Shameless Geeks And Superhero Success, With Gareb Shamus.

How do we open up and broaden our audience? And that's what we set out to do. So we said, okay. We made offers to Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, Henry Cavill's Superman, Chris Evans, Captain America, and Tom Holland's Spider Man. And they all said yes. And we were like, holy, we're in business now.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to Business Lunch. We're so glad you've joined us. This is Darren Clark, the producer of the show. We have the legendary Gareb Shamus talking with Roland today. One of the foremost experts in the superhero business. He's a serial entrepreneur, deal maker, he's a networker, and the founder and CEO of Wizard Entertainment and Ace Universe. Roland and Garab talk through his unique story, and Garab shares what he believes are the reasons for his success. So sit back, listen up, and be sure to follow us on Apple podcasts. All right, here's Roland.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome to Business Lunch. And I am very excited today to have Gareb Shamus. Gareb, welcome to the show.

Thank you. So happy to be here. Of course.

I love it. And we were just talking before we got on about your art, which is. I'm super excited that, and I see it's behind you right now. This is something that I'm always very excited about. We probably got from Saatchi alone, we've probably bought maybe 25 or so really cool works. And just a great selection, great venue too, for artists to be able to share their stuff, right?

Absolutely. I mean, when you think about how the art world has changed, it used to be only about being able to sell your stuff in galleries, and then it only became about selling it at art fairs. And now we, with social media and direct to consumer type sites like Saatchi, it's made it really accessible for people to be able to acquire art from artists that they like and also just to be able to get directly from an artist and be able to support them that way. And it's fundamentally changed that whole world.

That's really cool. Now I want to talk more about that before I do that. I'm doing things kind of reverse here. Let's get a good intro for you. So I know that you started wizard magazine, did a lot of stuff with Comic Con and there's a couple comic cons, right? There's two of them. Is that.

Oh, there's hundreds of them now. But back in the day there was a lot of comic book shows and There was really two Comic Cons, one in Chicago, one in San Diego. But it was really just a bunch of older people selling old comic books on tabletops. I mean, that's what it looked like 30 years ago.

Before comics became super cool.

Absolutely. Yeah. We helped bring in all the studios and the networks and the TV and the video game and toy companies and really introduced them to that world because there was so many characters that were starting to populate those genres and those medias out there. And we made it really easy to come to one place for all the geeks and the nerds out there.

And did you do that? This was the one in Chicago or San Diego?

Yes, the one in Chicago. This is back in the mid-90s. And the reason it worked was because of the magazines. If you remember, back then, there was no Internet, so there was no concept of. Of taking this stuff global or even national. It was whatever happened local. That's what happened local. So we were able to take what was going on at the shows. We put it into the magazines. So take costume contests. We did costume contests. People got dressed up, and then we put it into the magazine. And then everyone around the world got to see what these costumes look like. And it was incredible. Like, even when you Google the word cosplay, in 1996, it didn't even exist. And then in 1997, it went like this on the Google chart. So crazy. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Kind of how we set a lot of those kind of trends in motion, you know, over well over 20 years ago.

I love that. So let's do the history. So basically, and tell me if I'm missing. You have wizard magazine, which I think ended up being like, you sold 100 million copies, some crazy amount.

Between all of our magazines, we had about five monthly magazines and a bunch of other types. Yeah, we sold over 100 million in our career.

So you had the magazine, you had the event, you've got the art. What other entrepreneurial ventures?

So I was also. I also started a professional sports league around mixed martial arts, if people are into that. There was something called the IFL, the International Fight League, back in 2004 and five through 2008. And the theory was to basically take all these disciplines and do regional teams throughout the world and then have the teams compete with each other. I love it. We had Henzel, Gracie, Frank Shamrock, Ken Shamrock, Bas Rutten. I mean, it was pretty incredible, the list of people that we had involved with it.

That's really cool. Now, what came first?

Wizard.

Okay, tell us The Story of Wizard. Like, you were an enthusiast, right? Because you're considered one of the world's leading authorities on superheroes and things like that, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm 51, and I have three brothers. We grew up collecting sports cards and comic books. And then when we were kids, my mom wound up opening up a sports card and comic book store. So it's been in my family forever.

That's great.

That's what wound up happening. In college, I became an expert in desktop publishing on the Mac. And then when I graduated school in 1990, I worked for my mom at the store, and I hated it, but I had a Mac and I had a photocopy machine. So I decided to publish a newsletter and a price guide for all the new comic books coming out. And then our customers loved the newsletter. Our sales went like this. And that's when I decided to turn it into a magazine.

That's cool. Now, what is the process of that? Like, how does one go from a homegrown, you know, Mac and printer? Probably the laser printer. I remember back in the Apple laser printer days into an actual magazine.

