Backward Thinking
A little reverse psychology was all these entrepreneurs needed to get cash for their business.
Mason Gordon couldn't get his new sport, SlamBall, going
without money. His sport idea combined the agility of basketball
with the body contact of hockey and the excitement of extreme
sports. "The original concept was to create a live-action
human video game," says Gordon, 28, co-founder of SlamBall in
Burbank, California.
But getting a new sport off the ground is a very high-capital
proposition. So Gordon took the idea to his former boss, Mike
Tollin of Tollin/Robbins Productions, a TV production company in
the Los Angeles area. Tollin suggested pitching the sport—
was not yet in existence— TV networks to get start-up
funding.
"We went to Telepictures [a Warner Bros. property that
develops and produces programming] with a cardboard presentation.
It was not much more than a pipe dream at the time," says the
fortysomething Tollin, who partnered with Gordon on the idea.
"We [tried] to present this as a TV property; we tried to
speak their language. We got them excited about its
possibilities."
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Having whetted the appetites of the TV execs during the first
meeting, Gordon and Tollin brought them to see a prototype of
SlamBall in action at a warehouse in Valencia, California. It
worked— 2001, the partners secured a deal with Warner Bros.
Telepictures to help produce the show and with TNN to air six
episodes of SlamBall. They also got the funding they needed to
develop the idea. The first infusion of capital was in the mid-five
figures; the second in the low six figures.
The first season of SlamBall aired on TNN in May 2002 and
received good ratings. Now the company expects yearly sales to
reach well into the seven figures for 2003. Says Gordon, "I
think this is how sports will get launched in the future."