← Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants | E106
00:51:11
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- [00:00]
Ilana Golan
Wow. This show is going to be incredible. So buckle up and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. But before we get started, I want to ask you for a favor. See, it's really, really important for me to help millions of people elevate their career, fast track to leadership land, dream roles, jump to entrepreneurship or create portfolio careers. And this podcast is all about enabling this for millions of people to see a map of what it actually takes for big leaders to reach success. So subscribe and download so you never miss it. Plus, it really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. Okay, so let's dive in.
- [00:36]
Tony Khan
When you have a setback, reset your clock.
- [00:39]
Ilana Golan
Tony Khan, founder and CEO of All Elite Wrestling. Very involved in the NFL, Jacksonville Jaguars and football and many other ventures.
- [00:50]
Tony Khan
AEW is a challenger brand competing in an industry where the industry leader historically has been the most adept company at crippling and smashing their competitors in the history of business. I found it very interesting what was happening with the media rights in the wrestling business. The rights fees for the wrestling shows went up and it was really only one company that was producing that product at the time, and that was wwe. It occurred to me that somebody could launch a new wrestling promotion now award in 2025. We're on over 150 countries now.
- [01:27]
Ilana Golan
How do you get started with such an audacious goal, if you will?
- [01:32]
Tony Khan
Well, you have to build credibility and the best way to do that is.
- [01:48]
Ilana Golan
Tony Khan, founder and CEO of All Elite Wrestling, valued at, I don't know, $2 billion. Like, come on. He completely shaken the wrestling world and he's also an investor, very involved in the NFL, Jacksonville Jaguars and football and many other ventures. You are going to love this today because I want to learn together with you, how does somebody influence such a big industry with existing big players? So get ready for a fascinating show about taking bold action. Tony, thank you for being here.
- [02:26]
Tony Khan
Thank you for having me. It's very kind of you and I'm excited to be on your show and great to see you.
- [02:32]
Ilana Golan
It's going to be amazing. So take us back in time. You are a fan of sports from very early age. Tell me, what was the obsession about.
- [02:40]
Tony Khan
Sports growing up as a kid? I was really obsessed with television and exciting television. And sports is to me the most exciting television. But I watched a lot of TV and I watched a lot of sports and I watched a lot of cartoons and action shows. So I watched GI Joe and the host of GI Joe and he was a character in the show was Sergeant Slaughter. And Sergeant Slaughter is also a wrestler, so that helped me start to watch wrestling. I also watched the A Team, which is a great show. I don't know if you watched the A Team, but it was a fantastic show.
- [03:18]
Ilana Golan
I was busy watching Smurfs, like, I don't know what? Go ahead.
- [03:24]
Tony Khan
Yeah, sure. Smurfs was a great show. I wasn't. That's not as much the stuff I was into, though. I did like some cartoons. I like more like superheroes, the Super Justice League, Super Friends, but also a lot of action shows like the A Team, which was a great show. And Hulk Hogan was a character that appeared sometimes as Hulk Hogan on the A Team. And he was supposed to be a friend who was in Vietnam with Mr. T, which is pretty unbelievable in hindsight given their ages and. But AEW was something that I dreamed of for many, many years. I grew up as a kid loving pro wrestling. I started watching TV as a kid. I had TV in my room and my parents had a satellite dish in the backyard in the 80s.
- [04:10]
Ilana Golan
Did they love sports as well? Were they watching with you or. I know your dad was a fan, but were they also watching sports or were they like, what on earth is Tony watching?
- [04:21]
Tony Khan
No, my parents like sports. I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, and the University of Illinois. Sports are a huge part of living in central Illinois. People follow Illinois football and basketball really closely. So I grew up watching a lot of football and basketball, especially the Illinois, but also the NFL and the NBA and followed other sports to baseball and soccer and other things. And I really grew up as a big fan of wrestling. Above all else, as a huge sports fan. Collecting cards. But the one sport that never ends, there's no off season. It goes 365 days a year, does not take a break 52 weeks a year. Pro wrestling, there's no reruns. It's new wrestling every week. And that really is. You're a big sports fan. Kid can keep you hooked on that. So when the NFL goes on break after the super bowl and when college basketball breaks after March Madness, you don't really get that 52 week a year chance to really follow something you love. And wrestling does offer that.
- [05:29]
Ilana Golan
And meanwhile, I think your father at this point is a pretty successful businessman. Like, he's definitely doing some incredible things. How do you think that impacted you or whether it's pressure on you to show up or inspired you? What do you think that did to you?
