Do you want to have a career in sports? Find out how Brad Olecki the CEO of Trenches Sports got in the Industry

The Chris DeBlasio Podcast

- On this episode of C Level, I speak with Brad Olecki, CEO and founder of TRENCHES Sports & Entertainment Consulting. So Brad, so welcome, so tell me--
- Great to be here.
- Yeah, thank you for coming out. So tell me a little bit about like your background and, you know, just how you got started.
- You know, I've played sports my whole life and I went into college thinking that I was gonna go in and kinda follow my dad's footsteps of being the sales guy in the industrial sales industry, right. Selling toilet paper and napkins and those kind of things--
- Is that what he did?
- I mean that's what I did working in his warehouses, you know, prior to high school and middle school and what not.
- Right
- So, I went in knowing I wanted to be in sales, I didn't know a whole lot about the sports industry. Went to college to play football, got into marketing, fell in love with kinda the brand aspect of things. And then as I was coming out of college I still didn't know what avenue to take to get into sports. So, I was interviewing with, you know, big companies, like 3M and those types of places.
- For sales? For sales jobs?
- Yeah, for sales. General sales jobs, selling, I mean boring stuff. You know, janitory and sanitation products and that kinda stuff. Real, wonderful--
- It's like what do you do? I sell toilet paper.
- Look, you make a lot more money doing that than probably what I did starting off. And a good example of that is I got offered this job by 3M to, you know, make $48,000 a year and a company car and I could go to one of these four cities they offered. And instead of doing that, I took this internship with the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl and worked for a pretty great group of guys there that taught me a tremendous amount about the business. So I started as a glorified intern, with the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl here in town. And then you know, from there, just got more into the brand sponsorship side, had a couple mentors that helped me along the way that got me into working for a group that Paul Allen owned, called Action Sports Media. They had a cable channel up in the Pacific Northwest and they were putting in video boards in university football and basketball stadiums and arenas prior to athletic directors wanting to buy the biggest and the best. I don't know if you can remember, back then that everybody had one and athletic directors didn't wanna put the expense together, so
- Right.
- They would install them and we maintained the rights for the signage and the video content. So I started in the fulfillment side of the business, learned a tremendous amount from a mentor of mine named Bill Hodge. And then we, you know, learned how to sell this stuff, learned how to sell, you know, sponsorships. And from there went into another great company with College Sports and ISP Sports, which is now Learfield IMG College after a couple of mergers. Worked in the pro side for a few years with the Hawks and Thrashers. Miss the Thrashers, live hockey is incredible. And then left there and I went to the College Football Hall of Fame. So there's kind of this journey of working on incredible properties that gave me the chance to do what I do now, which I love with Trenches.