I see that my old friends at the NHL have added more pieces to their dealings with Cisco. The relationship covers a lot of areas, as you’ll see in a minute, and I know each party has the potential to get a lot out of it. Bravo! The two companies have had business dealings for several years and this latest renewal is testament that the partnership is working well. Of course, it didn’t start out being this multi-dimensional. Maybe you’d like a little insight as to how it got going? It might be instructive in your business dealings.
There are a lot of pieces to the current arrangement. The NHL now has Cisco TelePresence, a high-definition video collaboration system, in its New York and Toronto NHL offices. Hopefully this reduces the time NHL folks spend in customs lines in Toronto! Cisco is also a sponsor/partner NHL events such as the NHL Winter Classic, NHL Heritage Classic and NHL All-Star game, where Cisco technology will be used inside and outside of the venues allowing fans to access exclusive content and data. It now includes a product license for an NHL Flip video camera with the NHL logo or a custom design from any one of the 30 NHL teams and Cisco’s video content distribution network is also being used to distribute video highlights to the Yahoo fantasy game. It all began with social-networking.
The NHL was one of the first leagues to deploy a social networking element to the official league site back in 2006. We were trying to offer NHL fans the ability to create multimedia personal profile pages and share interests and ideas with other users in the NHL community via comments, photos, podcasts and video casts, links to new articles and content, friends or colleagues and RSS feeds. My quote at the time was we wanted to “provide them an opportunity to express their passion for the game, their favorite teams and players and relive the NHL game experience wherever and whenever.” We were working with a company named Five Across and in all candor the first year didn’t go all that well. They were a start-up, they had issues scaling to support our user base, and by the end of the season we were thinking about migrating to some other platform. Why didn’t we? Because we believed in the people – especially the company CEO – who were working their butts off to get better.
We invested in the people, so much so that we wrote a key-man clause into the agreement for the next year to make sure that the folks in whom we had placed so much trust couldn’t leave without us having the ability to leave as well. They didn’t, the next version of the product was much better, and the little company was bought by Cisco. That’s how the partnership started, and even though the NHL has moved their social network to another platform, the investment of trust we made in the folks running Five Across continues to pay dividends.
Had we been focused solely on the company we might have walked away. I suppose there’s a bit of “devil you know” thinking in hanging in there with them, but what was really going on was there was a terrific personal relationship, one in which each side was transparent with their needs and in which both sides were constantly working to get better. We believed in them and they believed in their ability to improve their product. We both recognized the problems, discussed how to solve them, and didn’t spend a ton of time pointing fingers. That’s why there are logos on Flip cameras today!
Business is personal. I’ve said many times I’d rather do business with a company run by folks I can trust than one that might be bigger or more established but with whom there is no chance of establishing a personal bond. I invest in people. If I connect with them the odds are we can work out whatever issues may arise. What do you think?
Consult Keith 