Steve Nash–basketball star, spokesperson and now marketing consultant–has partnered with Deutsch‘s Michael Duda on a new venture that’s ready to buy stakes in start-up companies with a $20 million investment fund.
The company, dubbed Consigliere (insert your Godfather impersonations here), wants entrepreneurs to consider marketing not as an afterthought, but as a strategic part of the growth process. It’ll focus on investing in budding firms in only a few sectors, such as e-commerce, sports and durables. Among the early backers are New York-based venture capital fund Zig Capital, Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Deutsch and its chairman, and sometime TV personality Donny Deutsch.
After carefully studying the venture-capital world and pressure-testing his idea with potential partners, Duda, Deutsch’s chief corporate-strategy officer, last summer presented his idea to Nash. The two became friends in 2007 after the NBA star and his marketing agent, Bill Sanders of BDA Sports, came to Deutsch’s New York office with a special two-week marketing project.
Nash took to visiting the agency regularly, sitting in on creative department meetings and probing staffers with questions about the ad business. His interest grew to the point that in 2008 he took a three-month unpaid internship (after all, how much do you pay a two-time NBA most valuable player?) at Deutsch’s Manhattan office, even dabbling in creative work for clients, including an interactive project for Anheuser-Busch.
While the idea behind Consigliere was fully Duda’s, Nash, who is considered one of basketball’s most gifted playmakers, also knows a thing or two about sketching out business plans and raising funds, thanks to a healthy realization that after 14 years in the NBA, he needs to build a life after basketball.
“I realize I’m not going to play basketball forever,” said Nash. “But I want to learn, grow, do something creative… I don’t want to be stuck after basketball going, ‘What’s going to give me life now?’ I wanted to give myself options to do the things I love so when I’m done playing, I don’t have to be a coach or a broadcaster.”
So far, that life is shaping up to be busy. He owns Meathawk, a film-production company that produced creative projects for Vitamin Water and Nike and is working on a documentary about soccer great Pele. He also owns a chain of gyms, a vitamin company and a social-media company, Apoko, which aims to help celebrities and athletes better connect with their fans on Facebook or Twitter. (Nash’s burgeoning marketing and promotional activities were featured in a Marketing profile last year. )
With Consigliere, “It appeared there was a great opportunity to construct something new” in the marketing space, Nash said. “To have an agency background and capabilities and merge that with private equity makes a lot of sense.”
Nash isn’t the only NBA star to launch a marketing consultancy; Kobe Bryant has Zambezi Ink and LeBron James has LRMR Marketing. But Nash is committed to spending time on this venture. “The ones where you build a company from the ground up, like Consigliere, take a lot of love.” Asked how much time he can realistically devote to the venture in between games and in the off-season, he said, “I’m going to spend hours on it every week–I don’t know if that’s three or 20, but some weeks it will be a full-time job.”
Said Duda: “Steve weighing in kept me in check, because he’s the one who championed the power of creativity… otherwise it was headed to be more of a brand-brokering venture-capital unit. It was a reminder from someone outside the agency space to reiterate how valuable that is.”
Duda and Nash have tapped Zig Capital’s Andrew Mitchell as their chief investment officer and are bringing on a handful of others with data strategy, brand-planning and financial analysis skills. It promises to be a lean operation–fewer than 10 people–for which Duda is eyeing office space in downtown Manhattan.
To read the full story in Advertising Age, click here.
