Chase Garrett: Inside the Matchmaking of "Name-Image-Likeness" (NIL) Deals

Welcome to Episode 8 where Dave interviews Chase Garrett, Ex Red Bull marketing liaison and Motocross athlete, now Founder and CEO of Icon Source, with his platform riding the phenomenon that has taken the sporting world by storm and what this new avenue looks like for college athletes and professional sports men and women’s careers. 

Chase shares in depth information that helps break down what the courts have recently settled on and how his company helps with branding deals and brokering the idea of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals. A revolutionary way of ‘using’ athletes’ profiles to enable brand deals was made legal in mid 2021. This means brands can better collaborate with athletes and athletes now have better access to brands while developing their craft in their chosen sport at their chosen university.

Tune in as Dave asks Chase the tough questions to help inform people in their 50s, 60s and beyond to stay ahead of the game with the most recent, relevant and insightful information.

With this new circumstance we are unsure as to how this will play out in the future of sports.

Top Takeaways:

• Evolution of amateur sports and impact of sponsors paying athletes
• Name, image, and likeness (NIL) partnerships in sports
• Role of social media metrics in shaping brand partnerships
• Disruption of traditional model of athlete-brand interactions
• Varying levels of influence and credibility among athletes
• Complexities of NIL rights within university settings
• Financial aspects of NIL partnerships and wide range of deals
• Icon Source platform's ability to cater to athletes at all levels
• Strategies for brands to engage with a wide range of athletes
• Future of athlete-brand partnerships and industry growth

Ponder and Share:

“As an athlete, it's important to establish your credibility within your sphere, because that's how people are judging you and I think once you can establish your domain, then you have a level of respect and that brings credibility ." –Chase Garret

“The best way to scale is to create happy customers and that's how you really evangelize your message.” –Chase Garret

“Happy customers, you might build by helping them. Then you end up creating a mass of people who are attracted to that history, to those testimonials and all that kind of stuff. And then figure it out.” –Dave Tabor

“There's a fair bit of value you bring just connecting brands.” –Chase Garret

“A lot of brands, they're chasing that teenager market because that's where those nutrients start and that's some of the hardest consumers to get your product on.” –Chase Garret

“There's markets for a wide range of different personality types. There's definitely not one perfect way to do it other than what aligns most with you as an individual.” –Chase Garret

Check these out!

Chase Garrett on LinkedIn
Chase Garrett on Instagram
Icon Source website

Share your thoughts and curiosity with Dave ab

Read my Blog called Rules For Being Stubbornly Young and let me know what you think!

Email your thoughts at dave@stubbornlyyoung.com

Check out where it’s all happening on the Stubbornly Young website

Thanks and looking forward to hearing how you’re remaining stubbornly young!

Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

Dave Tabor (00:00:05) - Welcome to the Stubbornly Young podcast for people in their 50s, 60s and beyond who want to remain engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. I'm Dave Tabor. And that last part – staying relevant to the younger people in their lives – that's why I've invited Chase Garrett to join me for episode eight. Chase is Founder and CEO of Icon Source, a virtual marketplace for athletes and brands to come together for NIL. That's name, image and likeness match ups. Come on. If you're like me and my friends were watching with twisted fascination about where so-called amateur sports is going now between sponsors, paying athletes and the transfer portal, it seems like chaos, and I would argue that it is, but I wanted to learn more and share it with you. So, Chase gave me access to the Icon Source tools. Oh my God, it is amazing. I searched athletes based on school, sport, number of social media followers, and even found some athletes over 50 and contemplated how they could promote Stubbornly Young.

Dave Tabor (00:01:08) - So I'm here with Chase to help you see into the future on a subject that just about everyone can't understand. So listen to this episode and you'll be helping your kids learn about this crazy new world. Chase, happy to have you on Stubbornly Young.

Chase Garrett (00:01:24) - Thank you for reaching out. Excited to dive in.

[INTERVIEW]

Dave Tabor (00:01:27) - So I gave a quick overview of Icon Source. You can probably give a better one.

Chase Garrett (00:01:31) - Yeah, yeah, well, I'll start with my background a little bit. I've been involved in sports marketing my whole life.

Dave Tabor (00:01:36) - I saw that Red Bull.

Chase Garrett (00:01:37) - Yeah, yeah. So when I was a young person I actually raced motocross, did that to a professional level, but decided to go to college as well which is not popular amongst that track.

Dave Tabor (00:01:48) - No, but less broken bones. 