So that's really where I said to myself, I'm like, look, I don't have that many resources, but what do I have? And it was. I had a photocopy machine, I had a computer, I had a phone. There was barely email back in the days there. I did have a bit of version of a cell phone. But we have a lot of connections. Like, we bought comic books from the distributor, and we bought trading cards from the comic book distributor, comic book trading card guy. And then just through the process of networking, it's like, okay, who do I know? That's this. Who can introduce me to Marvel? Who can introduce me to dc? And then we used to also buy a lot of original artwork from a lot of the comic book artists. So we had a direct relationship with them. So. So I called them up directly and said, hey, I'm doing this magazine. Would you do art for the COVID for us? And they were like, yeah, we'll do that. So it was kind of taking all these different disparate things and figuring out how to put it together. It was pretty crazy back then. And because I had a Mac, I didn't have to produce a magazine the way everybody else did with wax machines and cutting rubies and going to production houses. Literally. I mean, the discs were this big. Yeah, yeah. I could put it on a disc this big and then, like, hand it to somebody and say, okay, I'll put this to film.

Nice. That's really cool. And then how did you grow that? So what?

What?

And the event did not exist at this time.

Right.

This was just the magazine newsletter, then. To magazine.

Yeah. What happened was, fortunately, in the comic book world, there was this. In the magazine world, there was the newsstand and subscriptions, and that was it. You sold one through the other, and most of the copies went through subscription because they get people through the newsstand and then try to convert them into subscribers, the advertising base. But the comic book industry had something called the comic book stores, which went through a whole third different part of the distribution chain. And those sales were not returnable, meaning so people bought them directly. So we went through distributors, and we went directly through those stores. And at the time, I would say there's probably about, I think about four or five thousand comic book stores back then. So we could sell directly through distributors to the comic book stores, and they would place their orders, and then we would sell and then print to order. So it was a really efficient network set up back then to get the comic books to the retailers, and we took big time advantage of that.

That's really cool. And then how did the. Was the event the next thing that came?

Yeah, so that's what happened. So the magazine wizard was doing incredibly well. We were already starting to think about, how do we get into more magazines? So we were using the magazine itself as a test vehicle for other things. So we liked action figures, so we would do sections in the magazine on action figures. We liked collectible card games. We liked anime. So we would put sections in uizard to test those areas. And then when people liked it, we would kind of silo them out into their own magazine. So almost simultaneous to the event business, we started siloing out and creating magazines on each of these topics. But it was around 1995, 96, where we wanted to get into that world. And it really wasn't a business. So I don't want people to think that the comic con was anywhere close to what it was today. But there was that show in Chicago. It was maybe two or three thousand people. And because we were the new guys on the block, and there was a company called image, which were all these young guys out there that were creating comic books. Nobody really wanted us in the sense that we were loud. We were trying to do new things. We were the young kids that were disrupting the old system, and nobody would let us kind of do what we wanted to do. So I bought the Chicago comic con back in 1996. So we really could throw a party for the magazines. It really wasn't about making money. It was. The magazines were doing really well. It was like, all right, this is a marketing expense. We just want to do whatever we want to do. We want to bring in all the comic book companies and all the companies we work with and the artists and the writers, and maybe there's a few celebrities, we'll bring them there. And that was our version of a party. But little did we know that that changed everything because it was a very. Geeks and nerds. It was a very derogatory term back then. If you were called a geek or a nerd, it was really meant to hurt your feelings to that. So when all of a sudden we had 10,000 people show up, it made a lot of these people that were disenfranchised feel like they were part of something because they got to see other people. And a lot of cases may have met other people that they knew but didn't realize that they were into it. And that's what kind of galvanized that whole movement.

That's pretty cool. And so did you say that you bought an existing event or did you guys.

Yeah, we bought the Chicago Comic Con. Yeah, at the time. And so it was maybe 2,3000 people in a hotel. We moved it to a convention center, and we had over 10,000 people there. And it was just a mob scene. It was crazy.

For those of us who are listening that are deal junkies, that are deal nerds or deal geeks, how would did you guys do? Like a cash. You don't have to tell numbers and stuff. But how did you go about that? Because you probably had never bought an event before. So I'm kind of curious how that worked and how you structured something like that.

Yes, how we structured the purchase of it. Basically, there were four owners there, and they were losing money. And what the way the event worked is the way a lot of events work, which is they were. They were using this year's money to pay last year's show. What they would do is they would sell the dealer booths on the Sunday of the show for next year. Show they owed money for that year. They would take all that money that they just brought in for next year to pay for this year. And they got into a situation where it was. It flipped over where. Where they were underwater and they weren't going to get the new show out because they'd already used everybody else's money. And I was friends with one of the owners, and I just said, look, we'll buy the show, we'll take on your obligations. So this way we'll get you a few bucks, and then anybody that's already paid you will honor the agreements with them. So we just knew that we just had to go in and just say yes to whatever needed to be said yes to for the sake of just hosting it.

So was it mostly then that you took over kind of the obligations? You took them out of having to deal with all that, as opposed to a big lump sum cash payment?

Correct? Yeah, it was a combination of some cash and then just the obligations. Right. So people may have spent, I don't remember the numbers, but let's say people had already given them 150, $100,000 for the show that was going to happen, but they already used that to pay last year's bills. So, like, somebody bought a booth. Let's say somebody spent $1,000 to buy a booth. It might cost me, let's say, 200, 250 bucks to honor that obligation. So even though I didn't have the cash, it didn't cost me dollar for dollar to take on that obligation.

That's really cool. And then you set about growing it, and you owned media because you had the magazine. So tell us a little bit about how that worked.

