Adam Blumenfeld is Chief Executive Officer of Varsity Brands, a leading company in the school spirit industry, encompassing two key divisions: BSN SPORTS and Varsity Spirit. The company provides various products and services, including sports apparel, cheerleading uniforms, and graduation essentials for students nationwide. Prior to being named CEO in 2017, Adam served in the same role at BSN SPORTS beginning in 2007 and guided the brand to its current position as the nation’s largest provider of highly customized sports goods and apparel. Before joining BSN SPORTS, he served in several roles at Sport Supply Group, including as its President. Blumenfeld holds a B.A. in English from Tulane University. As CEO, Adam is responsible for setting Varsity Brands’ strategic direction and leading the development of the organization’s long- and short-term strategies.

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited to have with us today, Adam Blumenfeld. He’s the CEO of Varsity Brands. Welcome to the Impact Podcast, Adam.

Adam Blumenfeld: Thank you very much, John. It is a pleasure to be here.

John: Hey, listen, Adam, before we get talking about all the cool things you’re doing in Varsity Brands with your colleagues, can you please share a little bit about you? Where did you grow up, Adam? How did you get on this fascinating and inspiring journey that you’re on?

Adam: I’m happy to. My story is probably these days not that typical because I’ve been in this business arguably since birth. My father started the sporting goods portion of our business back in 1972 in Memphis, so I grew up in Memphis and literally learned the business and, as an only child, packed trucks and worked the warehouse and did all the fun stuff that kids don’t want to do. For about, my whole upbringing in Memphis, then we went to St. Petersburg and ultimately landed in Dallas, Texas, where I’ve been for 45 years. My dad was really chasing banks, looking for people to finance the business, and found during the 80s, an accommodating banking climate in Dallas. And I had the good fortune of growing up just watching and learning by osmosis and left high school, went to Tulane University down in New Orleans, survived four years of that, and came back, worked at Bear Stearns for a year when Bear Stearns was still around. Then came into the family business, which was still a family business, even though it was a public company in the early 90s, and have been part of this business ever since.

John: So, Varsity Brands, for our listeners and viewers, let’s just talk about the macro of Varsity Brands before we go into some more specific questions. Varsity Brands can be founded at varsitybrands.com. And your annual revenues are north of $2.4 billion. You have 11,000 plus seasonal staff employees, and you serve the United States, Canada, Sweden, England, Colombia, and Germany.

Adam: All true. A very true statement.

John: Is dad still alive, by the way?

Adam: He is. He’s 78, 79 years old, and he claims to shoot his handicap his age, rather, consistently. So he is still around still, he left the business in 2006. And it was a real opportunity to… it was really neat. We actually shared a physical desk for five years. And that, for anybody who’s ever shared a desk with a parent or a sibling, knows how much drama that can create. But it was all good fun when I look back on it. And I learned a ton from him. But he is still alive and still living in Dallas, Texas.

John: How often do you guys talk shop besides father-son, relationship? How often do you guys, does he check in with you about just how’s it going, son?

Adam: He loves to ask about every week or so. He’ll just kind of ask me general questions about how is the business performing. But, frankly, this business was a small public company for the first 20 years of its existence. And then we went private. And we’ve been private for 15 years through a handful of owners. And the change in the composition and size of the business has been crazy. It’s really grown dramatically over that 15-year period. And so my father, who always, was a fan of the public markets, the public equity markets, never thought we should go private. Most of his questions were around, really? That’s going on at this size today. And what did I miss? Why didn’t I take this company private long ago? So it’s a lot more that jabbing than it is probably straightforward business questions.

John: That’s awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about Varsity Brands. What’s your core business and mission, and how have you managed it since your dad’s departure, even though you grew up in it? How have you managed it through various owners, going from public to private and then these various owners? How’s that worked, Adam?

