The B/R Interview: Brandon Steiner

Brandon Steiner is the CEO of Steiner Sports Marketing Inc., one of the largest sports marketing and memorabilia companies in the United States. He has paired together thousands of athletes and companies using sports as a marketing tool to reach audiences and is the leading producer of authentic hand-signed collectibles.

I arrived at the Steiner Sports headquarters in New Rochelle, NY and had a chance to admire the signed photographs featuring Steiner’s roster of athletes before being led into a large glass-encased office where I was met by Brandon Steiner himself.  The following contains excerpts from the interview that day...

BS:  What the hell are you going to interview me about today that's going to make this story different than the other fifteen hundred other stories that I've either commented on or have been done on me?

MT: Well, I want the theme of this interview to be—

BS:  Hold on one second.

Steiner gets up from his desk and walks over to the door of his office where he begins chatting with a man in a New York Yankees cap who was delivering framed autographed photographs featuring Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

I sat in Steiner’s office looking at the various pictures, sports memorabilia, and artwork on display around the room.

There was Steiner with Michael Jordan and Bill Clinton, bats, gloves, and jerseys all signed by Yankees legends, and a Warhol-esque pop-art print of Albert Einstein behind his desk.  It all made for an interesting assortment.

His desk had hardly anything on it and his keyboard was positioned far away from him. Only his mouse was accessible, which gave me the impression that he rarely responds to emails but instead forwards them on to either of his two attractive female assistants who then contact the sender, as was the case in my getting in touch with him.

Keeping half an ear on the conversation he was having with the man in the Yankees cap, I overheard Steiner continually referred to “Hal,” “George,” and “Cash” and it quickly occurred to me that was referring to the Steinbrenners and Brian Cashman, but unlike the majority of Yankees fans, he's on a first name basis with them. 

The conversation moved to Steiner's account of the previous night's Knicks-Cavs game where he witnessed the in-game conversation held between LeBron James and Jay-Z while sitting courtside next to the rapper and his wife, Beyonce.

His week had also included a sideline ticket to watch his alma-mater Syracuse upset Notre Dame, where he had a chance to catch up with “Cash.”

BS: That was a guy from the Yankees so I had to see him.  Where were we?

MT:  What I’m hoping to learn in this interview is how your background, upbringing, and overall make-up has allowed you to take a passion for sports and turn it into an extremely successful career in the sports world. Really, and I hope this doesn’t sound cliché, I’d like to learn the philosophy behind Brandon Steiner.

Steiner lets out a long sigh indicating his patience was waning.  I quickly got to my first question.

MT: Okay so going back a bit, growing up did you collect baseball cards, was there a trend towards memorabilia and an entrepreneurial spirit visible from a young age?

BS: I was a business kid. I was one of those kids, you talk about Wayne Gretzky used to skate at age three, I was making money at age five. So yeah I was a collector, and I was a big sports nut, enthusiastic, and I played sports, never on a level where I thought I was going to play professional, but I just loved sports, I enjoyed sports, I enjoyed competition, and I enjoyed making money.

I needed to make money, I had to make money. It’s hard to imagine, in today’s world, a nine or 10 year old getting up on their own and going to work. I did that.

There's a lot of pressure put on kids and people today, that they’ve got to find this niche and this destiny that they’re going to follow, and that it has to start when they’re a kid. It’s a misunderstanding, it’s a misconception, it’s bullshit.

MT: There is pressure put on kids from a young age to figure out what it is you want to do, but I think the way the world is changing lends itself to the fact that you don’t have to just do one thing your entire life.

BS: Well the amount of top positions today in ten years from now will be completely different. So how would you know, as a fifteen or eighteen year old kid, what you want to do in ten years when the best jobs will be completely different? The best jobs today didn’t even exist ten years ago. And some of the biggest companies that will be in existence in 2020 haven’t even started yet in 2008.

So it’s a complete misunderstanding and it’s really bullshit to think that way.  The real question is: Can you find fun in the unknown? Can you actually find enjoyment out of not knowing where the hell you’re going and not knowing exactly how to get there?

But the real kicker is, and when I think my journey really started when I was a kid, is that it’s really not about what happens, it’s what you do with what happens, and the kind of character that you want to have. That stuff gets built up when you’re a kid.

I think integrity is a word that gets lost. When I was at Syracuse and I was an accounting major, not a great one by the way, I wrote for the accounting newsletter.  I interviewed this partner at a CPA firm, and I asked, “What’s the most important thing about being an accountant, a CPA?”

He said two things: "You gotta be able to communicate and you gotta have integrity." And I think his answer is really two of the most important things of being an adult, he probably just misunderstood my question.

It’s a great answer. You don’t develop character and integrity and communication skills all of sudden when you become an adult. That’s the stuff you develop when you’re a kid.

MT: When did you decide that you were going to try and make a run at this sports marketing thing?

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