So also again, because there wasn't Internet, there wasn't an Internet, there wasn't social media. So. And it wasn't like the newspapers and the TV stations cared about this stuff, and there was not that kind of movies or TV shows about this. So there wasn't this network to just get fans. So what we did was we advertised like crazy in our magazines, of course, and then we also enlisted all the local comic book stores within a few hundred mile radius. So what we did was because we didn't want them to feel like we were competitive to them, we wanted them to engage with us and to feel like it's part of theirs. What we did was we said, okay, look, you can sell tickets for us. And then we gave them a commission for that. So this way they wouldn't lose their customer to us. They can keep their customer, make a few bucks, and then be part of the show. So we use a lot of that network.

That's a pretty fantastic model for people that are thinking about getting into that kind of stuff. Now, what we've seen, we sold a company to one of our events, to Clarion Events, which is a Blackstone company that owns a bunch of events. And what we've seen, that was really, really helpful and Unique about ours versus most of the other events they've got is that we have media, and you have media also makes a huge difference. Right. I mean, if you're gonna feel like just going out and trying to sell a bunch of tickets to an event without already having aggregated the eyeballs is pretty daggone tough. Right? But you had the ability to do that because you already had this. And then you have this huge affiliate channel that you created as well. And then you, as you said, you galvanized all those people around supporting the event, which is brilliant. So for somebody that's thinking about that now, they're thinking, okay, well, if I can go and acquire or build media, and then I want to do an event and have people affiliate support, how did you. Was it like a 5050 split and you kind of did phone outreach to these stores, or how did you. How did you bring them on, and what did you incentivize them with?

Yeah, and at the time, it was definitely all phone calls. No question about it. We'd get them flyers, we'd get them counter things for their countertops. I want to say it was like 25% if something in that range. Great. But also, we also knew that people don't come to these type of events by themselves. They bring a friend, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a parent, a child. They definitely bring somebody. So we also really incentivize people to bring. Bring a peer.

How did you do that?

Get that word out. That's awesome. Yeah. We would offer, you know, bring a friend and get a. Whatever. Right. So. So it was always. It was always trying to get the next best person to come along with you. And that's really. That's really what's worked. I mean, when you think about, like, even how these movies, the superhero movies have exploded, they're events. People aren't going by themselves, and they're not just going on a date. They're literally bringing all their friends to make it an experience. And that's what we try to do even back then.

And you did such an amazing job with the costumes and everything, and all the things expanding, as you said, like identifying and testing within your media, action figures and other interests. How did you go about researching that?

Was it just like.

It started with an idea. Hey, that we should check action figures, or. Or were you polling or somehow getting data or anything that you could use to determine what things to test?

It was nothing like that. It was literally us and our editors. We were the demographic of our audience. I was 21, 22 when I started, but I looked like I was 14. So my average age was only a few years younger than me. And the same thing with our editor at the time, my editor in chief, you know, when I was a few years younger than me, even. So what we did was we just wrote about the things that we loved, right? So if Dungeons and Dragons was hot, we love that. We grew up collecting action figures, too, so why not write about it? We always had this philosophy that there were no rules. As long as we were making money, there was nobody to tell us what to do. Like, who can tell us what to do? As long as I don't have to ask somebody for money, I could do whatever I want. So if the editors wanted to write about stuff, it's like, okay, you want eight more pages in the book to write about it? Okay, great, we'll do that. And it worked. And then we would take those pages, and then we'd call up Hasbro and Mattel and say, hey, we're writing about action figures. Are you guys interested? And by the way, they're the Marvel and DC figures. It's like, okay, great, we'll do that. So we always went into the areas that we had fun with.

And I love how you reached out to kind of the bigger corporate folks. That's kind of intimidating for most people. So what, other than that you didn't know any better that you couldn't do that? What did you do? Who do you reach out to? If somebody's thinking about, you know, I don't know how that's amazing how he connected to those folks. What would you tell them to do when? Like, how would they reach out to whom?

So my last name is Seamus, and my nickname is Shameless. So right off the bat, I will talk to anybody about anything. And I'm also. I'm not afraid to ask, you know, And I also respond to that if, you know, I'm the first one to offer up an idea or suggestion or a contact to somebody else. But I'm also not afraid to ask for that. And I also kind of joke to myself that wherever I go, I always joke that I'm the biggest loser in the room because I take the most chances. I send out tons of emails, I send out tons of phone. I make tons of phone calls. And I can't tell you that my response rate, how low it is, but I don't care, because the ones that say yes, we then work with them.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

I love it. So.

And when you were reaching out, did you target Like a kind of a job description or like, because those are huge companies, how did you know or decide who to reach out to?

So we did a lot of stuff back in the day, which was pretty revolutionary. So what we did was we were indiscriminant about getting the magazines into the hands of people. So I would take a case of books and send it to the head of PR at Hasbro, and then I would take a case of books and send it to the head of Mattel pr, and then I would send it to the studios and the television networks, and they would get a case of magazines about comic books. And they wouldn't throw it out. They would stick it on their desk, and everybody that walked by, they'd hand it to. And then eventually they were not going to just throw it out. They were going to give it to somebody who they knew care about this stuff. And that's what wound up happening, was it wound up into the hands of the people that wanted it the most. And ultimately we built a huge network of people. And to this day, I have friends that were like, oh, you know, I kept getting this magazine, and then eventually I decided to read it, and it was your magazine. And I've become friends with them.