Chase Garrett (00:01:51) - Yeah, yeah. And then when I finished that, I started a small sports agency where I just represented my friends that were more successful than I were as athletes, you know, kind of built that for a bit and then had the opportunity to join Red Bull and manage their athlete program here in the United States.

Chase Garrett (00:02:07) - So, that was an incredible opportunity. Got to sign athletes like Reggie Bush, Chris Bryant in baseball, Victoria Azarenka in tennis too, you know, local heroes like Red Gerard in snowboarding. So, you know, got to work in over 40 sport disciplines, signed hundreds of athletes. So, doing that for a while was such an incredible education on the world of sports and what makes those different disciplines operate from the management teams in place where sports agents to league and, you know, federation guidelines and…

Dave Tabor (00:02:45) - These were all professional athletes, though. Right?

Chase Garrett (00:02:48) - I mean, they were but you know, Red Gerard was 13 years old when I gave him his first offer. So, it was a, it's a wide range. And, you know, we got to do deals from, you know, multi-million dollar deals with professional NBA and baseball athletes to local action sports enthusiasts that were just on the right track record.

Dave Tabor (00:03:06) - How old were you at that time?

Chase Garrett (00:03:07) - That I was working for Red Bull?

Dave Tabor (00:03:09) - Yeah.

Chase Garrett (00:03:10) - I think I started there when I was 28. And then.

Dave Tabor (00:03:13) - So you had some life experience. Yeah. 

Chase Garrett (00:03:16) - Yeah. So I mean, I had already started my own sports agency. I was an athlete before that. And so, yeah.

Dave Tabor (00:03:21) - You feel like Jerry Maguire some days?

Chase Garrett (00:03:23) - You know, I, I definitely had aspects of that, now I try to be a platform that enables the Jerry Maguires of the world to evolve.

Dave Tabor (00:03:33) - Yeah. I mean, talk about evolving. I mean, this whole new marketplace caused by court rulings, right? And now amateur athletes are entitled to get paid for the use of their name, image and likeness. So as a, as a sort of a foundation for listeners, what is name, image and likeness? I think I know, but. 

Chase Garrett (00:03:53) - Yeah, well, it's funny because it's a, it's a legal term that's been in contracts that I've been a part of since I was a young kid with sponsors racing dirt bikes, and it allows the brand to really be closely associated with an individual, and they can leverage their association by using that person's name, their likeness. So if it's like an animated or interpretation of the individual and looks like them with their features and kind of facial expressions, and then their actual photo image. So that ability to leverage an individual for profit.

Dave Tabor (00:04:30) - And that's the difference between image and likeness. It’s a photo versus like a cartoonish or

Chase Garrett (00:04:37) - Exactly or a reference to maybe like a nickname or something that is really well known, you could say like beast mode for Marshawn Lynch, but it's been a term that's been around for a long time. And then all of a sudden, college athletics have really coined it as their own. So people like, do you do NIL? And I'm like, well, what do you mean? My whole business is NIL. And it's been that for a long time. And, but I think a lot of people just get lost in the terminology.

Dave Tabor (00:05:02) - Yeah, well, your platform, talk a little, I mean, the way I describe it, it's almost like a match.com. It puts amateur and some professional athletes into a marketplace where brands can shop for them essentially, right?

Chase Garrett (00:05:20) - Yeah. And I mean, to back up a little bit, the reason I saw this opportunity was I was at Red Bull. Red Bull is a privately held business. They do about $20 billion a year. And they really built that from the authenticity that athletes brought to their product and their brand. And they did it before there was any, you know, basic social media metrics that said this is a good business decision. They were just very passionate about that, as you saw with some of the early adopters like Nike and and the other brands that got behind athletes like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and some of the the top of mind individuals. Well, since then, social media has become very prevalent. Now, individuals can put a lot of basic metrics around what they can deliver to brands. And so you saw this massive growth of influencer marketing from emerging brands. Meanwhile, the ecosystem around athletes had not evolved.

Chase Garrett (00:06:11) - It had stayed stagnant in that Jerry Maguire model, as you referenced earlier and all of a sudden athletes kind of got left behind in different partnership and endorsement deals. There was always opportunities going to the very top 1% but there was many more athletes that could provide tremendous value to specific brands that align with their, you know, likes and interest or geographic location. So, I all of a sudden felt compelled that the timing was perfect to leave an organization like Red Bull, which brings you all the credibility in the world and kind of start my own journey to disrupt how are brands intersecting with athletes, and how can we catch up with where influencer marketing is going. And so that's kind of how we got started.