Adam: First of all, the mission of this business, and I think it’s why we’ve had the tenure that many of our employees have been here for 20, 30, 40 years. I’ve been here for 30-plus years. We’re committed, maybe we’re addicted to the mission, which is elevating the experience that 55 million kids have in school and out of school sport and spirit activities, meaning athletics on and off the field, in and outside the gym, cheer, dance, band, anything that involves sport with a big S. And we like to say that we’re in the game for good. This is a mission-driven business. And BSN Sports and Varsity Spirit are the heart and soul of that game that we’re in for good because they are kind of the outputs that drive the action for the nucleus, the heartbeat, which is the engine that’s Varsity Brand. So we are, at a very functional level, we’re a value added distributor to tens of thousands of schools, camps, park and recs, all star cheer gyms, yearbook programs, and literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of summer camp participants through cheerleading and dance, competitions all across the United States, 300 competitions a year that matriculate to Disney and are on ESPN. And so it is everything about the entirety of the experience for these kids inside and outside the schoolhouse really… If I step back a second, it’s how do we as a business drive pride and spirit and passion and enthusiasm onto these campuses and then into the communities. So we bring them together. And you really see this kind of the success of it if we’re doing a good job articulated when you see these kids running out of the tunnel on a Friday night or a Saturday night football game at a high school or a college. And you’ve got the kids, the coach, the community, they’re all coming together. They’re wearing the gear. They look good. They feel good. And that energy isn’t just great for the community. That pride and spirit, and we’ve proven this over the last 15 years, it also generates better outcomes for the kids. They score better on tests. They come back to the community and serve. They don’t drop out. They stay engaged and involved. And we’ve proven this matters. And so we’re very focused on this kind of concept of driving pride, driving spirit, onto campuses, and the communities. It sounds lofty and not so tangible, but it actually has a very tangible outcome.

John: That’s fascinating. So is it mostly high school and under e-serving or also some collegiate?

Adam: It’s both. There’s 25,000 high schools in the US, and we serve a great number of them in one capacity or another. There’s about 2,500 colleges with athletics in the United States. So just by order of magnitude, a lot more high schools, middle schools. There’s nearly 70,000 elementary schools in the United States. So we do a lot of work across the scholastic ecosystem, but then increasingly a ton of work in the club and travel and select space. Sports has gotten so big outside the schoolhouse. Kids are playing all year round, in addition to playing on their varsity or JV team at school. And then for cheer and dance, it’s the same story. You cheer in school as an activity. You cheer outside of school as a sport. Inside school, you’re really a civic leader. You’re a steward. You’re an ambassador. You do sideline cheer and stuff like that. But outside the school, it’s two and a half minute routines competing for a world championship, going from event to event regionally. We have a FedEx Points Cup race that takes you to Disney. And we crown a world champion and a national champion each year.

John: How much has cheer grown over your tenure of being the CEO of Varsity Brands and from the days when you were growing up working for dad?

Adam: Cheerleading is a funny story because it is, our cheering division is, really founded athletic and entertaining cheerleading in the United States in the mid-70s and through the early 80s. Before that, it was long skirts, saddle shoes, and pom-poms. The team that came well before me founded this notion of making it athletic, really elevating the skill level. Making it an elite activity and outside of the schoolhouse as an elite sport. And everything that comes with that. The sport has really exploded, as has the activity in the last five or ten years. I would tell you that little things he wouldn’t think about. There was a movie called, Bring It On, with Kirsten Dunst, back in the day.

John: I remember it.

Adam: A catalyst to kind of turn on the broader world to the neat stuff that’s going on in cheerleading. Because listen, at the heart of cheerleading is that you’re part of a team. And you’re only as good as the weakest link. Everybody is playing a huge role. And I got to tell you that the composition of that team has changed so much over, and I’m 54, I think back to movies that I watched when I was a kid like, Grease. You would see the cheerleaders on the sideline.

John: Like LOI[?] baby.

Adam: You got it. LOI. That was a very different form of cheerleading. And all, it was more of a popularity contest. The cheerleaders were… it was that kind of contest. Today you go to a competition that we host. And it’s 100,000 people. You got the dads dressed up in the same colors of the team wearing these fire caps on their head and all this crazy kind of stuff. And you look around the arena and it’s kids from every walk of life, every background, people that are bases on the team that have to hold up the rest of the team are built differently than flyers who are really tiny people usually that are being kind of shot across the auditorium from place to place. So it’s just a very different world. And it’s almost like a cross-section. It’s a reflection of what youth athletics looks like in America. Because you’re seeing kids that when you look in the mirror, they kind of reflect that diversity and inclusion of all different forms of body types, styles, ethnicities, races. It’s cool to see because it’s very different, I think, than we all imagine cheerleading to be back in the day.

