Posts Tagged ‘interviews’

What does your normal workday entail?

We typically focus on three core areas everyday:  servicing our clients, researching the industry’s best practices, and developing Protégé’s domain brokerage segment.  We are always focused on delivering elite service to our clients.  As a result we spend a significant amount of our time tending to the individual needs of our Professional clients.  We offer a customized approach to building our athlete’s brand and therefore our services for each athlete have a great deal of variability.  On any given day we could be updating content on an athlete’s website, contacting potential sponsors, or scheduling an athlete’s speaking engagements.  We want to produce a platform that allows our client to promote their brand and create revenue.

We also spend a portion of everyday researching the industry’s best practices.  Part of our philosophy is to surround ourselves with models and mentors. With the internet changing trends on a daily basis, we constantly want to be on top of our game.  Learning form other’s helps us to provide our clients with the most proven and creative ways to generate revenue via their website.

Protégé’s domain brokerage segment is still in its infancy.  We are in the process of developing a platform similar to our athlete websites for the domain industry. Our goal is to bring high end cliental to the Domain investing industry and show how lucrative their investment can and will be.

As a professional athlete, what types of struggles are there to preserve your character through the public’s eye?

Media plays a very important role in lives of every athlete.  Until recently media completely controlled the public’s perception of an athlete’s personal life and values.  Unfortunately society has responded with great interest to stories that shine a negative light on many of today’s athletes.  This has created an incentive for media to “stretch” many of the facts to initiate interest for a story.  We have created a platform that helps an athlete present a clear and unbiased picture of their lives by directly interacting with fans.  This eliminates the media as a middle man and allows the athlete to communicate the specifics of their story.  Protégé’s products help an athlete to minimize the struggles that he faces in representing his values and experiences.
Protégé has a strict moral policy that gives our athlete’s audiences confidence in our platform to provide the most honest look into an athlete’s life and personal philosophies.
No matter the sport, ProtégéBranding.com will help build an athlete’s identity outside of the ballpark or arena.

What techniques do you use to intertwine their public life and personal life?

Our goal is to provide a platform that gives our athletes an opportunity to show their personal side through many avenues such as their blog, photos, and guest appearances. Protégé has built a foundation that can be uniquely built to serve the individual needs of any athlete.  We pride ourselves on our innovative culture that allows us to learn and adapt continuously. At no time in history has it been this important for an athlete to understand the value of their individual brand and how they should protect that brand.  We have provided a solution for athlete’s to control their brand and we relentlessly pursue opportunities to increase Protégé’s value to its clients.

With such an innovative company, what was the most challenging part about starting ProtégéBranding.com?

Two things: money and perfecting our platform. As a startup company we have self funded ProtégéBranding.com.  We have had the opportunity to raise start up capital, but we are not interested in losing creative control of the company.  While being self funded allows us to retain control of the company, we have to be very selective in how we allocate resources.  Ultimately this will pay dividends but in the meantime it presents a challenge.

The second big challenge that we have face is perfecting our platform.  Over the past eight months we have gone through many trials and errors.  The good news is that Protégé has developed a consistent platform that we use as a base for creating a unique solution for our athletes.  Perfection may be elusive but we will continually strive to meet this expectation.

Your domain brokerage is very comprehensive and thorough, what is a good first step for someone who wants to get involved but is not sure how?

Inquire at ProtegeBranding.com!!

Once the brand and website have been created for your clients, how do you help maintain their initiatives?

The website as a platform can be built almost immediately but the development of an athlete’s brand is an ongoing process.  Our business is built around providing an athlete with the most effective ways to promote their brands and to communicate with their fans.  For example, Protégé keeps an athlete involved directly with their fans by managing an athlete’s blog, scheduling speaking engagements and producing webinars.  Protégé prides itself on its ability to produce a consistent and clear message of the athlete’s brand to their fans.

At the end of the day, how does ProtégéBranding.com give back to you?