Dave Tabor (00:06:57) - Well, and this whole idea is intriguing to me because athletes have become influencers and it doesn't really go the other way. Influencers don't become top athletes, but it does go the other way. So I want to, actually I'm going to come back to that. I want to set a little more background before we come to that, but we will. 

And first question I had though is you've got this, I'm going to use the analogy again, this match.com place, right? But it's a platform. It's a marketplace essentially for the athletes and the brands to come together. But who's your customer? Like, is it the athlete or is it the brand? And I know you're going to say it's both. It's just like, what's, how does that tension work for you as a business operator? 

Chase Garrett (00:07:41) - Yeah. I think the phenomena of launching a marketplace is such a good complex set of rules and variables. You have to have unique influence on both sides to create that momentum to be generated. And once you have the momentum, that's your moat around your business. So you think Amazon, for example, they have so much activity that that's their defense essentially. So for me, I knew I had goodwill built up with athletes and agents that I had been doing deals with for a long time. And so I really went to them and said, hey, guys and gals, I want to find a way to keep you very relevant as society evolves and bring you more deal flow for a deeper group of athletes on your roster, and so I kind of, I kind of had some goodwill that I could get them to jump in early before I had a lot of opportunities, and then that gave me some time to go out and manufacture some deal flow. So that's when I lean on my relationships in the sports industry of where can I maybe lean on not perfect, ideal customers for our platform, but people that I have a good influence on that will jump in and start to drive some used cases. 

Dave Tabor (00:08:52) - Yeah. Now, you mentioned it used to be like the top 1% of athletes. My guess is it was even much less than that. So, when you think about the used case you've created, Chase, and you're thinking about okay, it's gone from maybe a 10th of 1% to now.

Dave Tabor (00:09:08) - You know, you look at athletes that have a few thousand social media influencers, maybe they're in a D2 school, but they're really good. I mean, how far down that continuum of athletes are you now? Can you sell the top 5%? The top 2%?

Chase Garrett (00:09:23) - You know, it's really up to the athlete, which is kind of bizarre because that doesn't really make sense. But it's who wants to lean in and really provide value for a brand partner. So there's people with influence from all shapes and sizes and the ones that really say, I want to go after and create a brand for myself. I want to develop content, I want to curate an audience, and then I can find a partner that will align with my audience's traits. And so

Dave Tabor (00:09:54) - But can a mediocre athlete actually do that? I mean, do they have to be a star, at least at some level before anybody cares?

Chase Garrett (00:10:02) - I think that as an athlete, it's important to establish your credibility within your sphere, because that's how people are judging you and I think once you can establish your domain, then you have a level of respect and that brings credibility to how do you manage your fitness, how do you, the products that you use, how do they stack up? Because an athlete doesn't want to jeopardize their performance it's given them this opportunity by using a faulty product. 

Dave Tabor (00:10:31) - Yeah. Until they get to be NFL players and then they're doing like Burger King. Like, what the hell? That's a separate subject.

Chase Garrett (00:10:37) - Hey, Marshawn Lynch, again using him, had authenticity with eating Skittles. So you never really know.

Dave Tabor (00:10:43) - That's not, it can't be authentic. Like the guy can't say this is my meal. Like anyway that's a whole other subject. It, no, no, I just can’t, anyway. So I got some questions about how this whole NIL works. Can an athlete wear his or her uniform whenever they want, when they're making money or around getting pictures? I mean, what's, how does that work?

Chase Garrett (00:11:04) - So if they're at a university, they have to obtain those rights from the school. There's actually interesting development and group rights to where if a brand is going to work with three or more athletes on the same team, or six or more athletes from the same university, a company called the brand or group has gone out and secured a group rights opportunity to where that brand can now not only contract the individual, but they can get them to be able to use their jersey that has a school marks and logos on it as well. But that gets complicated. I mean, that's a whole nother level of negotiation. So but I think it's been really amazing just to unlock the basic, hey, the individuals that have these massive followings generated by their sport are able to now make money. And then where it goes from their group rights, you know, marks and logos, that's continuing.

Dave Tabor (00:11:55) - Do the universities go along with it? Like, you know, I mean, a lot of athletes are only recognizable when they're wearing their school uniform. Do the schools make it easy, hard? Do they want a cut?

