sister companies — I've been chomping on Barebells [bars] a lot
lately. Those are at Trader Joe's. They have a good distribution model there, they
have good vegan options for some of their bars. So I've been crushing some
Barebells.”

Andrew’s favorite athlete brand campaign that Andrew / Athelo did not work on
“That's really tough. I see a lot of campaigns day in and day out that I don't hesitate
to give good feedback or even criticism on, publicly or even behind the scenes.
There have been a lot of good campaigns that I've seen done at scale, and I think
that's the true bread and butter from a marketing perspective these days are the
ones that really can activate with as little cost as possible. If you can move the
meter with as little money as possible, that's a home run.
“I don't like brands that invest millions and millions of dollars into these big
campaigns…I think a good example [despite recent layoffs] I would say Coinbase,
their Super Bowl ad [with the] fricking QR code [that] blew up. Everyone talked
about it. Simple marketing moves the meter.”

The biggest lesson Andrew has learned so far and starting running and
ultimately growing the company
“This sounds cliche, but you're gonna fail a lot. You're gonna lose a lot of
clients. You're going to get hurt. You're gonna piss off your significant other.
You're gonna lose time being a parent. There are a lot of sacrifices that go
into it and at the end of the day, all you can hope for is that it pays off. You
really have to not be too emotional and vulnerable to everybody around you
to make it seem like you're not able to weather the storm and the strength of
everything that you have going on, but you have to know how to set your
barriers, set your ground, and really just make sure that what you're doing
requires endurance. It requires fortitude. It requires just a lot of reps.

“And even then you are going to fail. The clients that you think would never
ever leave are probably going to leave you, the brands that spend millions of
dollars with you and you're like, this is the best brand, the relationship I have
with the CEO is the best, is probably gonna be the one that ends early for no
reason at all. You have to expect the unexpected and you just have to be
thinking proactively as much as possible. It is the hardest part of what we do,
but it's the number one lesson that I give any intern that comes into our
internship program is really understand what it is that we are doing, who
we're doing it for, and just always remember that we are at the intersection
of entertainment and education at the end of the day. For nothing else, we're
here to serve that purpose is to make sure we hit those two sectors and we
help people understand and know our why, our truth, and what we're doing.

“If we have questions, be vulnerable, if we have answers, don't act like
they are the finite a hundred percent answer. In a lot of ways, two plus
two isn't always four, it's not always that way. And, again, some people
would think you're crazy, but it's not always the case, and you have to be
open to those discussions and dialogue. I think the more that you can just
embrace the uncertainty, the uncomfortability, the better off you are. I go
to bed every single night thinking that if this is my last night on earth that
I'm good. Like, I have my family set up for success. I got everything set
and situated. I'm good. It is a really weird, and my wife hates every time I
say this, it's a morbid way of thinking, but it's a coping mechanism; when
you've kind of seen certain things, both professionally and personally like
I have in my 34 years.

“I'm not here to lecture and say, oh, I'm a whipper snapper, but I've
gone through some traumatic stuff, you know. I've been laid off, I've
been cheated on, I've been hurt. I've lost family members. Like, I've
probably seen more and done more than a lot of people probably
anticipate from a middle-class white guy from southeast Virginia. But
I'm not here to preach that, I'm here to just internalize it and use it as
my own truth. And hopefully it comes out to serve a greater purpose
through what I'm doing, both in my personal and professional life
every single day.”

The most memorable sporting event Andrew has ever watched
“Easily 2018, I believe Stanley Cup game five or game six…But when the Washington
Capitals won the Stanley Cup. I had a hundred-dollar bet at 14 to one odds that the
Capitals were gonna win the Cup. Rarely do you ever bet on your team and it pays off in a
big way, but watching your team win and also getting a huge payday, there's nothing like it.
You might as well have just hit the triple crown.
“So, I'll never forget that night. I was at a bar with my wife and some friends in Stamford,
Connecticut. I wanted to be in Vegas, but I also knew I was lucky enough to go to game two
in DC with my brother and if Washington never makes it to a Stanley Cup again in my
lifetime, I'll never forget that experience. Best sports series and experience of my life. So
the way that they celebrated, there's just, there's nothing like it. And it's something that —
you felt it. You felt all the energy and everything come from that city, and it was awesome.
So definitely 2018 Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals.”

The most popular or memorable social media post from an Athelo athlete
“Well, I could tell you right now one of our CrossFit athletes just advanced from the
semifinals and is gonna be going to, I believe, her third or fourth CrossFit games
coming up at the beginning of August. She already has a very dominating social
media presence, [but] she's gained [what] has to be over 30,000 followers in the
last two and a half weeks on just Instagram alone, and she hasn't really done
anything. Like, there's been no secret sauce except for the power of her brand. She's
coming up on a million followers on Instagram and she crushes.
“Across all of her channels, she just has such a dominating brand that expands
beyond the world of CrossFit in so many ways. So obviously everybody knows who
Tia and Mat Fraser are, but Dani Spiegel is a name that you shortly won't forget,
from just a marketing and brand perspective, and I can promise you that.”

