Back to the entrepreneurial culture: An employee in the Giants ticketing department came up with an idea that in the late 1990s, was unheard of. Why can’t season ticket holders resell their tickets?
“You have 81 games and those tickets in the drawer,” Baer says. “He came up with a way through barcode technology where a season ticket holder, if he can’t use the ticket, he can put it back up online. We sit here in 2015, yeah, that’s StubHub, everybody does that. But in 1997 and 1998, nobody ever heard of that. We were the first team to ever do a secondary market for tickets and a whole industry has sprung up around that.”
More recently, the Giants innovated again with dynamic pricing for tickets.
“Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, the fans aren’t going to like that. You’re charging $72 for a Giants-Dodgers game on a Sunday and you’re charging $10 for a Giants-Padres game for a Monday night game in April for the same seat,’” Baer says.
“But it’s worked and the fans get it. If we just did static pricing, the list price would have been maybe $18. But you can get it for $10 on a lower demand day. And it goes up on a higher demand day.”
The Giants worked with a group from the University of Texas at Austin to develop an algorithm. “We took an equity piece in their company and here comes dynamic pricing and now pretty much every team is using it,” Baer says.
Baer takes a lot of pride in what the Giants have become as he walks around the ballpark on a game night and sees the joy on the faces of fans. And he recognizes and makes a concerted effort to demonstrate that it’s not just the players on the field who make it all possible.
“When we won the World Series in 2010 and had the parade, the first people walking in the parade were the people who work in the ballpark,” Baer says. “It was people in full uniform, ushers, security guards, ticket takers, vendors.
“They were the first people. Then the next people were the front office. For all three World Series, we leased two 747s and everybody that works for the Giants front office, plus a guest, went to the road games. We live in an environment where I’m competing for talent with Google, Facebook and Apple with stock options and everything else.
“But that memory of taking their father, son or spouse to the World Series, Apple can’t provide that. They can get you rich, but they can’t provide that.”
Takeaways
- Don’t put limits on what you can achieve.
- Always keep the focus on your customer.
- Make every employee feel valued.
NAME: Larry Baer
TITLE: president and CEO
COMPANY: San Francisco Giants
Education: Bachelor’s degree, University of California, Berkeley; MBA, Harvard Business School.
Who has been the biggest influence on your life? My father was a person who always respected everybody, the ‘big person and the small person.’ I learned from my father to respect everybody, to be kind and gentle and to listen. My father was that way.
Businesswise, it would be Peter Magowan. He understood the value of customer service and of moving forward. He would say, ‘I’d much rather make 100 decisions a week and get them 87 percent right than make four decisions a month and get them 100 percent right.’ He saw the value of moving forward and doing the best you can and working hard at it. Integrity was very important to my father and it is very important for Peter. If you don’t have integrity, what do you have?
What was your first job and what did you learn from it? I worked at the college radio station that was broadcasting University of California baseball, basketball and football. I had to go out to get underwriting to pay for the broadcast. So I remember going to the Gap store on University Avenue and getting a $2,100 sponsorship and we mentioned the Gap at the beginning, end and middle of every game. I worked harder for that $2,100 than for millions of dollars on deals we’ve worked on today. That was very special, learning how companies can support work that you do.