Chase Garrett (00:12:09) - You know, it's been interesting because the opening of, you know, NIL dollars flowing through university athletes has really been kind of taken hostage by the recruiting game. And so now you're seeing these what are called collectives pop up, which are high net worth alumni donors that are trying to control and dictate something, through NIL. And so a lot of people have a lot of different thoughts and feelings about like, oh, this is wrong. This isn't being done right. I mean, and I think we need to keep things in perspective. These are kids getting paid and they're great at their sport. So I don't think there's a tremendous amount of harm being done, but that's the reality of what's really been taken over with college NIL and it's fascinating. And sometimes you're seeing schools do creative things to get the best recruits because they know that if they have the best athletes, they win championships. They generate more dollars through their created program.

Dave Tabor (00:13:06) - Creative things. That's what a lot of us who look at college sports and wonder what's going to happen and listeners, I'm going to come back. We're going to dig into that a little bit. But first, I've got a sequence and I don't want to lose it because this is, I've been looking forward to this and planning for this conversation for a while. So we will come back to that. But I want to know, like, do you consult with athletes and with brands, or are you simply a platform? And then when they come together, they figure out the contracts, how they work together? Or do athletes like knock on your door and say, hey, Chase, like, how do I do this?

Chase Garrett (00:13:41) - I think this is an interesting lesson for any entrepreneur looking to disrupt a category. You have, you know, probably deep experience within a sector that you've been involved in. For me, it was sports marketing and endorsement deals. And then you have a vision of where could this go? Where does the future look like in 10 to 20 years? And you start to work towards a concept to disrupt it. For me, it was let's create a marketplace, a platform to connect athletes and brands. And that's a technology solution that can be used at scale, completely self-service. But now you have where are your customers today and how comfortable are they to get to that sphere, which is your kind of ideal state. And you really got to understand what's that process to connect those two points of your ideal state that could be 20 years down the road and current state, which is the agents that are involved that do business a certain way, the athletes, the brands, the the marketing agencies around the brands, who's making decisions and how are budgets are allocated. So, when we first created it, it was a tech platform to be self-service and used as a match.com. Now, we've seen we've had to meet our customers with a fair bit of services, which would be the consulting to kind of meet them where they are today and not expect everybody to evolve on their own.

Dave Tabor (00:15:04) - And that's, that I suppose, becomes the foundational aspect of moving towards the vision. Right? You've got to early on, early adopters have to maybe be helped along that journey. Until now, you reach a critical mass. 

Chase Garrett (00:15:18) - Totally. And, you know, it's funny when our customers come to us, they just want fish and we want to teach them how to fish, you know, essentially. And so they're like, give me the right athletes, you know, to fulfill this campaign. And we're like, okay, we can do that at the beginning. And then we start to teach them, you know, it's easier than contracting our team to get on the phone and go through these plans with you is teach you how to make these decisions on the fly that can help you actually develop new potential campaigns. So it's a fun process, but it's definitely something that's been a little bit of a learning curve for us and our customers.

Dave Tabor (00:15:52) - Yeah. And that balance, right? It's hard to scale delivering personal service the way I mean originally you built this platform to be self service.

Chase Garrett (00:16:00) - Correct but the best way to scale is to create happy customers and that's how you really evangelize your message.

Dave Tabor (00:16:08) - Yeah. So happy customers you might build by helping them. Then you end up creating a mass of people who are attracted to that history, to those testimonials and all that kind of stuff. Right. And then figure it out.

Chase Garrett (00:16:20) - And beyond happy customers, to take Chick-fil-A's term, raving fans, and so we are happy to over deliver at this stage, with our customers. 

Dave Tabor (00:16:29) - Yeah. Now, what kind of money are you talking about? I mean, we hear about, you know, professional athletes that make more money and endorsements even than they're 20 and 30 and $50 million annual contracts. But, you know, we could talk about the few very top athletes separately. But if you look at the bell curve and you know, your, your athletes, what are they making a few thousand bucks a year, ten, $50,000 a year on this kind of thing?

Chase Garrett (00:16:55) - You know, it's been fascinating. Obviously, we started with just professional athletes because it was before the NCAA lifted their regulations for college athletes, and it's a wide range. I think a lot of NFL players and baseball players make less than you would imagine on endorsement deals, and a lot of them just want to be connected with really great brands. And so there's a fair bit of value you bring just connecting brands like Lululemon or a watch company with an athlete that just makes them happy. And then we've seen, obviously, with the college NIL opening up, it's expanded the sort of customer base of brands that think that they now have access to work with an athlete that could be on their range. So we see deals with individuals that are $2,500, $500, but we also have done deals in our platform north of $550,000 for one contract and it's been fascinating just to see, and for me, I'm happy at all sizes because that's individuals coming together and finding ways to leverage, you know, sports.

