Yahoo Finance My first boss: Aaron Radin, British Basketball League CEO
The people who helped shape business leaders
Aaron Radin moved to the The British Basketball League (BBL) as CEO in December 2022. Across a 30-year professional career, he has held senior-level positions at an array of sports, media and tech organisations such as the NBA, The Walt Disney Company, NBC Universal and Meta.
In 2021, The BBL announced that Miami-based investment firm 777 Partners had invested £7m in return for a 45% stake in the league.
One of my best pieces of career advice I can give to anyone is to get a good boss. It’s easy to say but it has been critical in my own development. When it comes to interviewing, not only should candidates be sharing about themselves but also digging into the qualities of the person they will be working for.
My first boss: Clare Mackintosh, from police to best-selling author
Once I was out of business school I worked for a company where I had a terrible boss and wanted to get out. I ended up being hired into a group of two people at a media company within the Disney group by Jonathan Leess in 1999.
We were developing an interactive TV product which allowed you to play along with the show you were watching, syncing to live over the internet. I was hired as a senior financial analyst and because we were a small group, I got to do a little bit of everything.
Jonathan gave me the latitude to do anything I was interested in. I was involved in P&Ls, marketing, operations and it allowed me to understand the product and the business as well as anyone in the group. It led me to sales and business development and being able to explain it better to third parties. That level of trust Jonathan gave me was incredibly valuable at that stage of my career.
He had run production at ABC Sports for 20 years and worked with some of the most famous sports producers. Jonathan was always ‘on’. He had a level of passion in his work that was infectious and I could rarely think of incidents where I thought of the job as work. He also had this level of intensity and focus that I hadn’t been exposed to before.
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When Jonathan left the company he took me over to a start-up he was working at. He then went to CBS, where he ran the digital media group for its television stations, and also asked me to work for him.
We had been involved in building three separate businesses and, by now, I wanted to get skin in the game and start my own company. I ended up hiring Jonathan — I consider him like family — to assist me with business development when I then took on the project to run the British Basketball League.
One of the key components was to produce world-class content and a huge part of that is managing the broadcast. The one person I trusted was Jonathan, a relationship which has spanned 25 years.
I remember saying to Jonathan at CBS that it could go one of two ways: we will fail and they will get rid of us or we will succeed and they will get rid of us. When you are going from that growth into maturity phase, the larger company wants to absorb that business. It was a huge lesson for us as we made it successful and our jobs went from 90% operational and 10% political to the other way round.
Today, one of the enjoyable aspects of the BBL is that, even though it’s a 35-year-old league, it is being operated as a start-up because of the investment that has come into it.
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I don’t look at British basketball as competing with other sports, I see it as competing with any other form of entertainment. We’re competing for attention and we have to develop a compelling product.
There's enough data to suggest there’s an audience; we have to draw them in with engaging content from the interest they already have in the sport, as well as expanding those who already have an interest.
The vast majority of our audience is aged 13-34 — that’s an incredibly hard audience for marketers to reach. The challenge is that we are in a fast-changing media landscape and we have to place ourselves in this landscape in a way that generates complimentary value, not only for us but for our distribution partners.
Already in my brief time here, I can't tell you the amount of people I run into who say they used to play at school but there was nothing after. We want to be able to fill some of that gap and create opportunities for people to play.
The big risk of this business is that we build a great product and nobody cares. It’s a low risk but we have to execute. The foundational elements are in place: you can get a strong crowd to show up at The O2, there is big participation who have passion for the sport. It’s how you connect the dots.
Jonathan and I have had plenty of arguments over the years but there is opportunity to express ourselves and, from my side, to say he was wrong. That transparency between a manager and an employee can be incredibly powerful.
From my learnings under Jonathan, I want to understand my teams’ aspirations, to assist them in doing that and help them explore their curiosities through the business. There’s no more valuable resource than having a boss who allows you the freedom, latitude and guidance to grow.
Watch: Basketball player hits buzzer-beater to win BBL Trophy
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