John: Also, let me just say this. I’m ’62. Since ’69, I’ve been a long-suffering Dallas Cowboy fan. And so it’s arguable to say that you’re in Dallas, Texas, where ground zero is for the whole cheerleading, well, what’s the legendary Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders arguably change the perception of cheerleading also and made it a very glamorous part of it, starting, when I started watching the Cowboys at least.

Adam: There’s actually no question, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleading brand probably elevated the star and the Dallas Cowboys in a way that it couldn’t have ever done it itself. There’s a great series I know out now that’s become popular on the cheerleading team. But it is amazing to see, they become a worldwide phenomenon. They travel for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. They go to the military bases and whatnot. And it just takes it to an entirely different level. And I will say this, at least in 2024, I’m much happier to root for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders than I am the Dallas Cowboys football team because one’s better than the other right now.

John: No kidding. It’s so sad. It is beyond sad. And it’s arguable to say the attention they’ve gotten to Jerry Jones’s brilliance of a marketing genius. They are the highest-valued franchise in the world, arguably.

Adam: Yeah, I’ve heard that you got a franchise worth $10 billion, and you’ve got a team of cheerleaders that don’t quite make that much, but love what they do, are passionate about the sport. Most of them, just like in our business. People grow up as cheerleaders. Boys and girls. They oftentimes come to our camps. They end up being instructors at our camps. They join if they’re really good, the elite, the national teams. Then, they end up coming back and serving with us as part of our Salesforce. We’ve got 400 mostly women out there calling on all-star gyms, calling on schools, calling on cheer programs. And they’re living out their life’s passion in business because they just never left it.

John: Adam, you’re from an entrepreneurial family, obviously, and you’re still an entrepreneur running Varsity Brands now and been with them forever. But, the model, a business model, so much of what you and I grew up with was these iconic loaners and the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates of the world, even the Zuckerbergs and even the Elon Musks of the world. Talk a little bit about why that’s great and why those innovations and breakthroughs that they made are nothing short of brilliant and genius, but why is it so important nowadays in the modern business world that we’re in to do collaborations? You collaborate and work with such iconic brands such as Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, New Balance. Why going it alone isn’t always the best way, why partnering with the right strategic partners can accelerate and make the biggest impact for a brand.

