By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – A maverick: a person who takes a stand independent of others in a group. That's probably the best description of Mark Cuban, icon for the business of sports and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
As a real sports lover, I, like the rest of the Dallas Mavericks' fans, couldn't be happier. 19 and 2 is an amazing way to start a season. But it's the owner, Mark Cuban, that the business world is enthralled with. And Business 2.0 magazine felt Cuban should be part of their December/January issue, "How to Succeed in 2003 - 20 Leaders Reveal What Works Now." In 1999, at 40 years old, Mark Cuban sold his creation Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Later that year, Time Magazine points out, Cuban unloaded or hedged almost all of his technology stocks. In typical Cuban style, he even publicly called them overpriced. We should have listened.
But it's that Cuban style that has captured the business community. Since taking a small portion of his winnings and buying a controlling interest in the Dallas Mavericks for $280 million, attendance is up 35% and ticket-sales are up 77%. If you want to sell tickets, increase the sales staff from 5 to 25. We all know that selling to the small guy is the bricks and mortar of any enterprise. But sponsorship, the money that comes in big chunks, is the foundation that keeps it going and growing. Cuban says, "Everything we do is for sale. Nothing is off limits." Why, at one game he even wore a 'Lord of The Rings' t-shirt - for a fee. By the end of the year, sponsorship will have tripled to an estimated $20 million.
But we who watch him on a regular basis know how often he crosses the line from passionate enthusiastic owner to jerk. His co-owners in the league find it very difficult to embrace even his good ideas when minutes before he was publicly debasing them.
Hopefully finesse can be learned - his business savvy is innate. For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m. To contact Maxine Shapiro, please send emails to mshapiro@kera.org.