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From American Airlines to Ford,
Brad Mayne creates successful partnerships

In his dreams, Brad Mayne can easily see himself working again as an event coordinator, an early position he calls one of the most enjoyable in his public assembly facility management career. In his reality, Mayne serves in the prestigious capacity of president and CEO of the American Airlines Center in Dallas, the $420 million sports and entertainment arena that opened in 2001.

In between, Mayne has traversed the country from Salt Lake City to Tacoma to Cedar Rapids, Iowa and on to Anaheim before finally coming to Dallas. Along the way, Mayne has carved a legacy as one of the industry’s best and brightest performers when it comes to the areas of opening new facilities, advertising, marketing, naming rights and partnering with sponsors to help them achieve their goals and objectives.

“With sponsors, it used to be that a sign was a good thing,” says Mayne, seated in his top-floor office at the palatial American Airlines Center (AAC).“Now a sign is only a part of the package.They want the hospitality so they can bring their guests down and show off what they’ve got, whether that’s a luxury suite or an area of the building that is strictly theirs.

“The new dynamic with sponsors now is they are looking for access to your guests. It’s not good enough that the guests read something and think they know about you. They now want to know who the customer is, and does the customer have a chance to interact with us?”

Want to know who Brad Mayne is? Let’s take you on his journey that started out as a Holliday and now has landed on Mayne Street.

Career Sidetracked
Growing up in an area of the Salt Lake City valley called Holliday, Brad Mayne believed that he could be just as happy staying in his hometown, as he could be anywhere else. His father had been the business agent for a local plumbers union (“Local 19 Plumbers and Steamfitters,” says the son with unabashed pride), and Mayne set his sights on becoming a plumber.

But while the son wanted to carry on a family tradition, the father quickly flushed the idea.“He didn’t want me to be a plumber, so I decided I would figure out something I could go to school for,” says Mayne.

That something would be a program at the University of Utah called leisure studies, with an emphasis on commercial recreation management. When Mayne was not in the classroom, he was working as a student employee at the Special Events Center (now the Jon Huntsman Center), where his highlight came in watching Magic Johnson and Larry Bird face each other during the 1979 Final Four. At the same time, Mayne was working through an apprenticeship program, only serving to prove he couldn’t get the tools of the plumbing trade out of his blood.

Armed with his leisure studies degree and now with experience in both plumbing and public assembly facilities (he also worked as a vendor at the University of Utah football games at the age of 14),Mayne studied his options and chose wrenches and pipes over events and nights.

“I had a couple of years left of apprenticeship when I finished college, and so I became a journeyman plumber,” he says. “I was working on commercial contracts and became a foreman on a couple of jobs.”

But when the construction business nose dived in 1981, Mayne went from caulk to Salt, as in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City.

“It just so happened there was an event coordinator opening there, and I thought it was something up my alley,” says Mayne. “I found out that the general manager at the time was somebody that my father had played softball with in some national competitions.”

So it was that Doug Borg took a chance on the eager, young Mayne. For his part, Mayne says that he was fortunate to get the position, even if it meant “taking a $10,000 a year cut in pay!”

Mayne admits that during those early days he was not certain that this was the profession for him.“I wasn’t sure where I was going to go or what I wanted to do,” he says. “Working a lot of hours, weekends, holidays … I wasn’t sure where it was going to take me. But after I worked there for a couple of years I started setting goals for myself.

“One goal I set but didn’t know if it was realistic because it was too pie-in-the-sky, was that with my construction background I wanted to be involved in the design, construction and opening of a facility before I reached the age of 40.”

It was after moving up to the rank of assistant general manager at the Salt Palace and subsequent moves to Ogden Entertainment venues Tacoma Dome and U.S. Cellular Center & Paramount Theatre in Cedar Rapids that Ogden named Mayne the project coordinator for what was called the Anaheim Arena project, a 19,400-seat arena that was being built.

The year was 1991. Mayne had yet to blow out the candles on his 40th birthday cake.

Making His Mark
Mayne smiles and points to an unopened bottle of Arrowhead water in his office. It is a reminder of the naming rights deal he helped secure for the arena in Anaheim, which would become the tranquilly named Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim. Naming rights, Mayne points out, is but one of the challenges in opening a new facility. “You have to decide what your facility is going to be,” he says.

“You have to decide if it’s going to be open to everybody. Is it owned by a municipal entity or is it privately owned? You have to define the facility’s makeup and structure and what role it is going to play in the community. Then you can get into what type of design features and what kind of facility it should be.”

Mayne cited a new facility he was involved with in Bakersfield, California, as part of his responsibilities with Ogden. The facility was being built on a small budget and a hockey team was playing in a nearby older facility. The new facility was designed primarily for the hockey team but also to accommodate other shows that would play the venue as part of their touring along the West coast.