This is a personal question, but we focus on how the business allows us to remain involved with sports.  Being an athlete has been a big part of our lives and we have experienced the same struggles that many of today’s athletes experience.  We want to help athletes to show their fans who they are without distortion from the media.  Also how many athletes do not make enough money to provide themselves with a comfortable living when they leave the athletic field.  Protégé provides a solution for those athletes to pursue their personal passions.  All of which we did not pursue while we were playing the game.

Once burned, Gruler’s learned
By Rick Hurd
Staff columnist
Article Launched: 10/02/2008 06:56:20 PM PDT

NOBODY SAID WISDOM comes disguised as something warm and fuzzy.

Heck, it’s usually quite the opposite. Usually, it’s dark and painful and an experience that you wouldn’t imagine sharing for all the money in the world.

Until, that is, you realize you’ve attained it. Then, you can look back at being 22 years old and getting discarded by the only profession you ever cared for as being a good thing. Then, as Liberty High product Chris Gruler says now, recalling how you were betrayed by your most valuable asset — the one that had netted you $2.5 million — doesn’t lead to irrational thoughts.

“Two years ago, when I was going through my spell, I remember saying that I’d give my bonus away in a heartbeat to be a starting pitcher in the major leagues,” Gruler says. “Now?”

Now? Well, it’s amazing what time and tough love can do. Then, Gruler was an angry, confused bonus-baby-turned-bust with a drinking problem. Now, at 25, he comes across as a grateful and self-assured professional who’s trying to use his experience as a vehicle to teach others.

He’s doing so through ProtégéBranding.com, a business he has founded with close friend Erik Averil that seeks to help athletes maximize the value of their name. And at least initially, this latest venture seems to carry as much promise as Gruler’s baseball career once did. Former All-Star second baseman Roberto Alomar and track star Allyson Felix already are counted as clients.

“We wanted to create streams of income through athletes through the Internet,” Gruler said by phone from his Arizona-based offices. “A lot of athletes don’t understand the value that their name has, and that’s something we’re trying to capture from every one of our clients. We deal with Web development, unique memorabilia, and content that we can sell to help the athlete connect with fans on a personal level. It’s been quite an educational process.”

Yes, but nothing like the one he received in the days that followed the unceremonious end of his baseball career. That moment came when Gruler’s cell phone rang on a February afternoon in 2006, and the voice on the other end, a representative of the Cincinnati Reds, delivered harsh news.

“You’re finished!”

It was, Gruler says now, his nightmare come to life. Four years earlier, the Reds had made him the third overall selection — behind Pittsburgh’s Bryan Bullington and Tampa Bay’s B.J. Upton — in baseball’s amateur draft. He sported a 96-mph fastball and a curve that was so devastating that Reds Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench said it was better than fellow Hall of Famer Tom Seaver’s.

But Gruler’s right shoulder derailed his route to Cooperstown. He noticed it was tired after his first professional season, and it never felt right again. He had multiple surgeries to fix the problem, only to run into more complications. The bottom line, he acknowledges now, is that “my shoulder was unable to hold up to the rigors of professional baseball.”

And in the immediate aftermath, Gruler says he couldn’t deal with that reality. He says he developed a drinking problem “as a way to mask my pain,” that he couldn’t sleep, that his mind never stopped racing. It was a runaway pattern that didn’t change until, at his parents insistence, he started journaling his feelings.

The result, he says, was “250 pages of jibberish,” much of which he says will be recounted in a book he’s in the process of writing. But more important than the content in the book were the lessons he came to realize, the ones he is trying to apply in this new stage of his life.

“He’s always been a compassionate, genuine guy, but some struggles he’s gone through have helped him understand that you’re not defined by the sports you play but by the character you build,” Averil says. “To see him go from being a first-round draft pick to a solid human being who looks out for other people’s best interests, that’s really what it’s all about.”

That discovery also seems to have restored Gruler’s good feelings for the game, and that, in turn, seems to have refueled his passion for life.

“The whole part of starting this business was to help other athletes not have to go through what I went through,” he says. “We want to set them up so that when their sport is gone, they have other streams of income and a sense that what they did mattered. My own personal experience has played a huge role in where we are. Would I give all the knowledge I have now for a chance to pitch in the majors? I can’t really say I would.”

Clearly, wisdom is a pretty powerful thing.