Dave Tabor (00:18:03) - Well, that's that joyful, greater environment, right? That people who at all ends of those spectrums can, can work through you. And that's got to be fun. And I noticed, too, that athletes can select to be paid with cash and or product. So to that, you know, the lower end, I suppose, you know, athletes are happy to be like, some of them, probably just are happy to get free stuff and talk about it. 

Chase Garrett (00:18:29) - Absolutely. And now in 26 states, high school athletes are actually able to get paid using their NIL. So now we're thinking not only free product but discounted product. And so now it really opens up who your user base could be from. Come engage with our product. You get half off because you're a high school athlete, get free product or let us pay you to use our product in the most authentic way. So, the range is very wide. I used to say our ideal customer is just any brand that needs connectivity to sport that doesn't naturally have it. 

Dave Tabor (00:19:05) - I can imagine how fun it would be to just get like, you know, relatively unknown high school kids that have active social media accounts give them all a free pair of shoes and let them sing your praises on all their, right? I mean, it's a, you know, the math works. 

Chase Garrett (00:19:24) - Totally and those kids, they're around people every single day. They're using your product. People are watching.

Dave Tabor (00:19:30) - I got these for free.

Chase Garrett (00:19:31) - Exactly. You know, and a lot of brands, they're chasing that teenager market because that's where those nutrients start and that's some of the hardest consumers to get your product on. So. 

Dave Tabor (00:19:43) - Yeah. So backing up a little bit, I mean, this platform you built wasn't cheap. You had to raise a fair amount of money. You had to put in… describe your funding, describe your team.

Chase Garrett (00:19:53) - Yeah. So, you know, I had kind of mulled over this decision for a while because it's frightening to leave a great job but it was similar time that I like, I met my wife. And I was kind of going through this, all right, what is my legacy? What am I going to build? You know, I can't just continue working for somebody forever. So I felt, really felt compelled that the timing was right. And I, I quit Red Bull, sold my house and just dove all in and said, all right, we're going to just build this thing from the ground. Initially raised 500,000 on a $2 million pre-money valuation off of hey, this is an idea I have. I have connectivity and understanding. And I raised it primarily from professional athletes that were kind of in my sphere. So they gave us some credibility within each vertical and could open some doors. And then I closed my round. Actually, the last check in was Mason Plumlee when he was playing for the Denver Nuggets on like March 5th, 2020. And then obviously the world went through quite a transition a few days later. Kind of an interesting stage because I was like, well what's the future look like? Is this good? Is this bad? You know, marketing dollars are turning into payroll dollars. Like everything was just like up in the air and then that's when the conversation around college NIL started to progress quickly, which we knew would be rocket fuel for our business. And so going into 2021, we raised an additional 1.6 million and that gave us some runway.

Dave Tabor (00:21:28) - Was that more like athletes talking to their buddies and saying, let's do this all together?

Chase Garrett (00:21:32) - Yeah. We had a few smaller institutional groups, GAN ventures which is local here to Colorado, Hawk Ventures, which is a venture arm of a marketing agency that wanted to collaborate with us. So they invested and then athletes and individuals. So, and then, you know, the most exciting day of our company, July 1st, 2021, when College NIL opened up and we did the first deal in history.

So, that was a pretty fascinating, I would say, 24 hours for us because, you know, never in the past has college athletes gotten paid without some, you know, implications that we're going to be really bad, you know.

Dave Tabor (00:22:13) - Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Chase Garrett (00:22:15) - And so we ended up doing a deal with another Colorado company, I guess, kind of, Boost Mobile, owned by Dish Network here in Denver and they contracted the Cavender twins. So Haley and Hannah Cavender, they are, they play basketball. They have a large social media following and they wanted to do the first college NIL in history. So at 12:01 a.m., they sent them the deal through our platform. We had all gathered in New York, bought a billboard in Times Square that said, ‘Ka-ching. Finally, college athletes can get paid.’ And then we showed the Cavender twins and Boost and went through a really impressive media tour where we actually got a little over a 3.7 billion media impressions. Which was an insane day as you can imagine.

Dave Tabor (00:23:02) - Wow. What a launch. Well, now. I want to understand a little bit better about how these strategies unfold, how companies do that. You mentioned the boost deal. And but, you know, as you look at how companies are structuring these because now it's just not the huge companies going after the huge players. But you know, you can find your niche based on, you know, whatever strategy you want, whatever your budget is. And so are you seeing a trend where companies are still trying to get the most expensive athletes they can, or are they doing other strategies where they collect like a whole group of inexpensive 5000 social media follower people and affordably just sort of almost like, you know, from the grassroots, you know, reach this broad group of people. How are they doing that?

