Just like you don’t hit the track and automatically run a marathon, you don’t build a brand that is a vital part to the community overnight. as a marathon runner himself, Craig Brown knows the importance of taking one step at a time and has built the Greenville Drive into a vital part of the community fabric in the last 10 years.
The Second Marathon “I used to run and maybe have one marathon left. I always like to make the analogy that if you look at it as 26 miles you will never do it; you can’t visualize the end,” says Craig Brown, owner and president of the Greenville Drive. “The only way you can do that is to divide it into three-or five-m ile segments and run a three-mile segment, then another. Then you realize that you are nine or 12 miles in, and the end becomes more of a reality. Careers and relationships evolve in the same way.” For Brown, the baseball team represents a second career—a second marathon. As a 23-year veteran of global advertising and part of some of the major, historical mergers of that business, Brown’s first marathon was quite eventful. After joining D’Arcy Macmanus & Masius, the advertising agency responsible for Skittle’s “Taste the Rainbow,” and CocaCola’s first Santa Claus design in 1980, he was part of the merger with Benton & Bowles, a New Yorkbased advertising company whose most famous client was Procter & Gamble, in 1985, which is looked at as the first big merger in that industry and that led to several others over the next several decades. “Basically, I became the chief financial officer for the firm, then I became the chief operating officer and then I became the president,” says Brown. “We grew from $100 million in revenue to $2 billion in revenue.” Then in 2002, Brown was a part of one of the last major mergers of global advertising—between Bcom3, a Chicago based agency, and the Publicis Groupe, a French advertising company who can claim Coca Cola, Nestle and Hewlett Packard as clients—which would become one of the final four players in global advertising, as these four firms controlled 60 percent of the global advertising market. “It was really the last mega merger that could take place in the business. There weren’t any firms left that size that could get together. So I like to say I was in the first merger in the advertising business and in 2002 I did the last merger with Publicis,” says Brown. Not wanting to pick up and move his family to France, where Publicis is located, Brown decided that his first run was over and began to look for another to begin. “I was still young enough to make a difference and ultimately choose, and I stumbled upon minor league baseball,” says Brown. “There were three of us—the original owners of the
Greenville Drive—we just knew it represented a throwback in the way it engages with the community. It was wholesome and very family oriented and it attracted business.” “To have a second career where you get to work in sports—a lot of people think that’s the sexy thing to do,” he says. “It keeps you young and vibrant as much as possible and there’s enough business involved in running the Drive that it keeps my business juices flowing.” In the sports world, if you want to own a team in minor league baseball, you have to wait for a franchise to come up. As chance would have it, the Columbia Bombers in Columbia, S.C., came up for sale, and Brown and his two partners jumped at the opportunity. “Being marketing people, we knew to really make the brand and do what we wanted to in the community, we needed a new stadium because the stadium in Columbia was very outdated and not at all modern,” he says. “We tried for years to develop a stadium proposal working with the city and with the University of South Carolina. In the end, we weren’t successful with that.”
The Drive Then, in 2004, the Greenville Braves were lured away to Jackson, Mississippi. “We were just suffering the disappointment of not getting a new stadium in Columbia, and all of a sudden—Greenville— just 90 minutes up the road, became available,” says Brown. In 2005, the team was awarded to Brown and they were tasked with building a stadium for the first pitch on April 6, 2006. “In the course of building the stadium, from March 2005 to April 2006, it was kind of like running a marathon. It was emotional, invigorating, exciting and all of those emotions, and in the end probably the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done in business—to see on April 6, the whole thing come together in one great, grand opening,” says Brown. There was no soft opening and no time to waste. The night of the game, the asphalt on Main Street was still warm from being poured the previous night. The crosswalk paint was still wet, and they had forgotten to get an American Flag. “At 4:30 p.m. for a 7 p.m. start, we were buying a flag,” says Brown.
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Business Black Box Q2 2016