Transcription of William J. Ryan, Jr. for the show Building Maine Businesses #294
Lisa Belisle: My next guest is William J. Ryan, Jr., who is the principal owner and chairman of the Maine Red Claws. I believe it’s okay that we call you Bill.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Bill is great.
Lisa Belisle: Bill is great. Which held their inaugural season in the fall of 2009. Ryan also has investments in real estate, restaurants, and early stage technology companies, and I believe you also once owned the Oxford Plains Speedway.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: I did for fourteen years.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. So, you’ve been out and about for quite a while.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: I guess I have a short attention span maybe and I move from thing to thing, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: Well that’s alright because we like talking to people who have had many lives here. You’ve actually been an attorney as well.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah, so I was in college and my parents kept calling me and saying, “What are you going to do with your life?” So one day they woke me up and I said, “I’m going to be a lawyer.” And that got smile and approval and they didn’t bother me for the rest of my senior year. So that was my well thought out process of what my career was going to be. But I actually liked law school and then when I got out and found out what lawyers actually did, I was kind of puzzled that anybody would actually want to do it. So I hated it, but I think when I started, my wife was pregnant. We had four kids in five years when I was doing it so I kind of needed a job so I stuck with it until I could figure out what else to do and moved on from there.
But it was a good experience. It’s good training, it’s good background for business. It’s great for some people, it just wasn’t for me, I wish I had thought about that a little bit better before I just made a snap decision to be a lawyer.
Lisa Belisle: Well so what was it about being a lawyer that you thought was good training and maybe just didn’t work for you?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: I think the good training part is you get to spot a lot of potential problems in business before they get to be problems. You can tell going into something, jeez this contract is not going to work or there’s a risk here that could be covered by insurance or what happens if XYZ happens, you know, how do we handle that as a business relationship. Kind of take care of it beforehand so it doesn’t become acrimonious later so if something goes wrong you want to make sure you figure out how to fix that before it becomes a problem. That’s the good training part.
What I didn’t like is most of it you’re not in a court room arguing and it’s not very glorious. You’re mostly in your office selling your time, is what you’re selling. It really takes away from interaction with your fellow human beings to some extent, because if your office mate comes by and says, “Hey, how you doing? You watch the ball game last night?” All you’re doing is looking at your watch and going, “Aww man, now I got to stay at work five minutes later,” because you’re selling your time.
So, you know, I ate lunch at my desk and never really left, because I had little kids at home and I was already working enough that my wife wasn’t super psyched to have me be there ‘til eight at night or something. So that was the hardest part for me is that my natural inclination was to care about the people around me and what their lives were, but I was selling my time so you’d have to kind of ferret yourself into your little office and do your work and try to do it as quickly as you could and get it done. A lot of people like it, it just wasn’t for me.
Lisa Belisle: I think that’s an interesting point that you make that something can be really worthwhile and worth doing and maybe just not the right thing for an individual person.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: But sometimes it’s difficult to get to that place and get to the place where you say, “Alright so what is right for me?” So how did you… you know, you still have those children, right?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Still have the wife. So, how did you get to that place?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah. So, it was interesting. The firm I was with represented a guy by the name of Bob Bahre, and Bob owned New Hampshire International Speedway at that point, which was a NASCAR track. I knew Bob a little bit, I didn’t work on his stuff, but I knew him through a couple different ways and from the firm doing work for him. I became fascinated with that business, the racing business, and it wasn’t anything I really knew about. Prior to that, I grew up outside of Boston, you know, car racing wasn’t big outside of Boston. But I became fascinated with it as a business. This is the early 90’s, kind of before, NASCAR has kind of risen and now it’s kind of fallen back a little bit.
So I decided that I wanted to be in that business somehow. Long story short, I was able to find a guy in Massachusetts who had a sports marketing company and had been heavily involved in racing. If you’ve ever seen a race car, they have 28 different names all over them, it’s everything from Budweiser to on and on and on. That was his business, he would act as a middle man between race teams and big companies out there and say, like, “You should be on this car because you will get this much notice and you could have your clients come to races.”