That's really cool.

So we were really just indiscriminate about getting the product out there.

I love that you sent a case of magazines, you didn't send one, you sent a case. And that's pretty smart because they're either gonna throw it away, in which case, no loss a few bucks, right? But if they pick it up, they're gonna be not just passing it along and forgetting about it, they're gonna keep one, and then they're gonna give everybody that. They're like, oh, you should check this out. That's super smart. I've never heard anybody do that before.

Brilliantly brilliant people. They gave it to me, became addicted to it, because then they want to come back every month saying, did the new copies come in? And I just spoke to somebody recently. We had a magazine called inquest, which is about Magic, the Gathering, and the whole D and D and card game world. And he told me that when our case of magazines used to show up to their office, it would literally shut down. Everybody would grab their copies, go to their desk, read the magazine, and literally productivity went to zero because everybody had to find out what was going on.

So you.

And so you sent this. You didn't just do it one time, you did it for months.

Oh, every month. Yeah. It was easier just to set Up a standing order list and just send out, you know, 50 cases of books every time they came off the press.

I love that.

Just try to figure out one here, one there. You know, they were. Once you print the magazine, it was 30 cents a copy. So 40 copies was $12. Right. Plus shipping. It didn't cost that much. It would have cost more to take two copies and stick it in the mail than it would have to just ship a case out.

That's so smart. Really, really love that. Now then, you operated this kind of empire of stuff for about how long?

That went on for over 20 years.

And then you sold out to somebody.

Yeah. So what I did was I took in some capital and did a reverse merger, took the company public. And that's. And prior to. But even prior to that, I started rolling up a lot of the independent comic cons out there. So we had about three comic cons and I bought about 15 of them. You know, after that. It was when the. When the economy started going down back in 2008 and nine magazines became. That business became impossible to run. So as we were kind of exiting the magazine business and everything was going digital, I mean, we were at a point where nobody. Back in 2008, 9 and 10, if you remember back, everybody was under this thought that with the new iPhone and the iPad, that nobody and facebook coming out, that nobody was ever going to see each other yet. Like, everybody's going to go digital and never be face to face. So while everybody was saying nobody's going face to face, I was acquiring all the face to face events out there because I knew that it's. Because what I saw was happening was even though these social networks were forming, I noticed that groups of people were forming that never had access to each other. And I was like, one day those people are going to want to get together in face. And we got to have a vehicle for that to happen. And that's when I started buying up the comic cons. I love that.

So now I have all kinds of questions. So tell me. Let's talk first about the reverse merger, because that is you basically either take a company public, do a registration statement, file all your documents, and get underwriters to help, or you buy a company that's already public, take your company, fold it in, and have market makers, which there are advantages and disadvantages. I know one of the big ones is that short sellers can come in, people that already had shares in a shell and things like that. Tell us about your experience with that. Like, how did you decide on that versus public offering and ipo. And what did you think of it? What was the good, what was the bad?

Well, so to me, it was always, what's the easiest access to capital out there? Was always the question for me, which was, you're in an economy where people were very, very afraid to invest in stuff, because especially, what would their exit be? In that type of environment, and literally any environment, you could take it today or tomorrow or two years ago. Everybody wants some sort of liquidity or some ability to get out. So I always felt like the public markets were the best because also, I trust our audience. When you think about our audience out there, there's hundreds of millions of them out there. So now they have a chance to invest in the type of business that they love, that they grew up or that they like. And if we're the leading player here was a chance for them to take a piece of us and now let them make the money versus everybody else out there, because they're the ones that understand what's going on. So I always felt the public markets were a great vehicle for us to be able to have an exit, but also raise capital. And I also think there's a lot more capital available to public companies out there. I mean, you even see it today in the environment we have today, right? You have all these small private businesses that it's impossible to get cash. But every single public company is drawing down from their line of credit. They're doing shelves, they're doing pipes. They're doing all kinds of vehicles to sell shares, to raise capital. So I always felt that that was a great vehicle. This one in particular was a little bit more challenging in terms of the regulations and the SEC and things like that. This is the second time I've done it. And, you know, so there was definitely.

The second time you did a reverse merger.

Yeah, that. I've done a reverse merger. So, you know, so I was definitely a lot more aware of what's involved. But with anything like this, it's all a matter of who your partners are with it, you know, and, you know, it could be a great experience. It could be a terrible experience. In this particular case, you know, we got to the point where I wanted to. Once we did that, I wanted to move on, you know, kind of with my life right afterwards. Right. Once we got the company to a point where it was settled financially. Right. I've been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week for many years, you know, so for me, it was a time to, you know, take a break. My kids were getting older and I wanted to spend more time with them.

So where did you look for the public shell again?