Adam: It’s really a great question because it weaves together the story of two different generations and almost kind of the way people were made back in the early ’70s and so forth with things that are going on today. I’ll give you an example. And when my dad started this business as a mail order equipment company, mail order sporting goods equipment company, he was the first guy to import sporting goods from the Far East. And sell it factory direct to schools and municipalities. BSN, which is our trade brand for sporting goods, BSN sports stood for Blumenfeld Sport Net because the first product that we sold were tennis nets. And he was importing those because his grandfather had an import store, and the only product that made any money were the tennis nets. So, he started that business at the exact same time as Phil Knight started Nike, and all these other iconic figures of that era were starting to import products from the Far East and go factory direct. And it was all about creating value for the customer, which is still as today. So that constant resonates. But it was very much a do-it-yourself. Maverick mentality. I’m going to do whatever it takes as my father, a 20-year-old guy who didn’t have a dime to his name and Phil Knight had a very similar story, if you read, Shoe Dog. And they started these businesses out of the back of their literal pickup trucks, and so you fast forward 45, 50 years. What I see is there’s willingness, the world’s flattened, going to the Far East isn’t a novelty. Everybody did that. Now, it’s about, okay, how are you going to create value tomorrow that requires maybe a multidisciplinary approach than just a one-trick pony? That’s not to denigrate the work that was done in the 70s. They didn’t have the internet. They didn’t have AI. Nobody was talking about performance shoes versus another kind of shoe before 1975. So if you fast-forward four or five decades, you see an environment that we’re in today where, okay, you’ve got to depend if you’re Varsity Brands, for example, and you’re me. You’ve got to depend not just on iconic partnerships like you mentioned with Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, we’re the largest distributor by far. I think we’re probably Nike’s third or fourth largest customer of any kind in the world. You’ve got to depend on these partnerships, not just to provide you with product, but as a strategic thought partner on, okay, how can I leverage AI to have the apparel, or the team uniform show up in a way for the kids or the family that they can do it themselves. They can spin it around on a computer. They can look at it in a really cool, different way. They can experience the product, even if it’s not in their hands, in a way that we couldn’t conceive of 20 or 30 years ago. And by the way, the supply chain to deliver that as fast as Amazon wants you to think you need it, which is yesterday. It’s a different talent set with logistics and supply chain to do that. We’ve got our own innovation department of 60 people, hundreds of people in customer service, nearly 2,000 sellers on the road who are feet on the street, in the schools, in the cheer gyms, every single day acting as that front line of service and defense for the business. So it’s so kind of codependent and interdependent with both the national brands and the back of the house in a way that I think in the early days, you just didn’t have to do that. Having said all that, we’ve got our own product too. And so we’re still maintaining that factory-direct DNA. We’ve got on our cheer side, everything is fabric-forward. We’re making it in Dominican or El Salvador to the customized, demand of the customer and delivering it in a short period of time. At BSN Sports, we make a victory line today, which has become over the last five years, one of our fastest-selling private label lines that we offer. And it complements, not competes with, because it serves a different part of the market, really complements the major branded relationships that we have out there.

John: I want to go back to technology and AI in a second. But first, let’s go back to cheerleading. I’m a father, obviously. I’m a grandfather now, too. So, I have a granddaughter and a grandson, and my granddaughter really loves to, she’s always five, but four and a half, she loves to cheer and do things athletic. And I can just see that day coming as she gets older. Talk a little bit about the fear of parents and grandparents of safety of the student athlete. And how do you work? You have all those great feet on the ground, not only selling, as you said, but I’m sure gathering information and giving you boots-on-the-ground feedback and constructive feedback so you can continually drive the rapid, continuous evolution and continuous improvement, really, of your brand and your products. How does that work in terms of safety? Getting parents and grandparents and loved ones comfortable with the idea that not only they’re doing these amazing cheerleading exercises that I’m always marveling when I’m watching cheer teams and cheer squads and the Disney stuff that you were talking about. But, how do we ensure that these athletes stay the safest they can stay?

Adam: It’s the right question. The way to understand our commitment to safety and how it is so different, by the way, there’s nothing more important. It is the most vital component of what we do for a living for the benefit of the kids, but commercially, you don’t have a viable business product if the safety and the security of the kids, of the coaches, of our employees, frankly, of everybody, isn’t the very first pillar that you build up here. And in our cheerleading world, a couple of ways to think about it. Number one, training and education is the heartbeat of our Varsity Spirit cheerleading division. This was where the company was founded back in 1974. The first thing they did was teach stunts and teach safety and teach kids how to not get hurt doing some of the things that they loved to do. The camps and the competitions came out after training and education. So it’s always been at the forefront of what we do. The business was instrumental in standing up the first two governing bodies that the industry ever had 20 years ago. So it was on the forefront of establishing folks that could regulate and watch over not just Varsity Spirit’s cheer activity, but the entire industry now known as USA Cheer and USASF, the United States All-Star Federation. So when you’re in a nascent industry that doesn’t have a lot of funding, that doesn’t have a lot of attention to it, you have to do things from the grassroots and the ground up, and it’s why Varsity Spirit is much more than just a company that participates in the cheerleading category. It’s been a steward of the sport and a steward of the activity since its inception. It has to really think bigger than itself. And I think that DNA and that kind of mindset permeates the team that we’ve had that’s been at Spirit for a good long time. Now, if you fast forward, cheerleading, like every other sport, has gotten more athletic. The kids have gotten stronger, more talented. And so you have to evolve what safety and security means when kids in football, baseball, basketball, or cheer get bigger, faster, stronger. I mean, you can’t imagine the lengths we’ve gone to on the mat. We have two spotters or three spotters that stand behind everybody that’s performing these functions to try to prevent any injury of any sort or be very responsive in the event that something does happen. And this occurs at camp, and it occurs at the actual competitions. But safety and security goes a lot farther than that.