So I talked my way into a job with him. The legal training was something that was attractive to him because it’s a heavily contractual work. It was a revelation for me because I came from that highly regulated, highly strict world of law where everything was, you know, you put on a belt, and then you put on another belt, and then you put on suspenders, and then, you know, the third belt just for extra safety and support.
I went with him and he was a real sales guy and we could do anything. A potential client would say, “Can you do XYZ, ABC…” And his answer was always yes ‘cause he would figure out how to do it. Whereas, my answer was, “Jeez, can we do that? How are we going to do that?” He kind of introduced me to the world of “yeah you’ll figure it out” and he wasn’t being deceptive in any way. He was just much more open to making things happen, whereas I was in that world, like, “jeez, let’s check the 92 things that could happen that would be wrong with that plan.” Whereas, he was like, “Yeah, there might be 92 things wrong but there’s 120 things that are right.” A guy by the name of Paul, he was probably the most influential person in my life really in terms of, or business life.
Lisa Belisle: So, you owned Oxford Plains for 14 years.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: And then what happened?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Well, during that timeframe, I was approached by somebody, because I was in the sports business, was approached by somebody, just a cold call, a guy that had worked for the Celtics years before, and said that he wanted to start a professional basketball team someplace in New England that was going to be in the NBA Development League. To be honest, I was a huge Celtics fan and always had been from growing up outside of Boston, but I wasn’t really in tune with what the NBA Development League is. What I did know was that two professional basketball teams had failed in Maine before.
So I returned the call anyway and went to a meeting. I thought it was an interesting idea the more I learned about it and the lawyer in me said, “What’s the downside risk and can we eliminate that and how do we eliminate it? And if we can’t eliminate it…. you can never eliminate it all, but how do you mitigate it and make it so it’s not going to kill you.” And on the other side was like, “Alright, what’s the upside here, what can we do?”
So after kind of doing that analysis for a bit, I thought it was a good idea. My father was retiring at that point, he’s the ex-CEO of TD Bank here in Portland, so he was retiring and he liked the idea, as a basketball fan. He said, “alright, you call five of your friends, I’ll call five of my friends, we’ll put together an ownership group,” and so that’s what we did. My father and I are the majority owners of the team and we have partners that are people from across- probably people that you’ve interviewed, you know, people from Maine that are influential in the community and it’s been great. It’s been a great experience. We just are finishing our eighth season and starting playoffs tonight, which is fun. But it’s been good.
Lisa Belisle: Sports is an interesting thing because it really…. there’s really such a significant community around it so whether you’re a part of the Red Sox Nation or you’re a Patriots fan or a Red Claws fan, really, you’ve automatically got this group of people that you can talk to and you can interact with and that you can have conversations with. Is that part of what attracted you to becoming an owner of the Red Claws?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah, I agree with that. It’s that built in, you know, when you’re at a game, the person next to you, they’re a fan, they’re probably a fan of the team that you’re a fan of and you have that natural ability to talk to them. I think even when I was in the racing business, there’s a wide demographic for racing and it’s interesting because I could talk to anybody from the guy fixing my car, I know nothing about fixing cars, but a lot of guys that fix cars are into cars and stuff so they’d maybe recognize me from the speedway or something and I’d get into a long conversation with them about racing, right, and you have that in common. And I still bump into people all the time that I know from racing, that are just all walks of life, but often something, you know, a delivery driver, or something like that, or an occupation that has to do with maybe cars or something. It’s always funny because we’ll go back to talking about racing.
And basketball is the same too. It has a different kind of demographic, I would say, but you have that universal language that you can talk about, you know, like, “did you see that game last night? What do you think of the Celtics?” So it is, it’s a community in a lot of good ways and can be in bad ways too. I think when you have- when you’re a fan of the Patriots and you hate the fans of whoever it is. To me, that’s ridiculous, I always kind of…. my family is from New York and they’re all Yankee fans. I grew up in Boston and it would be one of those things where it’s like, “Oh you’re supposed to hate Yankee fans.” And I’m like, “I can’t hate me grandmother! My grandmother is a Yankee fan.” So I never had that, like, oh you got to hate Yankee fans or something, you know. So there’s a lot of good to it but it could be destructive too.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, so how do you handle that? I have an unawareness of sports, my kids are all….