Chase Garrett (00:23:53) - Well, I think there's so many strategies on how you can leverage athletes that can be really beneficial. You know, for one, giving your product credibility. If you see a product pushed to you on, say, Instagram and you don't really recognize any of the people that's attached to it, that they're using their advertisement campaigns, you kind of start to question, you know, where's the validity behind this? And so if a brand is looking to just get basic credibility, I think there's a range from athletes that can be relatable and trustworthy and then athletes that can bring tremendous brand experience. So a lot of times we'll see brands come and maybe make a large investment and a high flying athlete that has a lot of recognition and then layer on a broader campaign that's less dollars per individual, but get a wide range. And so now we're able to get brands, you know, 200 athletes that they can contract with. We had a brand, just the other day they built a campaign and they made it open, which means the athletes that are on our platform can see it and, and say that they would be interested to be a part of it.

Chase Garrett (00:24:57) - And in 24 hours, I believe they got 250 athletes respond saying they want to be a part of it. So now you have 250 athletes that are authentic, that say I like your brand. I like your product. I use this today. Let's look at a deeper partnership. 

Dave Tabor (00:25:15) - Wow. What do the athletes actually do?

Chase Garrett (00:25:17) - It's a range. It can be a long term standard endorsement deal with branding, with appearances, with social media components. Or it can be each of those verticals. Sometimes we'll see brands like Microsoft will pay athletes just to come speak at a sales meeting or a holiday event, or we'll see a lot of new brands just want to dip their toe in and do a social media campaign, say, hey, let's just see if we can have you talk about using our product in your stories.

Dave Tabor (00:25:43) - And I suppose in the agreement, the contracting brand is either saying we're going to deliver this content or we're requiring you, we're agreeing that you will deliver this content X number of times over this period of whatever.

Chase Garrett (00:25:57) - Exactly. So typically that's an intimidating process of a brand saying, how do I even go about what the expectations are? What's my rights if they are doing user generated content, should I be able to approve it? And so we, on our platform, walk them through step by step and really easy environment that just asks them those questions. And then they come through and they check. Yes. No. How many days in advance do they need to have, you know, the content on hand.

Dave Tabor (00:26:24) - So there's a structured sort of menu operation that they can, that's cool.

Chase Garrett (00:26:28) - And then that all gets converted to a legal contract that lists all of this and the terms and conditions. So this way when two people meet each other, we can take them to 80% of the way to completion without having to contract a sports agency. Just consult. Not that we, we don't cut out sports agents, but we want to make their life easier so that they don't have to handhold somebody.

Dave Tabor (00:26:50) - Especially some of these contracts aren't huge and to have to worry about an expensive contract and a time consuming 

Chase Garrett (00:26:56) - It can be horrible. 

Dave Tabor (00:26:57) - Yeah, this is super fun. And by the way, listeners, Chase gave me access behind sort of into the platform access as a brand using it. And I played around quite a bit with it. It is super fun, by the way. It's just, it's like shopping for, shopping for pros. It's cool.

Chase Garrett (00:27:12) - I mean, you can send a campaign or a deal opportunity to Tom Brady and in real time, his agent will tell you if he's open to it or not. And I just use his and him as an example. There's also local university athletes. There's a wide range.

Dave Tabor (00:27:28) - Yeah. I shop for, you know, local universities in Colorado. I think we have used that term ‘shop’. That's not, that's tacky isn't it? Shopping for athletes.

Chase Garrett (00:27:35) - I think we currently have over 18,000 athletes across professional college and high school. And then, over 850 sports agents are currently using it with their roster of athletes.

Dave Tabor (00:27:47) - That's cool. I noticed 17 athletes have over 300,000 social media followers, four have over a million, and listeners, the number one, if you're curious, you can turn down the sound if you want to guess, but the number one is Olivia Dunne with 4.3 million social media followers. She's a gymnast and now also a Sports Illustrated cover model. Number two is Angel Reese of the NCAA women's basketball champs, LSU. And what I found interesting is like one seems to have her value raised by her, I'll just call them non-athletic qualities, not sports specifically related, the other by her athletic prowess and sort of her persona. Although these things seem to overlap. I mean, like, what's your take on that?