John: So it’s beyond just the physical safety because you’ve already baked that in. You’ve baked that in as part of your branding.

Adam: That’s right.

John: Talk a little bit about, though, it’s now part of our American lexicon to be able to give grace and space to talking about the mental and emotional well-being of our athletes. As we know, these kind of rigorous sports, whether it’s cheerleading, or as we’ve seen in swimming with Phelps and with Simone Biles and in tennis with Coco Gauff, that the mental and emotional well-being of our athletes is also at stake. How do you go out of your way and make that part of your branding and your ecosystem to also support the mental and emotional well-being of your more than millions and millions of athletes that you serve in the 25,000 high schools and over 2,500 colleges?

Adam: It’s a great question. And the simple answer is we actually write the curriculum, that we work with professors, we work with safety experts. For the National Federation of High Schools, we work with them to come up with protocols around social and emotional learning. We have programs inside the company, really inside Varsity Brands at the Topco, that focus on SEL in a way that over the last 10 years social and emotional learning was not a tagline you heard a decade ago. We have, let me just give you a few examples, a program called the Collective, where it’s all about bringing together industry leaders from outside of sport and inside of sport to focus on anti-bullying, anti-social shaming, how you feel in the morning when you wake up and you look in the mirror, anxiety, depression management, even suicide prevention. These are free tools we provide as part of curriculum to schools. We have a video series called, Believe in You, with a wonderful gentleman called Kevin Atlas. He’s a seven foot, one armed force of nature. The only guy that looks like that, that has played professional basketball, played in Europe, and he is a hard luck story gone right that talks to 100 schools a year and has a video series with the likes of Michael Phelps and these kinds of celebrity friends of his. And I have to tell you, when I get up in front of a group and I talk about what it’s like to be anxious or depressed and can they relate to me, the kids may yawn. When they watch a Believe in You podcast, in their homeroom and Michael Phelps says, “Listen, I just won my fifth gold medal, and I had to be physically pulled out of the pool because I was so clinically depressed.” The kids react in a different way because they can relate to that kind of celebrity mindset and what it’s like for somebody that they know. So, just exposing kids to the fact that famous people in insanely successful athletes have gone through some of the same things that they have. And Kevin does this really well when he talks on the program and in person. To be a superstar but struggle with the same things that a 13-year-old child does, that’s eye-popping. And you see it in the lines of people that just line up after a performance to shake Kevin’s hand and do nothing but tell him their story. We spend a lot of time at this business going… we like to say we deliver a lot more than goods. We are trying to deliver an experience that these kids will carry with them for the rest of their life. One of those is around empathy. People hear the word fundraising, and they think about writing checks, and it’s all about raising money. And it is about supporting the funds and the things that are important. But we have a program with St. Jude, the St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, worldwide pediatric cancer research leader. They help us teach empathy because our cheerleaders become pen pals with the kids that are sitting in those hospital beds that would rather be in school class all summer long during summer camp. And you know what? Yes, they learn how to run a week-long fundraiser, and yes, they learn how to raise money for St. Jude, but they also learn how to meet a kid that would much rather be in social studies than getting chemo. And that gives you a very different perspective on life when you realize that the kids that are in those beds are the same age as you. They were on the field of play last year. They just got a phone call that they didn’t expect, and now they find themselves in this incredible situation. So it’s programs like these that bring sport to life because there are so many lessons and I think you know this too. Growing up playing sports, there are so many lessons. And I grew up as a tennis player that you pick up through being an athlete and the perseverance, the grit, the determination, but the teamwork, the heart, the resourcefulness that you need. And depending on somebody else and having them depend on you, these are traits that carry you all the way through your business career and your business life and you can’t get them anywhere else but sports.