- [05:48]
Tony Khan
My dad is a very successful businessman. And as I was growing up, he was really building his business Day by day, week by week. And there was a lot of work he put into it, but he was also away working a lot. So I did see my dad as much as he could, but he was working hard, building his business up and traveling the world. And my dad is a big sports fan, took me to games, built his auto parts empire and started companies, built new factories all over the world, and eventually able to buy the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars in 2012. And it was many years building towards that. But when I was growing up as a little kid, it seemed like a. An impossibility, but definitely my dad always loved football, as far as I remember, and was great about taking me to sports when he was around.
- [06:43]
Ilana Golan
And do you think they pushed you towards, like, did you know that you're going to be a big business person? Or did you think, you know, I'm just gonna go study, I'm gonna find a job? What did you think?
- [06:54]
Tony Khan
Yeah, I definitely had some pressure from my parents to do something of significance in their eyes. There was academic pressure, but also pressure to go out and do something important at work. So I really love my parents very much, and they're very hardworking people and very smart people, but they are very motivated, and they motivated me.
- [07:16]
Ilana Golan
So you go and you actually study finance, Right. Why finance? Was there a reason for it? Was it part of a big plan or was it something you were drawn to?
- [07:27]
Tony Khan
Well, I changed majors at the University of Illinois. I was in engineering school. For me, yeah, I always thought I would go into business, and I was in engineering school. And it's a lot of work. And I was having a lot of fun in college and also doing things like writing wrestling shows for fun and trading wrestling tapes and posting on wrestling message boards and watching lots of basketball. The Illinois basketball team was really, really good when I was there, and watching lots of football and going to the football games. And it was a lot of work in engineering school. And also a lot of the stuff I really wanted to learn, I was learning in my minor, which was finance. And they called it the secondary field of concentration. So my secondary field I found far more interesting. And also I found that I could manage my studies and still do all the other things I wanted to do and be a solid student, but also go out several days a week.
- [08:24]
Ilana Golan
Was that a hard decision, by the way, to move from engineering? Like, did that feel like you're giving up on something or you were like, oh, my God, that's what I want?
- [08:32]
Tony Khan
I was so much happier instantly. I enjoyed the classes more. I had so much more free time and I saw my friends more and it was fantastic. I learned things that I applied more and I took a few years of the engineering classes. I have an insane amount of math credits for somebody that graduated with the degree I have, so I could go back and do something with them sometime. I don't know if I ever will now.
- [08:58]
Ilana Golan
I don't think you ever will, but that's okay.
- [09:00]
Tony Khan
But yeah, I had done a lot of the work already before I switched, but no, I'm really glad to do it. And I was much happier and I was happy with the degree.
- [09:08]
Ilana Golan
I got into it and it's definitely certain serving you now more than the other. But. So after college you're finishing finance and you're actually taking some interesting roles. Talk to us a little bit about the first role and how did that all shape you?
- [09:25]
Tony Khan
Not long after I got out of college, my father was trying to buy a football team. So I graduated in 2007, and months later I was following the St. Louis Rams because my dad was trying to buy the St. Louis Rams. And the thing I was spending most of my time on at that point was studying sports statistics. And then my father spent a couple more years working to get in the NFL. And then less than two years later, he announced that he would be buying Jacksonville Jaguars, which was over 13 years ago. And I'm here in Jacksonville, Florida now. And that's when I moved from Illinois to Florida. And I've been here ever since. And we launched AEW here in Florida. But I still look right and go back to Illinois anytime I can. Yeah. It was not long after college where I started working on sports statistics. I had a job in biofuels as a day job, but really the thing I went back and worked on every night was studying NFL statistics and flying one.
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Ilana Golan
So you joined and I think you at some point start working with the Jacksonville Jaguars and you start looking at, I think, this entire operation and organization in a different way, which is a lot more data driven, et cetera. What knowledge did you bring and how did you look at the organization? A little different.
- [10:44]
Tony Khan
I started working there in 2012 as soon as my father bought the team. There was not a sports analytics department there, and I'd been studying it for several years and I began bringing in some of the top vendors. Now this is standard practice for all 32 teams, and there's a huge amount of work that's done on all 32 teams with machine learning and football research, looking at all the plays, researching all the personnel, scouting Game data. And that's a huge part of NFL preparation now, preparation for the draft, for free agency, for the upcoming games against your opponents. It's a huge part of football. And people have been building up staffs in recent years. The Jaguars were one of the first teams to really build that. And now we have a great infrastructure. And what's really great is we have a young group of executives that's really applying it. We have a very young coach and a young general manager and they're very data driven guys. And it's a stark contrast to when I came into the organization in 2012 as far as the uptake and the interest in the football research and all of the analytics and applying the data into making personnel decisions and studying the game.