Chase Garrett (00:28:32) - You know, it's funny, when I was working at Red Bull, I would sit down with a lot of our young snowboarders and skiers and I would say, do you know why you get paid to snowboarder ski? And they would think, oh, I just got a win contest. And I was like, no.

Chase Garrett (00:28:44) - I was like, you gotta win contest. Yes. That will establish your credibility, but you got to be able to bring value and sell products for the brands that are going to get behind you. And it kind of like demystified it. And it was kind of sad. You can see I'm kind of like, what? Like that seems like a sellout. And I'm like, there's no other place the money comes from. You're only going to get money from people that are passionate about it on a donation perspective. And so even though it's not, you know, pretty to hear that it's real. And so there's a combination of, you know, establish yourself within your sport platform to be the best or at least be at a high level.

Dave Tabor (00:29:18) - Step one.

Chase Garrett (00:29:19) - Yeah. Step one. And then step two. How are you? How are you influencing your audience? Do people want to be more like you? Are you fun? Are you exciting or are you anti-authoritarian? Are you maybe very buttoned up and professional? There's markets for a wide range of different personality types. There's definitely not one perfect way to do it other than what aligns most with you as an individual. And so.

Dave Tabor (00:29:42) - So it's not, what I'm hearing you say, what I'm, what I'm extracting from this is that it's not just purely social media numbers. It's also probably stickiness within certain social media audiences. Right? 

Chase Garrett (00:29:57) - Yeah. And it's and it's aligning with the right brands that fit your audience. I mean, I can tell you our biggest earners are female athletes. The ones that you just named are at the top of our list. So, because they deliver and they deliver in different forms, but they deliver meaningful results for our brand partners, which is what's really important with us and why we're willing to consult, because we want brands to have a really good experience and say, wow, I haven't seen this kind of growth ever. Let's get more creative on leveraging athletes. 

Dave Tabor (00:30:28) - All right. Now, we're running a little over. Are you okay if we keep talking?

Chase Garrett (00:30:31) - It's fine with me. Cool.

Dave Tabor (00:30:33) - What has surprised you in how brands and athletes sort of come together and do this work?

Chase Garrett (00:30:40) - I think just the new participants, which was my original goal, was, all right. Endemic companies like Gatorade, Red Bull, Nike, they've been in this space for a while. But I wanted to grow this fear. And so now we're seeing companies that have never been a part of sports marketing and probably never thought about it before engaging because they feel that there's a really cool local initiative. So, Hydrate IV, which is another Denver, Colorado company here, engages with athletes.

Dave Tabor (00:31:12) - I could see where this would even get outside of sports into other I mean, like, well, maybe some would argue ballet as a sport, but I mean, any like your platform works for any kind of an influencer marketplace, doesn't it?

Chase Garrett (00:31:25) - Yes. We try to stay focused around sports. 

Dave Tabor (00:31:26) - Yeah, that makes sense. 

Chase Garrett (00:31:27) - Athlete or sport influencer or sport personality. We want to kind of stay within the constraints of those walls. We think it establishes a premium credibility because every individual has a significant revenue source outside of college athletes attributed to their sport and so they're not just looking for any deal.

Dave Tabor (00:31:48) - Yeah. Now okay. So I'm glad you mentioned that comment except for college athletes because that's not the case anymore. And that brings us to what I will call sort of this big elephant in the room, which you alluded to earlier, I promise to get back to, which is the feeling that NIL, the sports portal, you know, all of these recent court decisions which have changed college sports in the views of many, are ruining college sports, even if you don't think it's ruining college sports, there's no doubt that it's creating chaos. So is this all your fault?

Chase Garrett (00:32:21) - It's all my fault. You know, sometimes I wonder, should we have all had the college sport sort of playground that we all had to watch? You know who is college sports for? Is it for the athletes or is it for us sitting at home, you know. And who's the most important person in that discussion? I believe it's the athlete that's laying it on the line that's committed to their craft. They're the best at what they do, and they've been trying to to craft that since they were young. And then now how do we layer on some fairness and some scalability and stuff that promotes goodness? And I believe a lot of these athletes engaging in these types of business opportunities at a really young age provides them a chance to learn. It provides them almost a glorified internship to figure out how do I fall into a marketing mix of a brand? How do I manage my dollars? How do I understand what taxes are? I mean, we teach a lot of kids what a W9 is, and it's nice for them to have that familiarity before they get into maybe a different level that's even a higher consequence. And then for 98% of the athletes, they don't go pro at their sport. So here's a great opportunity for them to maybe graduate with some money for a down payment of a house, or to give them some flexibility to move to that place that they really want to build their life at.

