The Business of Kayfabe Read online

  “How was dinner last night, Jim?”

  “Great brother, great. Good to see family.”

  Of course, that’s not what I did.

  I walked to Powers and squeezed myself between Knobbs and Saggs. I introduced myself to Powers, whose eyes were nearly shut. They actually did shut intermittently during our discussion that followed. His words were very slurred as well. My guess was that he was very, very tired. Must’ve been there quite a while.

  We had a chat that went around in circles for about fifteen minutes, with the Nasty Boys standing on either side of Jim and I at the bar, throwing in their two cents and stirring the pot.

  I’d reminded Jim that I added a slot in the schedule for him. He again told me I made him feel like a jabroni because I wouldn’t shoot his show before Terri’s and Vince’s. I’d reminded him that we agreed to this schedule, and then I changed it for him and agreed to Saturday.

  Then Jim said Saturday was now no good. I should add a Sunday! What?!

  I told him the whole thing should have been cancelled after he told me he had to go to dinner with his daughter that night. Saggs laughed and turned to Powers.

  “You told him that’s where you were tonight?” he said, howling. I pressed for details about the dinner and a timeline that got him to the bar well before 9 o’clock, though he couldn’t shoot with me. Then Saggs pressed him too, sensing more drama could come and further annoy the shoot interview mark with the wrinkled shirt and undone tie, looking like a salesman after a Labor Day sale.

  Powers said something about an airport trip he had to make. Saggs pressed him more. I was uncomfortable and just said, “Let’s forget this whole thing, Jim.”

  “No wait,” Saggs said. “You had to get your daughter from the airport?!” Jim had become confused and he was losing his grip on his own story. There some more eye closing and forehead rubbing before he threw out his hands, cutting off the discussion.

  “It was a personal thing and I don’t want to talk about it,” he barked. Saggs turned back to the bar and smiled. Knobbs was leaning over tugging on my arm.

  “Hey brother, why aren’t you hiring us?” he asked, right in front of Jim. I didn’t even respond. I was busy with Powers.

  “Jim, that’s fine about tonight. Let’s just call it a misunderstanding. Are you now telling me you can’t shoot tomorrow?”

  “We should do it Sunday,” he said. I told him that wasn’t an option. With great exasperation he told me he’d try and move stuff around on Saturday and make the shoot. I just couldn’t keep everyone working with us hanging until Jim figured out whether or not he’d be shooting with us. That wasn’t going to work.

  “Let’s just get it another time, man.” I offered him my hand. His head was down, despondent.

  “Yeah, Brian is right,” Saggs says as he turns back to me. “You should be offering us a spot on your show.” For a moment, I actually consider negotiating something right there. I did always want the Nastys on YouShoot. They would have been hilarious. I told Saggs so.

  “Next time you guys are out here let’s do it,” I said. But I still had the issue of the angry, sulking Powers sitting on the stool before me. I wanted the hell out. I’d had a busy day and there was another staring me in the face for Saturday. I put my hand on Jim’s shoulder.

  “Hey, one Jersey guy to another—we can do this again. I tried everything you asked for.”

  “Yeah, but you won’t do Sunday,” he said. I explained yet again about the cost and the fact that he’d agreed to two prior options. I wrapped up the ridiculous conversation and headed for the door.

  “Hey Sean,” Powers called out. Before turning, I prepared to explain why we couldn’t do Sunday yet again. I turned.

  “Where in Jersey?” Jim asked.

  “Hudson County,” I said and put up a fist. He smiled and did likewise.

  I was spent. As I walked out to the parking lot I didn’t want to even return to the hotel on Saturday. It felt like nothing was accomplished. I had half a show with Terri and Vince in the can, I’d been unable to land either of the Young Stallions, and apparently it would have been easier to work with the Nasty Boys than everyone else. Who knew?

  You’re probably holding this book because you’re either a fan of pro wrestling and the programming produced by my company, Kayfabe Commentaries, or perhaps you are interested in starting a company yourself. You might be sitting with the germination of an idea you’d like to bring to the masses (or even better, a niche of select, passionate folk) and have no interest in wrestling. Welcome, both of you.