- [12:07]
Ilana Golan
So for the first whatever years that adds up to be, you're kind of an employee, if you will, and at some point you decide to start your own thing. What happened there?
- [12:18]
Tony Khan
A lot. The Jaguars. I went in in 2012 and around that time my father had announced the purchase in January 2012, but he'd been working on it for a couple years after the Rams purchase. It was stopped in 2010. So I spent about four years studying football stats pretty much every day. And I put together what was the football technology group that still exists at the Jaguars. I still am an employee of the Jaguars and still work in that research group and really enjoy it. And we just got done with the draft and it's the most data driven group of decision makers we've ever had. Somewhere in that time, my father also bought the full football club in the Premier League and I had never worked in Premier League or around English football at all. And that was happening around that time away from me and then here at the Jaguars here in Jacksonville. I was hiring a lot of vendors. The best vendor I hired actually was a pair of guys out of Boston that ran a small business where it was two guys and they had another person. So it was really two founders plus one employee, three people total that are still with us to this day. And the two founders put together some really exciting technology and some very, very cool analytics research. And I found that their tools, the reports that they gave us were just fantastic. And I asked them if they were interested in working together and building a bigger relationship. And they said they would really be interested if I would invest in their business and help them grow it. And I was interested in that too. So I did. And that was in 2014. And within a year I bought the business outright and became the 100% owner of True Media Networks. We're the largest and best sports analytics engineering firm in the world. The CEO, Ralph Anderson, and the president, head of technology, Jeff Stern. They are absolutely fantastic people. I've been working with them for now about 13 years, since my first year here at the Jaguars. And I've been the chairman of the company for over 10 years now and really love working with them. And we built a great business where we service 25 out of the 30 Major League Baseball clubs, ESPN, New York Times, and any football clubs in the NFL and in Europe. And in doing that, I learned a lot about growing a business. As we were growing that business, I was following what was happening with Fulham very closely. The team had some very tough times in 2014 and 15, and I started to take more interest and wanted to get more involved. And the team was relegated. The first year, my father bought it from the Premier League. The second year they finished 17th in the English Football Championship, which is the second division of English football, which was very scary. And you can be very interested in sports analytics. And as I've seen, whether it was at the Jaguars or those first couple years of fall on, you can have really good analytics people making good suggestions or good really, in any business. There can be somebody smart in a business that's making good suggestions, but there has to be applied by the people making the decisions, because you can get really good research and recommendations. But if they're not being applied, then it's useless. Yeah, really, they're interesting. They can be interesting after the fact. But if that information isn't being applied to the product or to the team or whatever it is, then it's not that helpful. So in the summer of 2016, I took over managing the transfers and we totally changed the team. It was a new team and the results got much better. Years later, we gotten much more successful. We had gotten back up to the Premier League. We'd had some success, but then had gotten relegated. We had gotten back up and gotten relegated again.
- [16:30]
Ilana Golan
Let me take you there just for a second, because to some extent you describe hard moments. We tried and it didn't work and we tried and you're describing hard moments as if they're just normal and you just kind of continue. Right. But I want you to take us to one of those hard moments. Did you ever think, oh, my God, maybe I just can't improve this team? Or, oh, my God, it's going to take down my brand if I'm not able to do, like, did you ever make it mean anything bad for you?
- [16:59]
Tony Khan
As the sporting director, we didn't win the playoff and I thought we were the better team, and I was frustrated, but I always thought we would go up the next year. We did go up the next year, and this was in May of 2017. I remember feeling terrible and thinking that it was such a disappointment and it was so much pressure to go up the next year now, and we wouldn't really be able to play games for a few months, and we're going to have to sit late for a few months to start building up again to get back to the same point we were. It was going to take a full year and it was going to be another year in the championship. And that was really hard. And I felt really terrible that night and really sick, and that was really hard. But other than that, I mean, I still felt like we would do it. I just knew it was going to take another year. And I think that's the way I felt when we've had some of the setbacks, sometimes that when you have a setback, reset your clock. Well, it's going to take a year now to build back to where we just were. And thankfully, what we've been able to do. As I was about to say, I think the most positive thing that's happened in many years is we made a great hire with the head coach in 2021 and brought Marco Silva, who had great experience in England. He managed teams. He'd been in the Premier League. I had never worked with him. I had only met him for a couple seconds in passing when he was a manager of Everton, when Fulham was playing Everton in 2019. And then we reconnected on Zoom in 2021, which is very fitting because I see him on Zoom a lot now, and it was such a perfect chemistry and I have so much respect for Marco and the team has been able to go to another level. So these are things that happened on the road to aew, but these are a lot of my experiences and things that are still a big part of my life. The NFL and the Premier League, what we do at True Media. And now I work in a Sport that's also 52 weeks a year in AEW. Pro wrestling.