Just through networking and contacting people that I knew that dealt with public companies. You know, even today, I have a lot of friends that are in the public company space that help people take their companies public. There's really a couple of ways to do that. There's the traditional IPO, which everybody hears of. There's filing, what's called an S1, which is, you know, you could take yourself public, really. And then today there's still, you know, reverse mergers are harder, but they're available. But there's things called SPACs. There's all kinds of ways now to take your company public and to have access to the public markets.

How did you guard against the other folks? I know folks who have, including clients. I'm a recovering attorney, so I've had done several reverse mergers too. And one of the challenges that raises its head occasionally is people who already own the public shares and wait for you to kind of get things going and the price goes up, and then they dump as many as they can. They do what's called short selling, where they sell now with the right to, you know, the obligation to replace the shares later.

How do you.

How did you go about controlling that? Or was it not really a problem just because it was such a big fan base and those short seller nasty people weren't really aware of what was going on?

It's the. You only worry about those things when you're putting in a business that's. That has a skeptical opportunity or future to begin with. Right? Because if you're putting in a really good business that's on a scale where it's gonna make a lot of money or it's moving towards that, then those people are screwed. They're stuck in a position where they've got a tight squeeze on you. So the only way to flush them out is to do well. So the only people that are worried about that as a business owner are the ones that probably should have taken their company public if they thought their only chance was to have some short window, either raise capital or sell shares and not really have a really good business plan. So I was never really in that position where I had to worry about those types of people because we always had a very strong, fundamental business.

And how did you. Did you draw on the audience that you had for marketing the public shares?

I tried not to do anything like that. It was important for our audience to know that we're public But I never did anything that would market the shares or you know, it was always just, hey, you know, we're doing really great things, you know, and if you feel like you want to be a part of it, great. If not, that's fine. I never tried to sell a share of the company that way.

Okay, cool.

And now let's talk about the roll ups. So super, super smart strategy. You saw the economy hitting the skids back in the great, what they call the Great Recession now, right. Which is kind of cool. And you said there's a lot of opportunity because people are kind of freaking out with all of the virtual connectivity that exists. What did you do in approaching those other events? Did you approach them directly because you knew them or reach out to them and have conversations? I know a lot of people want to know, how do you reach out when you are about to acquire somebody? What's the best way to do that?

Call them? You know, people, people knew who we were, right? We didn't really have an issue of hey, you know, this is who we are. Everybody knew who we were.

Okay?

And then because the economy was, was, was not going well, typically people were having financial issues or their shows weren't going as well, maybe they needed some cash. So we basically took the approach that we said, look, you know, you have a show in a local market, we want to be in that market. We could do one of two things. We could work out a deal to acquire your show or we could just put on a show in your market. And you know, we would love, we don't want to do the second, we'd love to figure out a way to do the first. Right? And we said to them, look, you know, you have a show. Typically a lot of these shows were put on by people who already had, who were dealers or retailers. And we said, look, because we had all the other shows. The deals were typically, look, if you gotta get some cash, we'll give you a little bit of cash. But it was really, let us take over your show and we'll give you space not only at that show, but all of our other shows. So what they might typically spend $1,000 a booth for. If I gave them two booths at 20 other shows, that's equivalent to $40,000 in cash that they'd have to spend, but now they don't have to spend it. They get that through me and it doesn't cost me that much. So, you know, and if I could give them one or two years of those type of deals at our shows, you know, it wouldn't cost me cash immediately out of my pocket. I could. I could. I could bring it out over a period of time, and I would have a lot more dealers at the shows. Because now that person say, hey, I'm going. And he tell his other dealer friends, hey, we're going. And we cut a lot of those kind of deals in these markets where just for very little to no cash, we were able to acquire a lot of these events.

That's my favorite way to acquire things. So you went to the event and said, we'll give you a booth because you're a dealer for your dealer, your other business, not for the event, but for your other business at these shows as part of the acquisition package, Right?

Yeah, correct. Right. And then. Not that we were threatening, but the threat was always that we'll just be a competitor, and then you really just won't have a show, you know.

So we call that the Velvet Pipe wrench offer. It's just, you know, we would love to work with you, but, you know, if not, we're going into this market one way or the other. You know, how about if we do it as friends?

And we didn't want to have kind of like a hammer over people's head that way, so we really couched it where, look, we just want to work with you. Let's figure it out. We did everything we could to do that.

So I love the creativity of finding the other business that they had and giving them booths to help pay for the price. What other things did you do to help not have to come out of pocket with cash? What other strategies did you find that were effective in acquiring those other businesses?

In some cases, it was working with them on marketing also, because they were typically the larger player in that market. So what we'd also do is we'd hire them as a consultant to work in marketing for us at that event. So I would say to them, look, not only do you get a booth, but we'll give you a commission on the other booths that you sell, which is what they did to their other show. They also make a lot of extra money there or they can get more booths out of it. So we try to create this economy where, you know, they were the. We also wanted people to feel like when they sold us the show, that it was very friendly. And by giving them that opportunity to make more money by selling it to their peers like they had in the past, people would know that, yes, this was a very friendly transaction.

That's fantastic. Any other strategies on the. On the acquisition side, I'm trying to.

Think of what else we did. Yeah, we kept it pretty simple.

Did you do any non cash where you just did kind of straight mergers? So you basically offered shares in the public company in exchange for the.