  If I’m correct with either of those assumptions, then I now know who you are. And I know why you bought this book. This leaves you to wonder why the hell you’d buy this book by me. Fair question.

  As an owner of Kayfabe Commentaries, I was charged daily with the task of creating entertaining, interview style, pro wrestling-oriented programming. We don’t have any actual wrestling on our shows. It’s all programming revolving around the sport’s outrageous and glorious history and participants. In our 10+ years of life, Kayfabe Commentaries (KC, herein) has created shows with original and innovative formats in which to present such programming. Simply put, we redefined the genre, and our niche in the world.

  The word “shoot,” as in shoot interviews, is specific to wrestling. You’ll see it popping up in the book. Pro wrestling, for so many years, was a closed society. Participants in the sport were closely knit and committed to perpetuating spellbinding illusion. The word shoot is an industry term meaning “real.” So this segment of programming in which we operate, commonly referred to as shoot interviews, means the wrestlers are drawing back the curtain and speaking about once protected secrets. It was our goal to take the concept of the shoot interview and apply formatting never before attempted.

  Prior to being a co-founder of KC, I was active in the arts and the business world as well. I’ve been a professional film and television actor and voice artist for over 20 years, having worked on some of the biggest motion pictures and TV series in that time. I also directed national TV commercials, short films, and was a director of photography on a feature film, back when people shot actual film as opposed to digital. I’ve written books, screenplays, TV scripts, you name it.

  For 10 years, while working as an actor and director, I was also working on Wall Street in the sphere of the investment banking world. I wasn’t a blockhead, er sorry, I mean banker. I worked in graphics, branding, and presentations. Basically, I was showing the blockheads how to be creative. Most couldn’t. Their entire, Ivy League lives were spent in the confines of the proverbial box they so often read about thinking outside of. Someone had to take them by the hand and show them how to do that. That’s what I did.

  But while I was doing that, I was paying attention to their world as well. I was learning the world of big business from the inside. Deals and figures involving the biggest companies in the world passed my desk all day, every day. I worked to put them into attractive and digestible presentations and documents so the bank could go on to make zillions of dollars financing these massive deals with the Goliaths of business. Many working with me and under me in my department were focusing on only the aesthetic. They were artists as well–wholly disinterested to what lay inside the egg we were painting. But I was also paying attention to the machinations of business that sat before me.

  When I wanted more in-depth explanation, the senior bankers were very helpful in taking time to explain their thinking in the work that was being presented. It helped that a Vice President may have seen me on Law and Order the night before and wanted to hear about how his favorite show is made. Or the lady banker was intrigued that I’d been working on Sex & the City, her favorite show, for the past five years. It was a quid-pro-quo I guess. They thought it was cool to hang with me and talk about Hollywood and I needed pieces of their MBA as I was starting my company.

  I also spent a few years in real estate but was very quickly bored and frustrated by the rigidity of
that industry. I’m an entrepreneur and control freak. I can’t so easily hand over so much of my destiny to someone else. That’s what real estate is.

  As a real estate agent you are nothing more than the waiter—bringing stuff back and forth. Your decision-making is removed; your creativity is grounded. Within a few years in real estate I found myself in a sea of desperate goons with no business acumen, always waiting to get lucky. There were exceptions, though very few. Most of real estate is snake-oil sales and tactics. There were corner cutters and liars with holes in their shoes.

  So I went into wrestling production. Hold your laughter.

  Another reason I view real estate as a dead-end business is that it’s almost completely market driven, and we’ll discuss that danger later in this book. I have always viewed sectors that are totally controlled by the performance of a market as death traps. If the market is up, things are good. If the market is down, no one eats. There’s no opportunity to create multiple revenue streams or build hedges. Actually, you can’t build anything! If there is nothing to sell, and no one is getting a mortgage approved, you’re screwed. Again, no control.

