Former Spirit CEO Mullin still in the action with the Aspire Group
It's been about 26 months since he left his job as president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Spirit, but Bernie Mullin, it turns out, is never really far from the Atlanta Hawks, the Atlanta Thrashers or Philips Arena. He oversaw the two teams and their general managers as well as the business and arena operations from 2004 to 2008.
"I'm going to the Hawks game tonight, and I'm getting some dental work done this morning with the Thrashers' team dentist," Mullin said with a laugh recently when asked if he still keeps contact.
Not that he hasn't moved on. For the past couple of years, the 60-year-old Britisher has been building the Aspire Group, a global management and marketing consulting business focused on sports and entertainment. He's used his 30-plus years in sports management to advise clubs in Major League Baseball, the NBA, NHL and English Premier League on building sales and service cultures and growing revenues and profits.
The company's growth is keyed to the expansion of the Aspire Fan Relationship Management Center, a customer relations and ticket sales operation the company hopes to install and staff at colleges and professional sports clubs around the country and the world. It rolled out the model at Georgia Tech, and Mullin called the project staggeringly successful, making nearly $1 million in new ticket sales in nine months.
"It's gone really well," Mullin said on a sun-splashed day as he looked out from his high-rise office at Tower Place in Buckhead.
Mullin terms the operation "replicatable intellectual property," meaning that the system can be put in place at any school and successfully grow sales and customer satisfaction.
It grew out of expertise gained by Mullin at his many posts. He ran a team marketing and business consulting operation for the NBA and developed marketing strategy for the league. He built a minor league hockey club in Denver, ran business operations for the Colorado Rockies and Pittsburgh Pirates baseball clubs, served as vice chancellor of athletics at the University of Denver, and as a professor taught business and sport management at the University of Massachusetts. Then he hired on with the Atlanta Spirit.
That job -- which required dealing with multiple owners, some of whom ended up in a nasty legal battle -- eventually took its toll on Mullin, a former soccer player who retains a competitive edge in business along with a characteristic optimism.
"I would've died if I'd stayed on the job," said Mullin, who developed an irregular heartbeat.
Upon leaving, he took the advice of his old boss, NBA Commissioner David Stern, and merged his international and sports backgrounds and went into business for himself. He stayed in the U.S., where he's been since moving from England 37 years ago, and opened shop in Atlanta.
His thought then: have a business with no employees. Maybe a virtual office. That's after having more than 300 full-timers under him with the Atlanta Spirit, plus another 1,000 part-timers.
Business grew and the fan center developed, though, and Mullin currently counts 20 employees. Most are away, at client sites, and Mullin himself is often elsewhere. He fitted in an interview between trips to Canada and Great Britain.
He doesn't mind the travel so much, but he said he can see the day when he hands off more of the business to employees such as Bill Fagan, the company's general manager of fan relationship management.
He doesn't see stopping, however. "I have too much energy," he said, noting that his mother is 95, a sign to him that he may be around for a while longer, too.
And, "I love doing what I am doing and the variety of work and the people at our client organizations."
As for his old employer, he said, "It was the hardest thing in the world to walk away. They were my babies. They still are. But they grew up fast. I still love the organization."