John: It’s so true. When I lean on sports all the time from my metaphors and my analogies, as I lead my company, I’m sure you do the same. I want to get to that in a little bit. Let’s talk about the power of technology. First, let’s just take the macro. I mean, you and I both know that technology like everything else that goes through evolution and revolution, has its net positives and negatives. Let’s talk about the net positives for a second. Has the rise of TikTok, Instagram, and other wonderful platforms when they’re used for good helped the rise of the cheerleading sport and all the greatness around it that you just shared with us?

Adam: I think it has. I think that when you can put competitions and camps and even uniform reveals and new looks and influencers and It Girls on Instagram and on TikTok, it’s a very different world. Where you can get to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. Some of this stuff will go viral. You’ll get millions of people watching really cool stunts and just silly jokes that they’re playing on people. And I think that for sure, it helps not just elevate the sport of cheer domestically, but it kind of crosses geographic lines. So when we think about the Olympics, for instance, in 2032, where we intend to have cheer as a sport, it allows us to start exporting the elements of cheer in America that other countries may not be really focused on. So for sure, you couldn’t do that without the power of technology and the power of social media. Now listen, on the sport and the cheer side to the other side of that coin, it has another effect. That we would all love our kids to be out of the house, playing sports, doing things with their friends, not on their phones. And I’ve been to too many family dinners where I look around the table and everybody’s at the same table looking at their phones, doing their own thing. So, social media has a dark side. And there’s a lot of people focused on getting phones out of schools and getting kids back on playgrounds and getting kids involved in team sports. It’s frankly why I think at Varsity, at least, here at the company, people are so passionate about what we do because we know it’s a bit of an antidote for what ails us in so many different ways. Socially and emotionally, technology can take a toll. By the same token, just getting out of the house and playing a competitive sport, even if it’s not so competitive sport, gets your heart rate up, gets you to sweat a little bit, and you feel better when those endorphins start running. So we feel like we’re in a business that doesn’t cure cancer, but maybe it’s the next best thing because it gives you a chance to live a little bit longer and have some fun while you’re doing it.

John: Yeah, I fully agree. Talk a little bit about, there’s not a day, Adam, we can wake up and turn on our Bloomberg or CNBC or read the Wall Street Journal of New York Times or any other great news outlets and read about the power of AI and the growth of AI. The hype cycle that we’re in right now with AI is, again, just massive. It feels like the old dot-com hype cycle that we were in the end of the 90s. Talk a little bit about how you leverage AI in any way possible, but also just how you’ve created a proprietary tech-enabled platform at Varsity Brands to be a differentiator for you to your competition.

Adam: Well, it’s true that over the last 15 years, we started back in 2010, believe it or not with AI per se, but versions of it. We said to ourselves, okay, in order to run this business at scale, if you really want to be a 10,000-employee-plus, two and a half billion dollar plus business, going to five or $10 billion in scale and size, what has to be true? You have to have technology that can take you places that you just can’t get to by yourself. And so we put SAP into this company 15 or 20 years ago. When we were a much smaller business, and you could have argued we were making a very silly investment at the time, but we’ve grown into that system over the last 15 years. It served as a foundation, along with this tool we have called Team Art Locker, which allows us to customize every single piece of marketing material and anything you get from us, by school, by mascot, by logo. So if you come visit us for a day and you’re a vendor or a customer or whatnot, chances are we’re going to have a screen behind you that’s got your high school, your college logo, and mascot on it because somebody in our team has researched that for two seconds, found out where you come from. But we’ve got 180,000 mascots in this system. And people think, well, that’s neat. That can’t be that hard to do. Well, it’s one thing to have the mascots and the logos. It’s another thing to have a supply chain that can put them on garments and embroider them and do all the tricks that have to be done and deliver them in lightning-fast speed. So when I think of AI, and I think of where we are today, we’re using AI, everywhere from placing purchase orders with vendors so that a human doesn’t have to do it and they can do something else, to you want to see your product right on a person. People react one way when they see it on a shelf. They react another way when they see it on a human being. Well, most of the time, the people that you’re seeing it on our websites, they’re not real people. They’re artificially generated humans, but you can’t tell the difference. And so it gives us the opportunity to constantly change the look and the look of that mannequin, so to speak, but it looks like it’s being worn by a real individual. So, these are just small examples of some of the use cases that exist inside a company like ours. I tell my kids this all the time, my kids are 21 and 23, and they’re like, listen, Dad, we don’t want to work in a sporting goods business. We’re going to go work in tech. We’re going to work in AI. I’m like, that’s great. That’s good for you. But the good news about Varsity Brands is you can go and have just about any kind of career you want. Because we’ve got a tech department. We’ve got an AI department, innovation, and everything else in between. And so what you start to realize is that AI is going to be embedded into every part of our life, no matter what industry you are in.

