Exchange For the MBA Community at the University of Texas at Austin

Alumni Notes

Capturing the Value in People and Events
By Pam Losefsky

Left to Right: Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs

Bill Stapleton, BA 87, MBA 91, JD 94, and Bart Knaggs, BBA 89, MBA 95, talk to Lance Armstrong on the phone every day. They get backstage passes to Shawn Colvin concerts and shake hands routinely with NFL players.

“Nice life,” you say enviously? How about, “Nice job!”? Stapleton and Knaggs lead Capital Sports and Entertainment (CSE), an artist and athlete management firm whose clients include not only Lance, but the entire U.S. Postal Service cycling team, a host of Texas musicians, and football players throughout the NFL.

“Yeah, I’ve got a dream job,” Knaggs admits. “It’s great and I feel fortunate.”

But it wasn’t always so great. CSE has come a long way from its roots as a sports law practice that Stapleton struggled to justify to the Austin law firm where he worked. An Olympic swimmer, Stapleton began practicing law after graduating from UT’s law school, but never really enjoyed it. Instigating a sports law practice was his attempt to combine his law background and love of sports in a career that was more meaningful to him.

“But it was really more of a sports marketing practice, since that’s what I enjoyed doing,” says Stapleton. “And that was the source of a lot of tension in the firm.”

Lance Armstrong's USPS bike.

The year was 1995, and in another part of Austin, Bart Knaggs, a competitive cyclist and friend of Lance Armstrong, was earning his MBA at UT. That was also the year Armstrong’s cycling career really started taking off. He had earned U.S. and World Champion status, and had won stages of the Tour de France and other high profile cycling events. Gaining celebrity, Armstrong was finding that he could no longer manage his business affairs by himself. This he confided to Knaggs, who set out to find him an agent.

The two story lines collided in a McCombs School business law professor, Frank Cross. Stapleton had been Cross’ teaching assistant for five years, throughout business and law school. When Knaggs mentioned to his professor that he wanted to help his friend find an agent, Cross told him to call Stapleton.

Thus, in a moment of serendipity, Stapleton secured his first client. Armstrong would be Stapleton’s sole client for another three years, until he officially formed Capital Sports Ventures, a full-service sports management firm.

And it would be another several years before Knaggs joined Stapleton to launch CSE and look for ways to grow the business. In the meantime, Knaggs founded his own company right out of MBA school in the heady days of the late 1990s. As the founder and vice president of marketing for high-tech firm Trajecta, Knaggs sharpened his skills and reveled in the entrepreneurial dream.

While he never thought he’d be a concert promoter, Knaggs says that the essential skills needed to run any business are the same. “What I enjoy most is creating business opportunities and starting something new. I love being in a small company where what you do really matters, so that hasn’t changed at all,” he says of his move to CSE. “Whether it’s a high tech start-up or any other kind of start-up, you need to work well in ambiguity, make sound decisions without a lot of information, and you absolutely have to know how to hire people.”

Stapleton would add to Knagg’s requirements that you need to choose your partners well. The two seem to have nailed that one. “I view our partnership like the Dell model of two in a box,” Stapleton says. “We both do everything, but Bart is more of the strategist and I’m more of the deal-cutter.”

They also both agree that they’ve assembled a crack team that can do just about anything. “We’ve got about 20 of the most talented, passionate people in Austin who really care about client service and are very good at what we call ‘making cool shit happen,’” grins Stapleton.

There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of THAT going on in Austin. Aside from CSE’s success with Armstrong, the company has a hit with the Austin City Limits Music Festival, brainchild of partner Charlie Jones. And their roster of clients continues to burgeon as they look at opportunities to expand to other metro areas.

For their part, the duo is glad to be operating in the more cool, collected 2000s than the crazy 1990s. “The high-tech world of the 90s was the most challenging business environment,” remembers Knaggs. “The smartest guys were chasing the most money, and competition was fierce. Every day, I was reading the research and trying to figure out what was going on—it was crazy. Back then a lot of companies were taking products to market with no value proposition. But now CSE feels a lot more like if we execute well, if we create something that works and focus on delivering value, we can’t lose.”

• Capital Sports and Entertainment: www.planetcse.com