Chase Garrett (00:33:43) - And so I absolutely love it. I think the transfer portal is arguably a lot more disruptive than we are. You put the two together and it makes for every season. Who knows who's going to be at the top. I think it evens the playing field a little bit but, it's definitely exciting and it's chaotic. And I don't want to say it's not, but I at least want to find a way to shepherd the users in the most productive, sort of safe path.

Dave Tabor (00:34:10) - I would think I got this notion that the transfer portal is really going to create, you know, at least a two tier, maybe multiple tiers of actual college programs. You know, the elite, the elite that can afford, whether it's through boosters or whatever nil contracts that, you know, there'll be a few at the very top and then I don't know what'll happen, but the other tiers will be the top tier is going to be almost like the what Single-A baseball is now to you know, the base.

Chase Garrett (00:34:34) - Yeah, I definitely sympathize for coaches. They've lost a lot of their ability to sort of, I don't know, 

Dave Tabor (00:34:36) - Develop a program?

Dave Tabor (00:34:37) - Develop. I mean, you can also go get a new program the next year but.

Dave Tabor (00:34:48) - We see that in Colorado, don't we?

Chase Garrett (00:34:51) - Totally. They definitely don't have the same level of authority over their team as they used to. And so I don't know, maybe that's good. Maybe it's bad. I think most coaches would say it's probably less good. So, but it's exciting and I think it's going to keep the fan base on their toes and I'm hoping that it drives more deals to athletes that are committed to their craft than your generic influencer, that nobody knows why they have a million followers, but they just take pictures on the beach all day.

Dave Tabor (00:35:18) - All right. Last question. Going forward, you know, as you think about, you know, where all this is going, what, we talked a little bit about the chaos of what's happening. But I mean, if you could think out three, four or five years, what do you, where do you think this is all going to end up, or is it just going to be more and bigger?

Chase Garrett (00:35:38) - I believe that it's just going to be a little bit more streamlined. It'll be less chaotic. 

Dave Tabor (00:35:48) - The whole sports world or are you talking about just your marketplace?

Chase Garrett (00:35:50) - Specifically college is going to really professionalize a lot and it will be a little less chaotic. And so I don't think that that's going to hurt us. I don't think it's going to dramatically help us, but I think it's going to at least provide some clarity for how people move within those spectrums. And then and then I believe that brands are going to really adopt how do I work with athletes? How do I find the right person? How important is authenticity? If I'm going to work with an athlete, should I do more than get them to take a picture eating my cheeseburger? And so, we know that we deliver results for the brands because there's authenticity attached to these campaigns. You get brought in to an entirely new group of, of new consumers. And so, we just need to shepherd more brands into the category. And that's our mission.

Dave Tabor (00:36:42) - That's cool. So we're going to start to see lesser known brands or evolving brands or emerging brands starting to take advantage of these strategies going forward.

Chase Garrett (00:36:51) - Absolutely.

Dave Tabor (00:36:52) - That's cool. Hey, that's a good place to wrap up, I think. I'm your host, Dave Tabor. You've been listening to my conversation with Chase Garrettt of Icon Source. Glad you could join me in the studio. This has been a great conversation. You're going to have to come back in a year or two when we figure out where this really has gone.

Chase Garrett (00:37:07) - Yeah, it's been fun. I really appreciate you having me on today and look forward to growing here in Colorado and seeing what, what can come from it.

Dave Tabor (00:37:15) - Cool. Listeners, glad you're here. Oh, by the way, I got to tell you, I was doing a search and I was thinking, what athlete? Because you got super, like, you can align with athletes, all different interests, everything from chess to book reading to kayaking and all that. You don't have one with entrepreneurial stuff. We need to add that.

Chase Garrett (00:37:32) - That is true. Although you can search in our keywords anything and it will pull it out of their bio. So you can type in yoga, you could type in, you know, books and anybody that's listed out in their profile, it'll automatically pull it.

Dave Tabor (00:37:46) - Good to know. Don't kick me off yet I'm going to find that. I'm your host, Dave Tabor. And today on the Stubbornly Young podcast, you've been listening to my conversation with Chase Garrett, CEO and founder of Icon Source. Listeners, this has been episode eight of the Stubbornly Young Podcast for those in their 50s, 60s and beyond, remaining engaged in the world and relevant to the younger people in their lives. Please do me a favor. Help the podcast spread by submitting a review and by sharing. Catch you next time on Stubbornly Young.

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