  My experience in both the worlds of entertainment and business truly puts me at the intersection of art and commerce. I understand both. And it is my job at KC to ensure they work together cohesively. We need to create art—quality, enjoyable, profitable art.

  That’s the fluffy stuff. If you’re more business-minded you’ll probably want to hear that we’d grown revenue 695% in our first six years of life. More notable than that number was that KC did it during a recession, and in a most challenged category—digital media. Within our first ten years in business, I got to present our people with a Lucite award thanking them for their part in our surpassing $1 million in gross sales by 2015. It didn’t just land on our doorstep. You’ll read everything I learned about how we made that happen.

  And before you hang a medal on me, know that we also got torpedoed by the digital media market. We were in a segment that didn’t change and wouldn’t accept change. Our fight continues to this day and you’ll be right beside me to experience my analysis and game plan in the final chapter of the book.

  And that right there, is exactly why you bought this book by me—successes and failures. Yeah, I know—the crazy stories, too. They’re here.

  There’s a lot of blood in wrestling. The stars have been gouging their heads to draw a crimson mask for decades to excite fans and ramp up the drama. But there’s another kind of blood of which I will be speaking.

  I call KC a Business of Blood. That is to say, a business rooted in its owners’ knowledge and passion for the niche they serve. We’re fans that started a business, and that alone gives us insight and an advantage over big companies. We’re a very small company and that’s a good thing. I will spend the next couple hundred pages sharing with you why I think the structure and practices at KC are applicable to almost any small business and why it gives one a leg up on the big boys. If you love GI Joe dolls, have collected them for years, and are about to start a GI Joe-oriented business, my money is on you, even before Hasbro.

  This book is broken into four parts:

  Part One: The Business of Blood - This outlines the foundation for the entire business principle in which I strongly believe. It’s what the whole book is about and, hopefully, your entire business will be about.

  Part Two: Running It - In order to keep your Business of Blood afloat, making great product, and making money, you will need to tend to it constantly. I guarantee that you have no clue how much attention this will require. In this chapter we will delve into all of that.

  Part Three: Growing It - If the Business of Blood is a self-sustaining operation, then you’ve cleared a major hurdle. Maybe you’re one of the 20% of businesses that make it past the first few years alive. Well 90% of those will be gone in the next few years, so you better get good at growing your Business of Blood. This chapter covers growth and expansion, when it’s possible, and when it’s not. We tried some stuff that didn’t work and probably worked against us. It was a great lesson in the limitations of a Business of Blood, and how success puts blinders on you.

  Part Four: Saving it - The climate changes, and sometimes it never changes back. It will be your job to have your company change and adapt to new market environments. Sometimes it’s related to simply trends, but other times you’ll see a permanent shift in our world that affects your business. It isn’t simply weathering a storm—it’s global warming. If you’re a media company like us then you’re dealing with a lot of that as of this writing.

  Throughout the book I’ve included real-life examples from my experiences with Kayfabe Commentaries. Each anecdote pertains to the topic we’re discussing and is included to illustrate more vividly the concept I’m conveying. Wrestling fans looking for stories from the insane world of wrestling will find them here was well.

  I thank you for taking the time to read this. Let me know if you found it valuable. Finally, I want to thank my partner in business and co-founder of KC, Anthony Lucignano. The results I speak of are as much his doing as mine. It is the Jagger/Richards or Tyler/Perry that teams strive for. Though Anthony always prefers to reference far geekier comparisons like Jobs/Wozniak or Lee/Kirby. Either way, the result is the same—magic was made from two people seeing the same apparition one day.

  Of course, those other guys didn’t try to book the Young Stallions.

  Part One:

  The Business of Blood

  1. The Blood: It’s the Passion Flowing Through Your Business

  I WAS ON the phone with Lanny Poffo, a talented wrestler of years past and brother of the legendary “Macho Man” Randy Savage. I’d seen Lanny on some shoot programming produced by other companies and I thought him to be candid, intelligent, and entertaining in a real “left-field” kind of way. I’d never worked with him before but I thought he’d be great for a show called Breaking Kayfabe, wherein we explore the personal lives of the men and women of the sport. To say they are colorful outside the ring is an understatement.

