By R.V. Baugus
Steve Koonin is a busy man these days. The chief executive officer of the Atlanta Hawks and State Farm Arenas wears many hats.Steve Koonin is a busy man these days. The chief executive officer of the Atlanta Hawks and State Farm Arena wears many hats. Steve (“Don’t call me Mr. Koonin!”) recently carved out a few minutes on the day of Game 4 of the NBA Hawks competing in the Eastern Conference to talk about a number of topics near and dear to his heart, many of which he will share as the Closing Keynote Speaker at VenueConnect in Atlanta with a presentation titled “From Venue To A Vehicle For Reopening.” His is a session that you will not want to miss and will be complete with insights on the role of venues today, the role and necessity of innovation, and even a story of stories about how he broke into the industry. Sorry, no spoiler alert here. You’ll have to be there. to talk about a number of topics near and dear to his heart, many of which he will share as the Closing Keynote Speaker at VenueConnect in Atlanta with a presentation titled From Venue To A Vehicle For Reopening. His is a session that you will not want to miss and will be complete with insights on the role of venues today, the role and necessity of innovation, and even a story of stories about how he broke into the industry. Sorry, no spoiler alert here. You’ll have to be there.
I CAN TELL FROM THE TITLE OF YOUR SESSION THAT SOME CHANGE IS IN THE WORKS FOR VENUES, AND IN THE TYPE THAT YOU OPERATE, DEFINITELY WITH ARENAS. HOW ACCURATE IS THAT?
Steve Koonin: Arenas have changed from venues to a reflection of the city. To me, venues can be a vehicle for recovery. How your venue means something in your marketplace I think is the future of the venue. We’re at a real reflection point. Let’s be honest, nobody ever thought that an arena or stadium would do voting, would do vaccinations, would do food. That’s the stuff I want to talk about is the ability to be so important that it changes your perception in your marketplace. We’ve seen that in ours.
We have to help people reimagine and think differently because if you’re going to go back and open up, pay x amount to the promoter, I don’t know if you will be successful, but if you demonstrate to the community that you’re part of the fabric of the community and that you stand for something, I think people will value the venue a lot more in the future than they have in the past.
I really believe that venues have a different role today than if we would have had this conversation two years ago.
TAKE A LEAP FORWARD NOW AND TALK ABOUT THESE CHANGES THAT YOU HAVE JUST MENTIONED IN MORE DEPTH.
When you look at a venue on the outside they have scale, they have mass, and people bring events there, but until recently they really haven’t served multiple functions in the community. They’ve shown multiple pieces of entertainment. Then the pandemic comes forward and all of a sudden you have to have a place for people to vote so you can socially distance and have incredible WiFi and technology that allows people from all over the city to get there.
We were the first arena to open our doors to voting. It was the largest single arena voting site in the history of the US with 3,000 people able to come in and vote safely and securely and taking advantage of our trained staff of hospitality, our technology, our location. Next comes vaccinations and we were leading the charge. Where’s the scale coming from? Stadiums and arenas. And then, kitchens during the pandemic. Our seven kitchens and Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s 11 kitchens all working around the clock to create meals for the hungry, for healthcare workers, and our role wasn’t to host the next concert, our role was to help the community get through the crisis.
When you become a fabric of the community, you become a place that people care about and a place that people know stands for good, then you’re increasing your role and your relevance to people throughout the community. We’ve seen that happen.
ONCE YOU GET TO AND THROUGH THAT POINT, IS IT TRUE ABOUT THE OLD SAYING OF “NO TURNING BACK?”
Correct, and there should not be any turning back. I look at the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dodger Stadium. They did a terrific job both with vaccinations and with voting. What do we have? We have scale, parking lots, seats, square footage that – even a small venue has more than a library or a school. If you look at the way voting has been done in the past and even the way that food distribution been done in the past, it’s always been on a very small scale. Now these venues – which a lot of them are community supported and city supported – are really paying it back to the residents of those markets. I think there is no going back for us. I think there are more and more and more things that we can and we should be doing with our venues to make sure that our cities and towns have everything they need for people to be successful.
OBVIOUSLY YOU NOW HAVE TO BE PREPARED FOR ANYTHING WHEN YOU GET INTO THE PUBLIC ASSEMBLY VENUE INDUSTRY, RIGHT?
You look for opportunities and they don’t always have to be done in a negative. We saw voting as an opportunity, not a negative, because the formula was right, meaning connectivity, hospitality, scale.