“What was great about that experience was it was a pretty simple concept,” says Mayne. “Build it for the hockey team and let’s have a few more events in the facility.”

The facility in Anaheim was built with the hope of attracting an NBA team, although Mayne says that the city did not want to stop itself from an opportunity of getting a hockey team because it didn’t have an NBA team.

“They didn’t make the decision as some facilities have,” says Mayne, “where an NBA team owns the building and is responsible for the building and ends up designing the facility for basketball first and everything else second. In Anaheim we looked at that and said that we needed to be something for everything.”

Today, of course, the Mighty Ducks play hockey in the facility, while the promise and prospect of luring an NBA team is always present.

From one new facility Mayne came to another one in Dallas in April 1998. Operating under the name of the Arena Group, Mayne immediately went to work selling sponsorships and looking for a naming rights partner. What he quickly discovered was that his situation in Dallas was unique from anywhere he had been.

“It was an interesting process in that we’re the only entity I’m aware of in the NHL and NBA where the building is a separate entity from the ownership of the teams and the teams were responsible for the project,” he says. “As such, we still joke around here about having to wear a referees’ outfit and making sure that both sides are playing fair.”

Mayne is not joking, though, when talking about the advantages that such a scenario offers. He calls the situation “incredible” of being able to draw upon the resources of both an NBA team and an NHL team. And it didn’t hurt any that at the time he arrived in Dallas the Mavericks were owned by Ross Perot Jr. and the Stars by Tom Hicks. “That caught my eye,” says Mayne.

Mark Cuban soon bought the Mavericks from Perot, and once he did a facility that started to be a $230 million project would eventually top out at $420 million as the most expensive ever built.

“The owners here were substantial in the community and wanted to make sure this was the proper facility for Dallas,” says Mayne. “It had to be done right.”

Mayne told the ownership groups that research showed that the Center Operating Company (owners and managers of the arena) could cover the costs up to $285 million. Once the costs rose past $285 million, Mayne went back to the owners to give them the news that they would be the ones out of pocket for the costs.

When the arena opened in 2001, American Airlines was on board as the naming rights holder while other sponsorships, suites and club seats were selling at a brisk pace.

Art Of The Sale
“If there’s any one word that works with my background in marketing and sales, it’s inclusion,” says Mayne. “That means the inclusion of the people you have working for you. Everyone’s got great ideas and we have all these resources in Dallas, so why not bring them to meetings, sit down and ask what they think and what we can do to grow the pie for everybody?”

Using that process, there was some tall meringue as Mayne started putting some plans to work. “We didn’t go out and say that any package was ‘x’ amount of dollars and here’s what you get,” says Mayne. “We went out and said, ‘Here are all the things we can deliver to you; tell us what you need.’”

For American Airlines, the need was branding and to get the word out to the public about the carrier. Besides wanting coverage on radio, television and newspapers, the airlines also wanted a strong presence in the building.

“When you walk in the building, you know it’s the American Airlines Center,” says Mayne. And if you don’t know it when you walk in, you’ll know it when you sit down because all seats have the airline’s logo embedded into it.

Mayne notes that American Airlines also has a concourse in the arena that features 13 replicas of their planes hanging from the ceiling and can be viewed on any concourse level.

Ford has a concourse and one of their vehicles on display. UPS also has a designated concourse with kiosks on the ground and banners on the columns. TXU, an energy provider, has an interactive space where fans can see how high their vertical leap is.

“That’s all important to the sponsors,” says Mayne. “Our approach has been to find out what the sponsor wants instead of saying, ‘Hey, we’re the NBA, we’re the NHL, come to us.’We created an opportunity to generate revenue and be the high-end facility that the people in Dallas expect. It’s worked out very well for us.”

Mayne is the first to admit, though, that things don’t usually work out unless a person is fortunate to be surrounded by quality individuals, which he, himself is.

“Surround yourself with the best people you can find,” he says. “Never be afraid to hire somebody who you think might be taking your job some day.

“It’s been great to have had people who have worked for me in the industry to enjoy the positions and opportunities that they have been afforded. By the same token, I’ve had some people who are still in the same positions they were 10-15 years ago, and they are still doing first-class jobs. There’s nothing wrong with that, either.”

Mayne believes that perseverance and patience are other attributes that those in the industry should possess.

“We have a lot of people in this profession who work too many hours and don’t get paid anywhere near enough money,” he says. “The unfortunate side of this business is that there’s 100 people for every one of us who wants our jobs and are more than capable. If you work long enough and hard enough and do the right things then there will be opportunities.”

And if Mayne found another perfect opportunity for his career? “For me to become the president and CEO of this organization … I’ve been fortunate to do that,” he says. “It has taken a lot of time and energy to get here, but if I could do it all over again and didn’t have a family to worry about … it would be back to that event coordinator position at the drop of a hat.”

Probably with some naming rights and sponsorships attached.

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