Avoid Micromanaging Everything: Interview with Leo Resig, Co-Founder and CEO of Atmosphere
I recently went one on one with Leo Resig. Leo is a serial entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of Atmosphere, co-founder and CEO of Chive Media Group, co-founder and Chairman of William Murray Golf, and co-founder of Tapiture.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Leo: I grew up in Indiana to a father who worked for GE for 42 years and always had a side business to fill his entrepreneurial cup, so from a young age I was inspired to “start my own business” and work for myself. I graduated from Indiana University with zero idea of what I wanted to do for a living, but I had my own deck refurbishing business in college and had the confidence that I could make a buck on my own if I had to - I didn’t want to be staining decks the rest of my life!
My introduction to media came from working as an office manager for a Hollywood creative agency in my early 20s. This is the same time the internet was blowing up (Youtube started in 2005) and I gravitated toward an open role in ad operations and graphic design. This is when I first learned how the business side of the internet works.
I realized then that starting a blog and getting hundreds of thousands of people to visit on a daily basis could make some real money, although obviously, it was easier said than done. My brother and I started a celebrity gossip site called derober.com and launched a fake news story that Donald Trump tipped a waiter at a restaurant $10,000, and this story went globally viral which caused our website traffic to skyrocket. Over the next few days, we experienced millions of visits and multiple site crashes.
That was a lot of fun (and Donald got a little angry with us), but we realized soon after that we were not into celebrity gossip. This led to the creation of theCHIVE.com in 2008, which was one of the first “viral” websites. The website took off immediately due to UGC photos as people got their first smartphones with decent cameras. Fast forward 14 years and theCHIVE has become a global phenomenon. We used theCHIVE’s audience as one giant sandbox and tried a lot of different revenue-generating projects, some of which worked great while others failed miserably. For instance, we launched a four-city full-scale music festival called CHIVE Fest and lost a ton of money, so we shut it down. We launched a beer company called KCCO beer and became the 50th latest brewery in the US. Despite the accomplishment, we all drank too much and gained a ton of weight, then lost a ton of money on this project so we shut it down. Through these experiences, however, we learned that failure is OK and even retained countless great employees from these ventures.
We had some hits too, from selling over $250M worth of branded t-shirts featuring the text “Keep Calm and Chive On” and another with a screen print of legendary comedian and actor Bill Murray’s face on them. We launched a successful golf apparel and lifestyle company with Bill Murray called William Murray Golf while our non-profit, Chive Charities, has raised and donated over $20M for rare medical, first responders, veterans and active duty military over the years.
Our latest sandbox creation was a streaming TV channel called CHIVE TV. This single-channel evolved into Atmosphere, the largest streaming TV platform for businesses now in over 30K venues worldwide. Since incorporating Atmosphere in 2018, we have raised over $140M in funding, hired over 500 full-time employees and added over 50 new channels to the platform. I feel very blessed to have caught lightning in a bottle twice now and having the time of my life!
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Leo: My brother John and I came up with Atmosphere while sitting at a bar watching TV. One TV was tuned to Sports Center where a story about an NFL player taking a knee was playing with Closed Captions. Another TV featured a live football game and a third showed Judge Judy, again, with Closed Captions. We realized that TV programming in bars doesn’t work. The content we were watching in that bar was meant for the living room, with the audio on. Closed Captions are not the answer. We theorized that the same viral video content people love on theCHIVE and on social media apps would be great to put on TV screens in bars, so we set about building an “app”. Launching on Roku, we leveraged theCHIVE and theChive community to announce CHIVE TV, then invited bar and restaurant owners to email us for free Roku sticks in order to bring Atmosphere to their venues. We had thousands of requests, seeding the market and proving that our product was a fit and a hit. Over the next five years, we’ve built the Atmosphere streaming platform and we’re continuing that growth quickly and globally.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
We knew we had something special with Atmosphere because it checked all the major boxes of a globally scalable multi-billion dollar business. The first five boxes are the most important to check:
1) Unit Economics - Does it have great unit economics? A strong LTV <> CAC ratio with good margins, low churn with multiple revenue streams is paramount.
2) TAM - Does it have a massive Total Addressable Market? How big is the opportunity?
3) Competitors - Is it a crowded space with a lot of competitors doing the same thing? Are you going to be the Uber or the Lyft in your category?
4) Team - Who will run this business and execute on the vision. Having a great leadership team is key to scale headcount underneath them.
5) Path to Profitability - Growth at all costs with no clear path to profitability is a recipe for disaster. Real businesses make more money than they spend.
A good idea is exactly that, just an idea. The next step is executing on that idea, but that doesn’t mean to do it without eyes wide open. If it were that easy, everyone would do it. The best new businesses find a big problem and solve it. Just make sure that once you’ve identified a big opportunity that you actually want to jump on that train and stick with it. When starting a new business, you are pushing a snowball down a mountain and there is no turning back. BUT failure is OK and there’s always new problems that need to be solved out there.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Leo: Hire amazing people with great attitudes that share the same passion you have with your company’s mission and vision. Watch out for employees that aren’t team players, are selfish, and have a bad attitude. A bad apple spoils the bunch.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Leo: Be creative. Know your customer. Have a great-looking brand that makes your company look more legit than it is. Don’t name your company something stupid or use a made-up word that’s a combination of two or three words-or is missing vowels. It’s a noisy world and your potential customers get bombarded with email, text, and phone solicitations daily. Stand out from the crowd with a great brand and great positioning and voice.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Leo: In my experience, an effective leader needs to avoid micromanaging everything by enabling senior managers to lead their teams. Know your strengths and do what you love in the business. You can’t do everything so don’t try to. Finding a good mentor or befriending other CEOs is a great way to get advice or simply vent.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Leo:
Don’t work too hard. Find balance and tend to your friend and family gardens as well as your business. Your health is more important than money or power and if you kill yourself chasing success (or avoiding failure) then it’s not worth it.
Have a plan and a safety net. If that means starting your new business while working somewhere else with a steady paycheck -that’s ok. Once your new business proves itself and you can raise capital against it, then you can pay yourself a salary using other people’s money and not burn your savings.
Make sure you can manage people as you’ll need to hire a lot of people to achieve your business goals. If you don’t get along with others or lack empathy, you will have a tough time hiring and retaining employees. You can go fast on your own but you can go far with others.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Leo: Know when to take the shot and go with your gut over data.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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