John: That’s right. And it’s better to embrace it than to resist it, because if you embrace it, I think the results will end up being better than just resisting it, because it’s coming anyway.

Adam: Yeah, exactly right. There is no getting away from it. And it really, it does remind me a little bit of the 1990s and the dot-com hype, but wow, do you get some efficiencies. When this, AI is different than RPA, robotic process automation, which we’ve been using for several years to process business in the background. As you well know, AI thinks, and it learns, and it gets smarter. And that’s scary to a lot of people, but it’s pretty fascinating because it’s not just performing a task. It’s figuring out how to do that task better and better each time it does it.

John: You and I have are of the ages. I’m older than you, obviously, to have seen the explosion of now the climate crisis and sustainability and the companies now transcending politics and becoming more open to extending their mission to not only the core business that they do, but making sure they’re more resilient than a sustainable brand by taking care of their cybersecurity needs and making sure they’re sourcing from the right places and being more efficient in terms of how they use energy and reverse logistics and things and that such. How much is sustainability playing a role in the evolution of Varsity Brands and how you manage it to be the most resilient brand in your industry?

Adam: It’s an enormous component of what gets talked about at the board level and the executive suite every single day. And the reason for that is that it’s good for the planet, but it’s good for business. So, it checks both boxes. And you have to do it. And I’ll give you a quick example. Back over the last 30 years of selling team athletic gear, everything on the uniform side was put it on your shelf and pull it off the shelf and ship it to somebody. And so you would be stuffing your warehouse with lots of product from the Far East and Vietnam and everywhere else in between. The world’s changing. And there’s less appetite for all that cardboard and all that stuff getting shipped around and all that product getting produced. The business in our world is transitioning to a world of sublimation where the product that’s made is made from white fabric. And you can dye anything directly onto, inkjet, it directly onto that. And so the kids that want to wear crazy lacrosse colors and have 20 different logos on there anything that they want to look like, they can do that now, and they can design it all online, do it yourself in a way that doesn’t, I don’t have to be stuffed with inventory that I can’t sell and having to find somewhere to get rid of excess and obsolete inventory and in ways that might not be so good for the business or the planet. I can produce exactly what they want when they want it. And it’s almost like the robotics we were talking about in that 3D box, where I can take what your needs are and design specifically what you need and deliver it to you in 21 days, that’s a heck of a lot better than the alternative. So that’s just a sliver of how sustainability is thought about in terms of dealing with very specific fabric for exactly what you need versus lots of fabric that has to be disposed of at the end of a particular season. But in so many different ways from what we do in the factories to the materials and the fabrics and the supply that we use around the company, if you’re not talking about ESG and you’re not talking about sustainability, you’re just not having the right conversation.

John: I agree with you. As we discussed earlier, Adam, sports is life. Life is business. A business as an entrepreneur, there’s so much to be learned from some of the greatest athletes, some of the greatest coaches, Nick Saban, Bill Belichick, and others who have inspired us over the years to just be great leaders and the simplicity of messaging. Talk a little bit about some of the key lessons you’ve learned over a lifetime of growing up under an entrepreneur and your dad and then being an entrepreneur yourself as you have stayed flexible and open and evolved your family business to something really special. What lessons have you learned in the journey that you could share back with some of our aspiring or budding entrepreneurs that listen to the Impact Podcast?

