If you keep a close eye on wrestling financials, then you’re probably familiar with the work of Chris Harrington. The former co-host of the Wrestlenomics podcast with Brandon Thurston is now All Elite Wrestling’s Vice President of Business Strategy. On the final (for now) episode of the podcast, he discussed what led to the hiring and where All Elite Wrestling currently stands as a company.
Check out highlights below!
AEW’s current situation:
I think it’s important to say that it’s a startup. When you’re a start-up you have a limited amount of resources and an unlimited amount of opportunities and a zillion different paths to get there. So, there’s a lot of working in different directions. I appreciate everyone that has wished me well on Twitter, I appreciate everyone who has submitted their resumes to me through a variety of means, and all I can say to people is that we’re very busy right now doing a lot of things so if we do or don’t get back to anyone, it’s not meant to be a slight in any way it’s just meant to be a reaction that we need to best know what needs we have and where we have to go before we can execute anything. We have a core nucleus that is accomplishing a lot of things, so there’s not a lot of [opportunity] to go, “Yeah, this is where I want to go with this,” or “This is who I want to work with.” So, we want to make sure we have time to look back about who we’re looking for. It’s going to change a lot here. What you need in the beginning is very different from what you need in the middle.
What fans can do to support them:
We have a really great group of people and everyone is working on a thousand things regardless of title, just to get things done. So, there’s a lot of things where people have really cool ideas where they can help us out, but the best way to help us out is to just support the company and support wrestling as a whole. When we say we want to make wrestling better in general, that’s a fundamental belief for us all. You make professional wrestling better by supporting wrestling, by engaging the wrestling discourse online, challenging people to do better and spending your hard earned dollars or drawing attention to it in the ecosystem.
The All Elite Wrestling Rally:
Everyone was really excited to be at the press conference. It was a lot of people meeting for the very first time. That’s always a cool thing to bring people into a room and a lot haven’t interacted before. Myself being the primary of that, so I had a couple days to really get to know everyone and talk to them face-to-face. Luckily, I spent about a week with some of the members of the Elite in Japan as well. If you watch one of the Being the Elite episodes, I unsuccessfully stayed out of a shot and I had to scuffle out of it. I knew the news was going to come out, but nobody really made the connection until I got to the press conference in Jacksonville. I was standing in the media section and started talking to Ross Berman…and they were very kind about [not making the story about me]. Later that night, after the meet and greet, which we had scheduled for an hour and then it wound up going [over 90 minutes], Cody and Brandi went to another media scrum. It was during that second interview that Cody dropped [the news of my hiring].
How he was hired:
I don’t think Cody has a clue that I do a wrestling economics podcast. The reality is that I’ve been working with Tony Khan for about six months on this project. The opportunity came to me, as we naturally had a connection in our interests. If you know anything about Tony, he works on the analytics team for the Jaguars and [their football team]. He’s obsessed with statistics and sports. So, with pro wrestling and business, it was always something he was passionate about, so we connected on that. I’ve had opportunities to work with him a lot.
The name of All Elite Wrestling:
All Elite Wrestling wasn’t the original name for this group. I don’t even remember all of the different versions of the names that we went through, but it was the easiest name that everyone liked and where we saw opportunity there. When it comes to three letter things, and typically one of the letters is going to be W for “Wrestling,” so it’s really two letters you have to play with. So, when you know one of the letters is probably going to be “Elite,” it becomes one letter you have to play with in terms of different choices. There’s been a lot of feds out there, so you have to search until you find the name you like.
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more insight.
Transcription by WrestleZone.com’s Senior Editor Tyler Treese.
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