I’m going to do a lot of speaking on our venue. We have a barber shop, we have a distillery, we have Top Golf, we have different things because the consumers are changing. I’m going to end with talking about how innovations fuels recovery. The innovation doesn’t always have to be bricks and mortar capital, but looking at your business differently.
WHAT NEW IMPLEMENTATIONS DO YOU SEE GOING FORWARD FOR VENUES AND THEIR STAFFS AND FANS AS WELL? WE THINK OF A LOT OF THOSE AS PHYSICAL IMPLEMENTATIONS BUT WHAT ARE SOME OF THE INNOVATIONS?
I think the innovation of moving from seats to spaces is a really important piece. I think how people use your venue is something today that’s far different than yesterday. Growing up, we would go to a ballgame, sit in the seats, eat and accept a hot dog that was cooked on a roller, stuffed in aluminum foil hours earlier, have a beer and never really got up and moved.
Today, a goldfish has a longer attention span than the average Millennial. That’s a scientific fact. So, you can’t go to market the same way. You can’t just have pedestrian offerings and think you’re going to be successful. You are competing with a great night out. You’re competing with people’s living rooms, and you have to innovate and you have to create and you have to replicate the best night out in your city. If you can do that, then you’re going to have tremendous success.
TALK A LITTLE MORE ABOUT MEALS YOU SERVED TO FRONT LINE WORKERS AND THOSE WHO JUST NEEDED A MEAL.
We did it three different ways. The first thing we did immediately when the country shut down is we realized there would be a lot of kids that would not be getting meals at school so how could we help and how could we supplement that. One of the things we had done was build 27 basketball courts throughout the metro area in underserved communities and we used those and turned them into pop-up grocery stores. Families could come by and get two weeks of groceries, vegetables, fruit, produce, dairy for free from those Hawks’ courts.
We created a delivery service and partnered with a company called Gooder which is a very cool food and security company. We partnered with State Farm who happens to be our naming rights sponsor and obviously one of the great companies in this country to help people in difficult times.
We created these grocery stores all throughout town that provided two weeks of groceries at a time and evolved that to a senior home food delivery. So, the first immediate thing was to make sure that we could help the communities around our courts which were some of the most underserved communities in the city.
The next piece we did, we wanted to keep and assist two different groups. A lot of medical workers leaving the hospital going into grocery stores were getting shot and they’re booed and even told they could not walk in wearing scrubs. We created a program called Healthcare Heroes where we took a bunch of restaurants who were obviously closed and struggling and turned them into commissaries. We made 8,000 meals per day for healthcare workers to take home to their families. So, when you got off your shift whether you were a doctor or orderly, you had a great meal pre-cooked, packaged and you could just walk out the door with it and go home and avoid going to the grocery store.
The third piece was working with the Atlanta Food Bank. We have seven huge kitchens in our building, so there was no reason for them not to be working. Our partners at Levy and our chefs came in and, again, created meals for months.
That’s what I’m talking about as looking at the assets you have and the problems you have and match them together.
IS STATE FARM ARENA NOW PLAYING AT CAPACITY?
We started with friends and family and then on January 26 we went to 1,700 people. We took that up post All-Star Game that we hosted to 3,200 people in mid-March. We went full bore except for some restricted NBA seats since the playoffs started in mid-May. We’ve been sold out 16,500 for every game. Knock wood, no issues.
DO PEOPLE NEED CONFIDENCE STILL TO ATTEND EVENTS?
The confidence of seeing it happen in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles now, and I think people see there is some genuine acceptance that now it’s working, and then obviously having vaccinated sections and vaccinated-only concerts like you saw with the Foo Fighters in Madison Square Garden last week. Those are the kind of events that continue to build confidence and bring it back.
For members of IAVM, this should be a record-setting year. It’s just, let’s get there, and let’s get there safely.
WHAT IS A TAKEAWAY YOU WOULD LIKE FOR YOUR PEERS TO GO HOME WITH?
I would like people to walk out and look at the people they either came with or work with when they get back and say, do we represent our home towns? How are we doing things differently? How are we taking lessons that are learned in the pandemic and applying them for the future? And how well do we really understand our customers? At the end of the day, the more that customer feels that you understand them, the more patronage they’re going to give you. We have so many options for entertainment in the world and the biggest one we usually compete with is our own living rooms at home. A night out has to be extraordinary. Are we extraordinary or are we just average? Then, how we get to extraordinary doesn’t mean expensive. It just means that from the service to the smiles to the experience means something. How are you thinking about your experience in your market for your customers?
