How Rich Paul, Fueled by LeBron, Built a Billion-Dollar Empire

[Music] rich paul has risen from selling vintage jerseys out of the trunk of his car to running one of the fastest growing sports agencies in the world representing some of the world's most famous athletes with an unapologetic swagger and purpose he's inspired devotion from his clients and disdain and dismissal from entrenched interests competitors and institutions alike i always said the dents in the man's armor show that he's battle tested while agents are usually the guy behind the guy or woman we live in a different world when it comes to star players and their reps and rich paul is a big reason why he's put the business out front powerfully making the case that different voices need to be at the negotiating table not just on the court i spoke with rich to find out what the rest of us can learn from a career spent relentlessly being true to yourself and where you came from i'm not going to be a yes man to you because you're paying me a fee [Music] so rich first of all it's really nice to see you i wish we were together and let's talk about where you came from what are the reflections you have as you think about your own origin story and and how it plays now and and how you think about it in in 2021 well i started out the trump and so to make it from the trunk to beverly hills is a blessing but i'm not satisfied i'm not complacent i know there's a lot of work ahead to be done to continue to inspire and be impactful for those that's coming behind me despite their skin tone or their gender you know my city was very segregated growing up but my parents didn't teach that they didn't allow that and i never wanted to be that way and i have all type of friends i treat everyone the same because that's how i was raised so tell me what you're looking at so i'm looking at a picture of my dad young and my mom and myself my mom was had a drug addiction and i know every time she tried to break it it was one day at a time my mom did end up getting clean she was a very strong woman she was the life of the party she was extremely helpful to give you the shirt off her back type of person my dad was always there he was always johnny on the spot he was always very hard on me and my brother and sisters because he knew what the world brought forth and he was always trying to prepare us for a time when he wasn't going to be around and that we had to navigate throughout on our own and i couldn't be more appreciative of the makeup and the dna of these two people uh two of the most important people to ever be in my life and i know i'm making them proud so that's that's very important rich learned from a young age how to sell and early on he identified vintage sports jerseys as a niche while his personal style he says aspired more toward ralph lauren he also liked a good jersey and saw lots of peers did too one day in 2002 a 21 year old rich threw on a warren moon jersey it matched his sneakers and headed to the akron airport for a flight to atlanta waiting for the same flight an already well-known high school basketball phenom named lebron james the once in future king complimented the jersey and asked him where he got it can you see this war moon can you see this that's the one huh yeah this the one don't ask me why i wore that jersey but you know seeing these young men at the gate and striking up a conversation based upon that that specific jersey for that to lead to what's now a 20-year friendship and a business relationship and a brotherhood it's just fake you know rich quickly became a trusted friend and advisor part of a small and influential inner circle he joined lebron randy mims and maverick carter two longtime friends of lebron also from akron to create lrmr marketing rich curated lebron's appearances and image and explored acting music and producing before settling on becoming an agent he ultimately joined caa to work under lebron's agent leon rose in 2012 rich left caa to start his own agency clutch sports last year it ranked seventh in the value of contracts negotiated at 1.7 billion clutch sports decides who wins the championship clutch sports decides who the best team in the world is so one of the things that becomes clear about your success is the relationship that that you have with your clients and i want to show you something that one of your earliest clients uh tristan thompson said about you and get you to react to it on the other side i remember um the first time i called rich i'm like uh good afternoon mr paul and he's like hey what's up chris i'm like okay like it threw me off because you know like the first time you meet someone like my mom always taught me is a kiss wish i'm 16 17. she's like have manners be polite so i was like hello mr paul this is uh tristan thompson here and then he's like hey what's up what's up double t what's going on like okay i'm like man i'm like alright well this guy's like like you know it makes me feel comfortable i'm like yeah what's up what's going on another reason why i got with rich especially just because i wanted to have some represent me that understands me understands my lifestyle understand what i went through as a kid you know like me being a black man and being represented by rich paul who's also an african-american man it's huge because well me and rich always talk about it we want to find a way to put more people like us in position of power and i think what rich is doing is a is a big step and then i think you know he's not finished you know everyone thinks like you know yeah he's you know one of the top agents and that's great finally i know one thing about rich paul he's never going to stop you know he always keeps the the the the the wheels are always turning his brain is always working the man hardly sleeps i got to find a way to get him some rest i'm like go on vacation brother like this is too much oh that was great um yeah you know tristan is someone who knows me better than anybody uh i've i've been with him since he was 16 years of age going back to that time that he described he came to cleveland and we kind of talked and you know he was really young and and impressionable about things and so moving forward when he got on campus at texas he called me one day and was like bro i need a car i got to find a way to get me a car and i said why would you need a car on campus say you're on a basketball team what do you need a car for yeah and he's like because this person got a car that person got in the car said tristan it don't matter what they have you got to put blinders on you're trying to get to the finish line and so i said at the end of the day you have a goal achieve that goal build good habits and i can guarantee you you're going to be able to get whatever you want [Applause] so that was one obstacle we overcame and so seeing tristan uh he knows me and i know him we love each other and when you have that it makes me able to do my job better because i can tell him something without worrying about him firing me or i don't have to create a yes environment i want to make sure we talk about that because i think that's a really important thing and and tristan mentioned it to me and and i've heard you talk about it before which is this whole notion of you embrace having these tough conversations with these guys they have been deified in many ways and yet part of what you do is speak truth to them how are you able to do that do you think the foundation has to be respect and you have to be respect each other and if you respect each other you can have the hard conversations and so we've had the hard conversations i've had