  I thought Lanny was interesting and suspected he’d be loaded with the kinds of quirks and idiosyncrasies that make for humans of a fascinating mold. I had no idea that discussion of bidets and self-fellatio were to ensue. But Anthony and I just had a hunch.

  Additionally, and maybe more importantly, Lanny was the closest human being to one of the most mythic and shrouded big names of the sport, in his brother Randy. Lanny is no idiot—he knew we wanted a piece of the late Macho Man, as did most of the people who rang his phone. But we truly wanted lots of Lanny too. How many of the mouth-breathers of the 70s locker rooms could quote Chaucer and sing Rodgers & Hammerstein? Lanny was unlike the pack, and I knew he could go toe-to-toe with me as I led the dance. Shit, he could probably lead it, like so many of our great guests could, Cornette and Sullivan to name a couple.

  But yes, it was Hall of Fame season and Savage was being slighted again, it seemed. The WWE would again produce their HOF show and announce a slate of entrants into the supposedly hallowed halls, and again without mentioning Macho’s name. In years past they’d mentioned Koko B. Ware’s name, Tony Atlas’s also. Edge was in. So was Nikolai Volkoff and Sensational Sherri Martel. I couldn’t ask Randy about it—he was gone. But I knew if I sharpened the pick axe and chipped away, Lanny would unearth the jewel. Whether by conjecture or gospel—Lanny could shed some light.

  So I spoke with Lanny and prepared to give him the pitch and sheepishly confess that, yes, I was interested in his growing up in a wrestling family, buttressed by patriarch Angelo Poffo, wrestler and promoter, and also his brother Randy. But I was also wanted to talk about Randy and his grudges with WWE, their grudges with him, and the whole sloppy sordid affair that makes for YouTube click-bait and fascinating shoot programming.

  Lanny agreed to it all, including the revelation of a few details no one had ever heard regarding Randy’s aversion to ever working for WWE again, including its Hall of Fame. Lanny didn�
��t know me. He hadn’t worked for us before. Why did he entrust us with something as dear to him as Randy’s legacy?

  The Blood.

  “I have seen your shows and I see the care and the production value,” he said. “You guys are passionate and knowledgeable and if anyone should have this story, it’s you.” I was honored. And I agreed with him.

  A business born out of its creator’s passion has a distinct advantage over most big businesses. Some of those big businesses may have been started 100 years ago by one individual’s passion for something. But here we are a century later and the current form of that mega-corporation may resemble little of the early form.

  Passion and business are almost unrelated—might even be diametrically opposed. It’s right brain versus left brain. The passion that was the genesis of an inventor’s idea could easily erode over the years. It may have been deadened by going public, analyst estimates, directionless growth, expansion into unrelated market segments, and numbers overtaking an emphasis on innovation. The company went from what I call inside-out, to the colder outside-in structure. More about those later.

  I despised many of the tenets of big business when it surrounded me on Wall Street. The process is cold, predictable, and repeatable. I didn’t see challenges to one’s creativity. I saw a rote process.

  What I was actually seeing was an absence of passion—an absence of Blood.

  This is why I would bet on a business run by a passionate entrepreneur, or small group of similarly passionate entrepreneurs, in a sector in which they are entrenched as consumers and fans first. I think that particular business has a better shot to satisfy the consumer, attract attention, and achieve longevity.

  It actually goes beyond being passionate about a sector of the market. The entrepreneur must be a passionate participant in it. If you never bought a ticket to a wrestling show, bought a magazine, or stood online to meet “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, how can I trust you will be able to produce a product that speaks to me? There should be a real intimacy and knowledge that can only come from first being a consumer and fan of that market segment. In many cases, big businesses have lost sight of the consumer experience, which is why the business you would start tomorrow would have a leg-up on them.