The most memorable partnership activation that Andrew has worked on in his entire career
“The one that I'll always have PTSD about is I spent about a little over a year working on the World Surf
League and the Corona [Jeffreys] Bay South Africa event. And it was like back in like 2016 or 2017. I was the
project manager from Octagon working on talent with the onsite agency, putting together the entire event
and I actually resigned three weeks before the even. So I never got to go to Jeffreys Bay, South Africa.
“And funny story, I resigned actually in Russia during the 2017 Confederations Cup because I was trying to
be respectful and give three weeks notice and not two weeks notice. But I was swiftly met with a lot of
hostility from quite a few people leaving at such a very busy time for our agency and brand. But I look back
on it and I'm just like, you know, Russia was a crazy experience. I think being able to go to the Maldives — I
spent about a month in the Maldives with Chris Hemsworth, M.I.A., Diego Luna for Corona and parlay for
the ocean.
“So I always joke with people, I'm like Chris Hemsworth and I — he called me Stalls [and] I called him
Hemsey — we talked about rush on a deserted indigenous island ni the Maldives. Not many people can say
that. And he's a great dude. So you kinda have those cool celebrity experiences on top of it, but the Maldives
was great just because I'll never in my life take a 49-hour flight and journey to get to an island ever again.
That was brutal.”

The best meal to get where Andrew is in Connecticut
and where to get it
“I'm up here in Connecticut, so obviously my go-to de
facto answer has to be pizza. You know, everyone says
we're in the pizza capital of the world right here in New
Haven, Connecticut. I love pizza and I think there's
some incredible pizza up here, [but] I'm [hesitant] to
say that this is the pizza capital of the world, but I
don't know.
“I do think it's really really good. I like Greek-style
pizza. Up here, everything's brick oven, like super thin.
I like deep dish, I like Greek-style. So there's a good
mix, but I'd say we're doing a pizza tour for sure…”

About Andrew being a longtime women’s hockey coach
“I’ve coached for about seven seasons up here in Connecticut for a local high school in Stamford. It's
a great outlet, great experience, I had the privilege to be able to coach with people that obviously
understood the Xs and Os of the game probably a little bit better than me. I'm very much like the
morale, rah-rah, go team locker room kind of coach. I'm like the guy that's gonna burn the girls on
the ice just with endurance and laps and exercises and conditioning more so than doing very
strategic puck handling and in zone, out of zone, neutral zone puck work.
“(It’s a) blessing in a lot of ways. My wife got pregnant, we had our first son about eight months ago
[and] I took this last season off. [I’ve been] getting a lot of calls and emails from local coaches seeing
if I wanna come back as an assistant coach and this and that. Just, once you kind of step out of it,
it's hard to go back in right away… I just had wrist surgery about a week ago, so I’m not gonna be
playing hockey for a while. But on top of that, I mean, I don't know, we'll see what happens come
the fall, but I would be hard-pressed to think that I'm even gonna have the time to commit to that,
especially with how crazy business has been…”

Andrew’s quick take on athletes and NFTs or tokens
“I'm not the guy to ask for that. I'll be honest, I don't like crypto. I
don't like NFTs. I think there's a time and a place for it. I think there
are a lot of people that are super educated. You know, we do have
some cryptocurrency sponsors that we deal with and work with that
are very versed in it — they're actually mining and doing that kind of
stuff. I understand it to the level and degree that I need to, and I pay
attention to it, but I don't know. I think it's very difficult for me to
give my resounding thumbs up that it's the best thing in the world.

“I think it's like representation, right? Find people that have diversified opinions on
it, good expertise, good case studies and, you know, simplify. I think the problem
that I have with web three, the metaverse, DAOs, all this stuff and NFTs and even
crypto is that it's so complicated. I love TikTok because it's an eight-second video
and it gets right to the point. You give me a crypto bro and a TGI Fridays on a
Thursday telling me about fricking web three and DAOs and this and that. I don't
care how much money it makes, I'm done. I can't deal with any of that stuff.
“So it's a little difficult for me to keep up with it. We lean on a lot of different people
within our team to keep us up to speed and educated so that we're not entirely
missing the boat. But if you're asking me if I'm staying up late at night studying this
space and am really just so excited — not really. I'm more focused on sports
memorabilia and autographed diecast cars of NASCAR that I've built out from a
sponsorship plan.”

“I mean, there's a reality that you can, if your best friend says ‘Hey, gimme a
thousand dollars, I can turn it into $10,000.’ Like if you want to, if you have the
disposable income to try and do stuff like that, go for it. I mean, this is not
financial advice, but I would say I love risks. I don't think I'd be where I am
today if I didn't take risks. I look at everything in life as like being a little bit of a
degenerate gambler, I've said it several times today. I know a lot of people that
just aren't like that. They like their structure, they like their paychecks, they like
their nine to fives. They like knowing at 5:01 PM they can turn their work off
and turn it back on at 8:59 AM. I've never had a job like that in my entire life. I
dream of people that can actually turn work off in their mind. And, like, if I had
a superpower that's what it would be — turn work off literally for off hours and
turn it back on. I literally have no idea how to do that.

“A bit off-topic. But I think there's a lot of excitement, but there's a
massive decline right now. And I think in some ways, how can you
take and refine this to make it your own and be excited about it? I
think again, find the simplicity. You don't need to dive into this super
crazy melodic, strategic, layered project of this stuff. I think the
people that simplify NFTs and web threes are the ones that are gonna
be able to bring it to TVs and households and everything like that.
You gotta simplify and right now this stuff is not simplified.”

Andrew’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“It's tough because I don't think there's one individual that
professionally I follow. I'll tell you my favorite TikToker right now —
it's Kevin Cooney, the guy that does the ‘Good morning, you bad,
beautiful bitch.’ These pump-up things — like me and my coworker,
Alyssa, almost every single morning we send those TikToks to each
other and it's just like our running joke.
So I just like parody, satire, comedy to lighten the load a little bit.”

Where to find Andrew and Athelo Group on digital/social media
Andrew is @AStallings88 on all social platforms
Athelo Group is @AtheloGroup on social and check them out on their
website, AtheloGroup.com

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Andrew for being so generous with his time to share
his knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Episode 222 Snippets: Andrew Stallings of Athelo Group

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