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: They all follow sports.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Their dad follows sports. I never had that, sort of, same passion.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: So when they would say, you know, “Oh Yankees suck.”
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Okay.
Lisa Belisle: I’d be like, “Oh, do they?”
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Right, right. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Like, do you have to be…. and I’m sorry to anybody who is listening who feels strongly that Yankees do suck.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: But how do you negotiate that?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: I just, you know, it’s silly to me. I think that you just have to realize that it’s just a game at the end of the day. Trust me, I’ve been caught up in games, you know, whether it’s my kid’s games or Red Claws games or Patriots games. If my kids listen to this, they’ll laugh at me saying that “oh don’t overreact to it,” because they’ve seen me certainly overreact to a lot of games.
But I think maybe as you get older and you get a little bit wiser and you realize that, hey that if the Red Claws lose tonight I’m still going to be here tomorrow and get up and do all the things that I do and sure I want them to win, but life goes on. And I’m much more that way, you know, I was happy when the Patriots won the super bowl, really happy. I’m sure I jumped up and down for a while, but if they had lost, I would’ve been unhappy for 15 minutes and got up the next day and moved on. So I think you just have to recognize that it’s not life and death. It’s just fun.
Talking to people that I’ve worked with over the years in sports, my line to them always is, like, “We’re not curing cancer, we’re just hopefully giving people a night out where they can smile and laugh and have fun and watch a good game or a good race or whatever it is.” I don’t think it’s unimportant, but it’s not serious. If the Red Sox don’t play today or do or whatever, it really doesn’t affect anybody’s life. It’s not a life and death thing, it’s just sports.
Lisa Belisle: Well some people might argue.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah. No, I know they….
Lisa Belisle: I won’t, but some people might.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: No, they do. It’s funny, you know, and then people expect me to maybe to be more passionate about sports than I am, because I’ve been involved in it. I think maybe through being involved in it, you kind of recognize that maybe its importance can be overstated somewhat. Not that it’s important to me, but there’s a lot of things that are much more important than whether or not the Patriots win or the Red Claws win or the Red Sox win.
Lisa Belisle: Was there something about the fact that your father was so high up at TD Bank and that banking is very similar to law that it’s kind of structured and lots of regulations.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Was there something about that that you needed to almost kind of break free of in order to get into these other businesses?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, that was all I was ever exposed to. You know, the rest of the adults in my life, my uncles and aunts and stuff, were firefighters and cops and that kind of thing. And I kind of knew I didn’t want to go that direction, probably too lazy to be out there doing any kind of heavy duty work like that. So my father was the only one that I looked to, he’s a banker my whole life. It is a very ordered thing and I’ve said to him a million times, “I don’t know how you do it.” And I say that to the corporate people that I know all the time, like, I just couldn’t. The meetings and the hierarchy and the- I don’t know, that’s not me and maybe it’s because I’d been, kind of out on my own for so long.
On the other side, since I left my law firm I was with in 1997, there’s been no paycheck waiting for me at the end of the week. So that’s the downside to it. I don’t have a boss and I don’t have meetings, even if I don’t want them. But again, there’s not that benevolent corporation over my head that’s going to be there at the end of the week whether or not I did my job well that week or didn’t do it, you still get that paycheck. There’s something to be said for that, but, for me anyways, there’s more to be said about the freedom to do a lot of different things. Luckily, I’m knocking on wood here, it’s worked out so far. But, yeah, it is a challenge.
When I had the racetrack, you get three weeks of rain, you can’t race in the rain. So, if you have 40 events scheduled for summer and it rains three weekends in a row, you could lose 10 percent of your opportunity to make money for the year. It’s like a retail store that’s open 365 days losing 36 days, where they make zero money. It’s a challenge to try to figure that out in our world. The Red Claws have, we have 24 home games so we have 24 opportunities to sell tickets. If it’s a blizzard in the middle of February, which we had one this year, and people don’t want to go out. It was fine, but the weather report, everybody at the storm center, they’ve all got their sweaters on and all that stuff, so everybody is kind of scared. So, you know, those are tough days because we probably sold half the amount of tickets that we would’ve had it been a nicer day.