Oh, no, we weren't public at the time, so I did all private and nobody got shares in our company over it. Okay. Okay, great.

That's awesome. That's really, really cool. Okay, so now you did the roll up and then were you thinking about Exit at that point or was it just kind of let's grow and see how we can serve our audience?

So here's the crazy thought, which is I knew I needed a break. And because I was so aligned with the brand and who I was and who the brand was, it was really me. Ironically, I knew my only way out was to make it much bigger to the point where you can always get somebody else to run it. So ironically, I had to grow the company. I had to take it public so that I could tell somebody else that, hey, you know, you can find somebody else with more public company experience. You could find somebody that's run a bigger business than me. Right. So it was like, ironically, I couldn't exit at the size I was at. I had to supersize the business in order to get out of it. So that's what I did.

Love it, love it. And then when did you ultimately exit and how did you find the bought it?

Well, once we were a public company, then it was a lot easier because my shares were public. I couldn't. I could pretty much. So I worked it out with the board where it was like, look, you know, it's time. It's time for me. We'll make an easy transition. We'll find somebody else. And then so we moved one of the other board members into my role, and then I stepped down.

Okay, and did you like, did the company or is it still going today? Or did like, was the company itself bought by another company?

Point. No, it's still a public company. But a few years ago, we got into a situation with them, me and my brother, and we left. And we're totally not affiliated with the company anymore at all. But my brother and I started a new company to really leverage all of the assets and resources and knowledge and experience that we have, this new venture. And that's gone extraordinarily well.

What is that company?

So we've started something called Ace Universe. And our theory was that the whole world is changing again and we want to be able to take that into the what's the future of live experiences in the superhero space? And what is the future of the superhero space itself, we found was that the hardest form of the things that were the most difficult in the past was distribution, getting people. And now with social media, that became a lot easier. And then the other thing that happened was, in my mind was called live streaming, which was how do we take our content and let everybody around the world have access to it uniformly at the same time? And when live streaming happened, that was like the eureka moment for us where we said, okay, let's get the biggest celebrities in the world, and rather than do big events, let's do more VIP and boutique events.

Okay.

Instead of trying to appeal to comic book people, let's appeal to superhero fans. Because you have a world today where 95% of the people that love superheroes never read a comic book. They love it. Movies and the TV shows. So we said, how do we open up and broaden our audience? And that's what we set out to do. So we said, okay. We made offers to Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, Henry Cavill, Superman, Chris Evans, Captain America, and Tom Holland, Spider man. And they all said yes. And we were like, holy, we're in business now. All the biggest four celebrities in the world at the time were like, we want to do this. So we hosted our first two events back in December of 17 and then January of 2018. They were massive successes. We had so many people show up, they got to take photos and autographs. And then we live streamed the panel, and we made it a lot more inclusive. You know, these other shows, sometimes they got so big that you'd have to exclude people. People couldn't get into the panels. People couldn't get the exclusives. People couldn't participate. We wanted a show that everybody could. So we built massive theaters so that everybody could be a part of this thing. And it went really, really well. What.

What does ace stands for?

It's just the number one card in the deck.

And the event. Basically you said, okay, we're going to do this new thing, and it's kind of. It's like a superhero con, basically.

Right.

As opposed to a comic con, is that.

Yeah. And it really appealed to people from all over the world. So unlike a lot of these other comic cons that draw from the local audiences, ours drew from all over the world. So. Yeah. So we had probably 60 plus percent of our audience flew to come to our shows.

That's great.

Yeah. Much more. Higher price point. Yeah. Now, unfortunately, you know what's happened with the virus and what's going on in the world certainly hurt us a lot in terms of being able to host these events. But when the time comes, we'll come back.

No. So are you postpone any of the events?

Yes. We had a show in Boston that was imminent to happen and it got canceled. So they shut down all the resources in the Boston area. So that got canceled and we wound up refunding everybody's money. We just didn't want to have to get caught in limbo as to when the next event is going to be. Show in Seattle, that was supposed to be in July, so that one we postponed. We have two more coming up at the end of the year that we're working towards. But again, we'll see. You know, we'll play by year. If they happen, great. If they don't, you know, we'll figure out when the best time is to do that. You know, first and foremost, you know, it's. We want to make sure that people aren't harmed in any way. And whether it's our fans, our dealers, the celebrities, our staff, we want to make sure everyone's safe about.

And what size are these events?

On average, they've been averaging anywhere between 15 to 25,000 people over three days. Yeah, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yeah. So those are boutique events for us. Yeah.

That's fantastic.

I love that.

Yeah, we have a digital marketing event. We had about 10,000 people scheduled to come here second, so we obviously weren't able to do that. And it's so nice how friendly everyone has been on the reschedule. Like the celebrities that you've already paid, all that in the hotels and everybody. It's really nice because they could all be, I mean, you, you could argue force majeure and things like that, but nobody was even like at all trouble with that. Did you kind of have that same experience?