the conversations where my guys don't pick up the phone for two days and then they call me and say you know what bro you was right man and they go both ways and i say to them if i'm ever out of line hold me accountable as well yeah because this is not about you playing a sport this is about you surviving the game of life i wanted to be liked by everybody part of rich's confidence comes from that tight circle he's a part of a group that's become famous enough to inspire their own documentary called more than an athlete it was through making that that they met the legendary jimmy iovine the multi-hyphenate impresario who produced some of the biggest records of all time created interscope records invented beats by dre with dr dre and went on to run apple music i met the crew i met lebron rich maverick and randy and i found it to be really uh just very very impressive you know they had the right attitude the right approach they were they were together for a long time it was a real team what i was shocked about was the lack of infighting the clear roles and so i'm not surprised that with that kind of structure infrastructure and foundation that they get things done um you know that's meeting jimmy at a time in which we were all still growing as young men and as much as he was impressed with us he was impressed with him yeah and this is jimmy iveen and we're sitting in his office and as he discussed about our roles and the respect respect that we have for each other oftentimes we come from a place where there can only be one person that's the man and that mentality sticks with you as you climb the ladder but maverick and i live together randy lived by himself on the floor below us and lebron lived in an apartment next to maverick high and i think one of the things that brought us closer together was the fact that we knew that if push came to shove we had each other and so you know jimmy's a mentor of mine and some of the things he's done you know he was always a supporter of our culture so i want to show you one more thing that he said because it builds on exactly uh what you're talking about if we if we can look at one more clip if you got jimmy twice that's pretty good there's an enormous opportunity in african-american culture that is under-resourced underutilized and under-appreciated in this country african-american culture is brilliant it's powerful the whole world copies it it's inspirational it's influential what you see now is corporations come around so we need diversity you don't need diversity you want diversity because this is an extraordinary resource and what you're seeing now in lebron's camp with rich et cetera are these things coming to fruition and um i think it's just the beginning that that's a big statement and and i feel like you are at the nexus of something important that that jimmy identified there yeah i agree diversity is something you want diversity is something that i want as the ceo of of clutch sports group when you talk about black culture i think a lot of times people get so caught up on the color versus the talent you know and versus the the genius that these men and women have within and when you evaluate the challenges they had to overcome and to still be successful he's right like i want that person don't give me the person who had a road map and who was able to have 10 different people pick up the phone call and make sure they was higher or make sure they was accepted to this university give me the person who had to fight for everything who was evaluated and critiqued differently from their peers and they still persevere and still give me that personal peace even as institutions and individuals undertake a long overdue reckoning around race inequality and systemic injustice there's still a ways to go in 2019 the ncaa made a new rule requiring agents representing student athletes to have a bachelor's degree themselves which many saw as directed right at rich to the point where lebron and others derisively called it the quote rich paul rule how racist it was to require you know that this guy has a four-year degree a college education rich wrote a stinging rebuke in the athletic explaining how this move would discourage people from poor backgrounds often people of color from entering the industry six hours after the article was published the ncaa backed down it was a striking example of what's coming at him almost every day i have no doubt that there were agents behind the scene that were pushing for that in hopes that it would compromise somebody like a rich paul there are a lot of people who have come at you hard i mean and have tried to discourage you and obviously in some ways it's out of their own self-interest but i i can't imagine that that feels good or is easy i always said the dents in the man's armor show that he's battle tested and if you were able to see my armor you know mako couldn't fix it it's got some dents i think that's fair to say yeah and it was a fight you know no one wants to give you credit for what you achieve with lebron right but at the same time it's like oh well if you go with them it's going to be all about lebron and it's a small ecosystem so you got assisted coaches that's saying things to parents disco it's all discouragement and i think that's the mentality of if rich paul is on top today in order for me to be on rich paul's level i got to push rich paul down or i got to convince this media person to say something bad about rich paul but you know i think over time people start to stop listening to the discouragement and to the false narratives and to the critique of others and really start to take things for what it really is and take me for who i am so as we wrap up sort of on on that point i did want to ask you you know when it comes to sports it does feel like we have seen something meaningful shift over the past few years certainly over the last year and one of those shifts has been who's pulling the levers of power in many ways you know we seem to be moving away from a point especially in the nba where white general managers sort of have the the final say we have players who are empowered in many different ways we are starting to see ownership changes and and owners think about their teams differently their their players differently do you agree with that is that is that something that that you have seen because you are in those corridors of power in many ways i think it varies um i do think there's an open-mindedness more today than it was of yesterday yesterday's owners versus today's owners yes they're definitely different from an executive perspective we still have a long way to go but they're trying you know they're trying and that's all you can ask for all you can ask for is effort you know acknowledgement effort understanding and a willingness it's a different time it really is and i do think that going forward there is going to be the world will be different and there will be an ability to be okay with the skin tone of somebody being different than yours and the sun would definitely shine brighter if we can ever get to that point i couldn't be more appreciative about what we've been able to build over the years i'm blessed to represent the guys that i do no matter what pick they were they're all great young men we support each other and i know this word is very cliche but we are a family we want to see each other win and we just really want to see each other do [Music] better you

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

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Id: _xEDKE192U4

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021