There’s challenges to both sides of things, but I say to my father all the time, “I don’t know how you did it.” Even the getting up to the top is hard, but even being at the top of a big company, there’s a lot of responsibility. You have thousands and thousands of people, like, you make a bad decision, it can really harm a lot of people. There’s a lot of pressure there that I don’t think people that haven’t seen somebody up close in that position recognize. I think people at that level, they really feel like, “If I make a wrong decision, it doesn’t just affect me, it affects all those thousands of people.”
There’s pluses and minuses to both sides. I like that steady pay check if I could get it, but I kind of like not having to answer anybody either.
Lisa Belisle: Given the background of the failure of teams.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: Basketball teams in this area. I’m assuming that Red Claws has done better than that.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: ‘Cause they’re still around.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Absolutely, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: So what have you learned in this process?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: You know, I think it was interesting when we first started it, the natural inclination for everybody, when we were talking was, “well you’re going to play at the Civic Center, right?” That seems like the natural place to play, but we figured out pretty quickly that teams in our league, you know, average attendance is probably 3,000, maybe 3,500. Well that’s going to feel and look horrible in the Civic Center, which is 7,200 for basketball, I think. So that was a decision to move to The Expo that was maybe a little bit challenging, would challenge people’s preconceptions at the beginning. But we did a lot of improvements there and it’s a great place and now people love watching the team play there.
That’s, I think, an example of kind of what we learned and what we did was to maybe not jump at the obvious thing. Where it was, you know, “you got to play here” or “you got to do this, you got to do that.” We kind of looked at it and said, “Well wait a second, how do we mitigate that downside risk? How do we make sure that if we go to a place that’s too big for us and it doesn’t look right and fans don’t love it, you know, how do we mitigate that risk?” We’ll play at a smaller place where even if you have 1,500 people in The Expo, which is half full-ish, it still feels great. It’s got a good atmosphere. Kids love it. And you’ve got Crusher, our mascot, running around and all that.
I think what we learned was just look at things a little bit differently and try to figure out why have teams failed here and other places and how do you make sure that you don’t fail in the same way. You can fail in a different way but don’t fail in the same way. I think the big difference for us was having the NBA attached to our league. The other leagues have been independent. Those three letters are hugely important, the NBA has a huge fan base, not only here in Maine, but around the world really. So having that attachment to the NBA and then the affiliation with the Boston Celtics.
People love the Celtics here, which is great. And the fact that the Celtics General Manager Danny Ainge will come up three or four times a year and sit at center court and watch the games. People love seeing him and we had Brian Scalabrine, who is an ex-Celtic, who does announcing now, he was here a week or two ago again sitting court side and watching. People love that stuff. They feel that connection and everybody feels like they know them. Those guys usually sit with me and somebody will walk by and say, “Danny, I saw you play in that game!” And it’s really personal and really important to that person to express to the athlete or ex-athlete how much they love watching them play.
And people love that our players come from all the big time colleges, so if you’re a Michigan grad, eventually we’ve had guys from Michigan, and people love that too. They’ll come up to them before the game or after the game and say, “Oh I went to University of Michigan and I saw this game or that game.” It’s interesting. So I think the biggest thing we learned was, like, figure out how to mitigate all our downside risk to avoid failing in some of the ways that other teams had before.
Lisa Belisle: So the way you’re describing this is that there’s this really significant emotional component to sports, which, of course, we all know.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That sports can make you feel passionate. But, you know, as you’re describing, you know, Danny Ainge, I remember watching him play.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: A million years ago.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You know, there’s an, it’s like a….
William J. Ryan, Jr.: He doesn’t appreciate that when you say a million years ago.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I feel like I’m old enough now that it probably was million years ago. Sorry Danny, but it’s almost like having a song that you knew when you were in seventh grade that you danced to at the junior high dance.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You know, it becomes locked into you.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Sure.