Yeah, absolutely. The one thing is that everybody likes to personalize these type of experiences, but everybody's been hurt equally or even quite unequally in a lot of areas. So we find that you really find out who your true partners are and your true advocates in the world are. I mean, we've had some vendors that have been just absolutely awful to work with in this. And it's like, where's your compassion and empathy? Where's your. Where's your sensibilities in these markets? And then we've had people that have just been, you know, bending over backwards to accommodate, you know, not just us, but us with them as well. Right. It's run the gamut. You know, other than other than two vendors, you know, everybody, you know, 25 other vendors have just been extraordinarily pleasant to work with.

That's great. What would you say that you learned through all of your other wizard and Comic Con event experience and business that you did differently in ace? Because you're kind of in a similar business, different focus, but different, but similar business. When you went in and started ace, did you say, these are some things that we should do differently now based on everything that we've learned from this other stuff? Anything like that that comes to mind?

Yeah, there's been a whole bunch of those kind of things. One of them is the team. So when we started this new eggs, we didn't even want to attempt to work with anybody but the best people we've ever worked with before. They had to be the best of the best for us. The second thing was we, right from the start, and this is over three, almost three years ago, we were like, we're going to have a distributed company, meaning we do have an office with a couple of desks, but everybody's all over the country, and we don't want anyone to. We want to be able to bring the best people in wherever they are, not the people that are willing to come to an office from 9 to 5 in New York City. Right. So right from the start, we were going to do that. The second thing was on the celebrity side. We used to bring 20, 30, 40, 50 celebrities to the show. And we said, we're just not interested in the quantity. We're only interested in quality. We want to get the best talent, no matter what they are, whatever the level of franchise. It could be a small TV show, but if they're the number one person on that TV show, then we're going to get that person. So for us, it was only about quality over quantity. And we felt that way about our fans as well. You know, we didn't want to go out and try to compete with trying to get 50 or 100,000 people. We just wanted to get the people that cared the most about it first. And we took that approach with every aspect of our business. We didn't want to try to oversell it. You know, we didn't try to go and say, okay, now people have to pay for this content. If you want to see it, it's free on Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, we don't care. You could buy a ticket to the show and see it, or you could see it for free in your house. We just Want accessibility on every level. Because we knew that over time, the more people see it, the more they're going to want to experience it.

Right. Super smart. On the hiring side, how did you go about that? What's the hiring? How do you find the best people and hire them?

The beauty is that because we've been in the business a long time, we just cherry picked all the people that.

You kind of knew what you wanted.

Yeah, there's this woman, Marlene, that runs the company with us. My brother and I even had a discussion. We're like, if Marlene says no, I don't even know if we want to do it. Like, that's how there's so many details and the business is so complicated in a lot of areas. It's like if she said no, it's like we'd have to hire like a few other people like to do it. Right. It's like if she, you know, we needed her to say yes, you know, so. And that's how we felt about almost everybody that we brought in. It's like there's nobody that's their peer in what they do now.

You don't have the magazines anymore, correct?

Correct. Yeah.

So do you have a media that you use now or is it straight paid ads and things like that?

Yeah, so for us, it's all about social media. Email database, collecting data, information and using it very, very sparingly and wisely with our audience. And we use everything. We use Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, we use email databases, newsletters, we use our website. It's literally every and any resource we can to access our audience. I love it.

Is there any one thing that seems to be like head and shoulders above the rest as a category?

You know, they're all amazing at very specific things. Like email is very, very effective, you know, for us, you know, in getting information to our customer, resourcing, following up things like that. Social media is really great. When we want to distribute videos or how tos or make announcements, you know, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or Insta. And then engagement on Insta Story with polling and, and then posting our videos and live streaming you. It's like we try to use every media in the most way for, for the people that want to access us that way.

Okay, I love that. I have one more business question and then I'm going to ask you a couple of fun questions, not that business isn't fun. And what is the monetization strategy? So obviously there's ticket sponsors. Is there any other monetization strategies or Are there any other monetization strategies you're using for Ace?

Yeah, so we definitely sell booths at the shows and we were working on sponsorships and then also we sell photo ops and autographs as well. So that's another area where, you know, people might pay upwards of 5, $600 for a VIP plan for one of the celebrities. You know, so we've had cast of the Avengers where that photo might be $1,500, where you get a, you know, you get a photo with six or seven Avengers out there. So, you know, it's a pretty special moment, you know, that's near impossible to recreate because they're always mixing and matching the different cast members and stuff. So, yeah, so that's kind of, that's kind of for us, you know, the big areas of, you know, for us that we've been able to monetize. And then as time gets on, we were in the process of creating exclusive products that are only available at the shows and we're working on now that kind of in a video commerce way.

What kinds of things would you do? What kinds of products?

Like exclusive Funko Pops, exclusive games or toys, or all kinds of comic books that we've done or prints that we've been able to do. So, yeah, there's lots of different things that we were working on that we were doing and working on towards creating something where people, when they either come to the show or are part of our experience that they had access to.

Okay, I want to ask you now about a little bit more about your art which we were talking about before. You have, as I understand, developed a patented process that is involved in your art.

Well, it's not patented, but it's unique in the way I do it. And the tools that I've had to create for it in order to do it are. Yeah. So from that standpoint. And it's taken a really, really long time to get the process right. So, you know. But yeah, so I do these individual drops of paint.

Now what caused you, what helped you to think of doing things that way is that like you were studying and you thought pointillism, but only maybe dimensional pointillism, or what do we call it?