Adam: It’s a really good question. Now, I’ll go from today backwards a little bit. I think about people I’ve met in the industry that have really had an impact on me. And we have logos and quotes all around our building here at our headquarters in Dallas, Texas. I spent some time with Kevin Plank, founder of Under Armour several years ago. And he’s famous for having said at one point in his life that trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. And it really resonated and stuck with me because it’s so true that you can do a lot of things right. And if you veer off of your North Star, if you veer off the course of what your mission is and what your vision is for the business, and you do anything that’s outside of the bounds of what’s appropriate and acceptable to people, you can lose their trust in a nanosecond. And so I think a lesson that reminds me of and that has stuck with me is that it’s all about people. We can talk about technology and AI till we’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day, We are in a business that is serving people. We are here to make somebody else look good. We have to be the second fiddle. We’re there to make those kids be the heroes on Friday night and Saturday nights, and those coaches and parents feel like they’re in the spotlight. If you don’t have that kind of orientation where you want to make somebody else look good and feel good, you’re just not going to do really well at Varsity Brands, but beyond us, you’re probably not going to do that well in life because what goes around does come back around. But the other side of your question, I think back to, just growing up the way that I did with my dad and working in the business. There is zero… I meet a lot of smart people these days. Having been through private equity now for 15 years, there are very few people I work for that don’t have a Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, Stanford, kind of a resume with them. And my dad didn’t make it through college. He was playing professional baseball, dropped out in, I’m not sure he went to a class, frankly, in college. And that was the story of a lot of people in his era. But the punchline is and was that grit, will, determination, just work, the adage just do it, that Nike is so famous for. There’s a lot to that. And we, I think about COVID, and I think about this is a business that shouldn’t have existed. After COVID, our business deals with teams and groups of people that do things together. Everything shut down for a year. We kept everybody employed in our entire salesforce out there talking with customers while we pivoted the business to digital. If you don’t have grit and will and this kind of resiliency to just survive and thrive, if you don’t have that kind of DNA, you’re going to have a really tough time in business. And I think entrepreneurs, either innately or they know that or they learn it, which is that you just got to keep going.

John: That’s true. We’re headed towards the end of 2024 now. We’re getting to 2025 and beyond. What gets you excited? What gets you out of bed? You’ve been running this company a long time. Where are you? We just finished the World Series. Do you feel like you’re just at the bottom of the second inning? Are you going into the sixth inning? Or where do you feel that you are? And what gets you really excited and jazzed about 2025 and beyond what you can do with Varsity Brands?

Adam: I get asked that question a lot. I have been here for a little bit. And I used to be the young guy in the room. And now I look around, all these 25-year-old kids are looking to me like, hey, who’s that guy with the gray hair? But I absolutely wouldn’t be here. Norwood, Terry Babilla, Bill Sealy, and so many of my partners that have been doing this with me for 20, 30 years. We wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing if we didn’t feel like we weren’t in the second or third inning in this game. This is a business. There’s a $55 billion addressable market. And we are a fraction of that at $2.5 billion in size. And so, when I think about what we can go do in club and travel sports, when I think what we can do with digital technology and microsite, what we call our My Team Shop tool and our virtual bookstores and bringing product to you when you need it, how you want it. When I think about what we can do to make it a do-it-yourself proposition, where you can order your uniforms, buy yourself, buy phone, on a Saturday afternoon. That’s the kind of stuff that gets me jazzed up in our team and across the board because we’re reinventing the way that your favorite pastimes get outfitted, played, and supported. And I think this business will continue to branch. I think we won’t just provide products. We’ll provide services and experiences like camps, competitions, tournaments, and all kinds of different ways for kids to engage with each other. And it’s those 55 million kids. If we can affect one-sixth of the US population and make their life a little bit better, we’re going to feel really good about the work that we’re doing.

John: I love it. Well, Adam, thank you for taking time with us today and sharing your fascinating journey with us on the Impact Podcast. To find Adam and his colleagues and all the great work they’re doing at Varsity Brands, go to www.varsitybrands.com. Adam, thanks not only for the hour you shared with us today, but thanks more for making the world a better place with your colleagues at Varsity Brands. We really appreciate all the impact you’ve made in all the communities across the United States.

Adam: Thank you very much, John.

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