Lisa Belisle: In a way that where, you know, remembering who you watched during the Winter Olympics.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: So you’re providing people, not only with this community of the present, but you’re connecting them to kind of, like, themselves in the past.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Does that come up for you?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: No, absolutely, you’re right. I think that when people come up to Danny and talk about watching him play or this game or that game, it’s funny ‘cause you can see grown men or grown women who revert back to being 10 years old, right? Because that was when they saw Tommy Heinsohn, another former Celtic and Hall of Famer and announcer, and you get people that are 60 years old and saw him play or maybe even older than that ‘cause he’s in his 80’s and they get, like, all emotional and almost like kids and revert back. There is a lot of that looking back towards the past so it’s interesting. Again, I’m not the guy who could tell you who the back up point guard for the University of Iowa was last year, but we have people that can and that are fans and when they see the backup point guard for the University of Iowa somehow make a team in our league, they’ll say, “I remember that!” They get very enthusiastic about it. So, yeah, there is a lot of emotion attached to it.
Lisa Belisle: You have four children, all you said 18 to 23.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Eighteen to twenty-three, yeah, exactly.
Lisa Belisle: So they’re right in that interesting range where you could theoretically call them, wake them up, and say, “Hey, what are you going to do with your life?”
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: So, what would you like to see happen with them?
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Because of kind of the life that I’ve led where I did something that I thought I was supposed to do, initially, it seemed like, well you got to do something like law, right? And I was really unhappy, and I don’t know if I expressed that, but when I say unhappy, like, my headaches started the second I got to the office like everyday and 12 hours later, it didn’t go away. So I’ve always told them, it’s kind of one of these cliché things, but I actually really feel strongly that I want them to be able to support themselves, but have fun and enjoy what they’re doing, you know, life is too short to do something you don’t want to do. Now, we all obviously have to do things we don’t want to do, you know, it’s not all happiness every day at whatever your job is.
I’ll give you an example, my son is the only one out of college, and he got very interested in the whole craft beer world a couple years ago. So I’m like, great, put him in touch with some people and he wound up working for a couple local places here and now he’s down in Boston and works for a place called Trillium Brewing and he’s in production. So he’s up every morning at four or five AM to get there to make the beer, basically, is what he’s doing. So he just graduated from Colby in May of last year and my joke to him is like, “Well, you know, spent about 260 or so thousand dollars on your education and you work at a factory.” But I’m happy for him, like that’s cool. In the education, he was a philosophy major so nothing goes better with philosophy than a couple of beers. You sound smarter after a couple of beers and every philosophy sounds better. But I think that’s- he loves it, he’s supporting himself.
So I think that’s been my message to them is, don’t think you have to do, you know, don’t think you have to be a lawyer because that’s the only way you can be successful. There’s a lot of paths to success and if you can be happy along the way, that’s a much better thing than just to be a cog in some kind of wheel that you don’t want to be a cog in.
Lisa Belisle: Well I think that’s fair. It’s okay to be a cog in the wheel as long as you want to be a cog in the wheel.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah, if you want to be a cog, you’re right, like I said, there’s a lot of people that, when I was practicing law, that loved it and loved it for good reasons. They could just leave it at the end of the day. That’s the other downside. I’ve been in a lot of different businesses in addition to the sports business, but I’ve had my phone in my pocket from the time I get up until the time I go to bed for the last 20 years and get calls at 11 o’clock at night saying, not so much now, but still now.
Even with the Red Claws, like, we had a travel issue where the team is stuck in Iowa and we got to figure what do you want us to do? We can get this one flight out of here, but it’s, you know, an extra 500 bucks a person kind of thing and we’re flying 15 guys around. So I still get those calls and I’ve had businesses like that for a long time. So there is something to be said for if you can leave work at work at 6 ‘O’ clock and I think that’s how a lot of people that I worked with at the law firm felt like, you weren’t going to get that call. But it’s interesting, makes life interesting, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: Well I know that you are a very busy person so I really appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me today. I learned something about the Red Claws, probably a little bit of something about racing.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Which honestly I didn’t know anything about. I’ve been speaking with William J. Ryan Jr., also known as Bill, the Principal Owner and Chairman of the Maine Red Claws and also generally involved in many other different industries. So, I really appreciate you having this conversation with me.
William J. Ryan, Jr.: Thanks. It was a lot of fun.