So there's. So some people have tried to call pointillism. I've tried to come up with a few names for it. Nothing that's kind of stuck. But ironically, I started painting about five and a half years ago and it's kind of when I was at a point where I was retired and, you know, I needed a Creative outlet. You know, I was trying to think about whenever you're getting into a creative atmosphere, you have to be honest. You cannot try to tell a story that's not 100% true. So for me, it was, how do I tell that story? So when I was thinking about kind of what happened in my life, I got to the point where I can make almost anything in our world successful because of the reach of our magazines and the comic cons. If somebody had a comic book property, I could literally make it successful because I could write about it, feature them at the shows, and then a month later or two months later, they get a movie or television deal. So I had a lot of people reaching out to me that were my friends, maybe I thought they were my friends. So I got to that point where I really pushed people away because I didn't know if people were using me because of my access or because they really wanted to be my friend. So for years, I was pushing people away. And then when I decided to paint, I said to myself, well, you know, I love meeting people, I love connecting with people. How do I do that again? How do I reach back out? And then in that process of thinking about reaching out to people, I thought about how do I extrude the paint to reach back out to the viewer and the audience. Yeah. And that's kind of what made me think about it. And then took me about six months to develop that process. But once I did, then all of a sudden it really came through. And then all the different patterns here, you know, they all mean different things as well that are actually quite entrepreneurial. Yeah.

Can you tell us a couple of them?

Yeah. So I've had. Luckily, I've had a very blessed life. So all my pieces are very. They're meant to be very positive and optimistic and make people feel good. These pieces right here, it's a pattern called Dancing Birds. So it's all about being very flexible and organic and go with the flow. And all the paint exists on the canvas. It doesn't go off the side. So it's all very self contained. So it's this thought process that no matter how difficult things get, there's always a way to manipulate and maneuver and to kind of really find your way. Yeah, so that's. That's that kind of thing. These. That piece up there, that's called energy. And it's really. It's. It's a lot of. It's actually. They're all circles that. That form this bigger piece. And it's all meant to Radiate, you know, kind of from your center, you know, outwards, and the circles actually go from being really small to much bigger. But it's also, as you grow, you know, your circle gets bigger and you radiate more and love that. Yeah.

How about the one Jason's interested in?

That one? That one's called Bloom, and that was the first time I did a different type of process where there are still the same drops in the circle, but they go from smaller to bigger in a way that I never did before. And that's called Bloom, and it's all about growing and blossoming out there. I love it.

I love it. Okay, a couple quick questions to close. What are you most excited about right now?

But believe it or not, as much as we live in a world where it's very, very difficult, I still always am the optimist here, and I know it's still a very, very difficult time for people. Basically, my company has been effectively gotten to the point where there's really very little we could do right now. So we've been hit as hard as anybody else out there. But I do see that right now it's going to create a lot of opportunities for the future. And, you know, it's. How do we. How do we use this time to figure out how to, you know, do things that we've always wanted to do but didn't have a chance to do? Or you get so caught up in your old ways that you still can't move forward? And that's really a lot about what we're doing, and we're being very, very innovative where we're not using this time as, oh, I can't wait to get back to doing what we used to do. Right now it's, how do we. How do we get back to even reinventing ourselves, moving forward?

That's great. That's really exciting. What about favorite books, podcasts, resources, things that you follow to help you grow both as a business person and individual?

So I love Simon Sinek. So, you know, he's got a new book out now. I've always been a big fan and friend and things like that, so he's great. Jim Kwik as well, just came out with a new book called Limitless. This gentleman. I'm friends with Max Lugavere. Max Lugavere. He's got a. He's got a podcast and a book called the Genius Life, and it's all about. It was really about eating right for your brain. So I try to be very, very healthy during these times. So It's a lot of that kind of stuff. And also I love this. This guy named Medical Medium. Quite a few books now on. So I drink fresh celery juice every morning. And it's. I'm really trying to be super. I have been health conscious for a long time, but, you know, to try to be. Even using this opportunity now to really be cautious about what I put in my body and kind of in my mind as well.

Very, very smart. So for people that would like to reach you, that are interested in your art, I know you're on Saatchi, but you probably have your own sites and social and all that. What's the best way for people to get ahold of you, all the places that you are?

So you can always reach out through social network. I mean, that's really the easiest way to do it. I'm on Instagram. It's my name, Arabshamus. I'm on Twitter, Arab. You could reach me through LinkedIn, through Facebook, through Instagram. I'm literally on every single channel. I try to be very accessible so people can absolutely reach out to me through every one of those sources. And I'm pretty good about getting back.

That's fantastic. And what about the event? If anybody's interested in finding more about the event, I'm sure it has its own site as well.

Yeah, it's aceuniverse.com so people can reach us there or go to Ace Comic Con as well. And the best thing to do is either through Facebook or through the website. There's tons of different ways to connect with us.

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate you taking the time to do that. And everybody that's listening or watching should definitely follow up and get in touch and see what you're doing, because you're doing some really, really cool things.

Thank you. I love talking about superheroes. Anytime.

Awesome.

Thanks.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Frazier. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information, go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening.

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