- [19:18]
Ilana Golan
You are a wrestling fan and you're starting to think about funding all elite wrestling, which is a huge undertaking. Tony, first of all, what was that moment when you started thinking, this is what I really should do?
- [19:32]
Tony Khan
Well, I'll flash back to the in between. So I had that low point for me. I felt in 2017, two days of just. And it was not despair. It wasn't thinking we won't be able to do it. It wasn't even a lack of confidence. It was really just a frustration that it's going to take a year to get right back to where we just were. And we had it in our grasp. And now it's going to take a year to get to the same point, to get back up and around that same time into the next season. We had a slow start to the 2017 season and things really picked up in December and we started a run of winning. And a run is an unbeaten team that extended 23 games, which is half a season. So we went unbeaten then from the week before Christmas until the final week of the season. And then we ended up winning the playoff final against Aston Villa at Wembley Stadium in May of 2018. And it was so huge. It was a huge part of my life during that. There was a weekend when I was in Los Angeles and my business partner, Bernie Cahill. Bernie invited me to a party in Beverly Hills and I saw a good friend who was Bernie's other best friend was Kevin Riley, who was the president of TBS and TNT at the time. And I found it very interesting what was happening with the media rights in the wrestling business that we'd gotten to a point where there were hundreds of millions of dollars in wrestling. TV shows, the pay per view business and the tickets and the merchandising, these have always been big parts of wrestling. But something changed in the last decade, which is the rights fees for the wrestling shows went up and they became similar to what you'd see for some of the top sports leagues for their game packages. When you think about it, the wrestling show that's on 52 weeks a year, it's on every week, it's very reliable and draws a great rating. That can be a great thing for a network. And it was really only one company that was producing that product at the time, and that was WWE. In 2018, the rights bees had gone up dramatically. So when I talked to Kevin, I had the light bulb go off. And it occurred to me that somebody could launch a new wrestling promotion. And if you could get even a fraction of what the competition would be getting through their rights fees, you could build a promotion based on that. Because really that was the game changing thing, was that now there was the potential if you could build a roster of stars and have a great lineup of wrestlers, which I also believed I would be able to assemble in the next year based on the market conditions and who I knew was going to be available in wrestling at that time, just as a fan following wrestling, it all came together very quickly. Kevin showed interest. He did not shoot my idea down. I suddenly thought I had something that we could really build and something that we could take to the market and take all over the world, build an audience with this TV markets all over the planet, which we have, because now in 2025, we're on over 150 countries now. It's amazing how we've grown the business. But that's really where it started, was a conversation.
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Ilana Golan
Take me there for a second. Because to some extent, and again, I'm kind of comparing WWE to like a Google, you know, like, if you know that there's like this big monster around, you're really scared to create a little competition, right? Because you're like, who am I to start creating this from scratch? And how do I even get started? And who's gonna trust me? Like, there's a lot of fear involved. So there's like, excitement, but fear or no, like, it doesn't sound like it even, like, made a lot of sense.
- [23:31]
Tony Khan
It was one of those ideas, you know, when you have an idea that's really good and you think, this is such a good idea. And another thing that was the timing was in 2018, the McMahon family announced they were going to relaunch the XFL. That probably also had an effect on my thinking because that sounded like a terrible idea to me and the amount of money they were going to put into it when the NFL is such a dominant competitor and the NFL is so strong. And I think I was proven right because the league, the xfl, did go bankrupt. And I thought, that's not going to work. You know what would work is a second wrestling league. There's way more wrestlers out there to start a second wrestling league. If I built a challenge of wrestling league, the roster of that league would be so much better comparatively than the roster of the xfl. It wouldn't even be close. And as a viewer of the sports, as somebody who loves football and wrestling, wrestling needs a second league a lot more than football does. And I think we were proven true of that.
- [24:38]
Ilana Golan
So a lot of it is your wrestling love and knowledge and experience of it. But also that combined with all the years and years and connections and the NFL and all the things that you build already in football and NFL, et cetera, like, you already knew a lot in the world. But take me there just for the first year, right? Because a lot of our listeners are like, I have all these, like, big Ideas and I want to create something big. But the fear is numbing, right? Or they don't really know. There's no blueprint, there's no map. Like, you kind of need to figure things out. How do you get started with such an audacious goal, if you will?
- [25:16]
Tony Khan
The market conditions were right. First of all, it wouldn't apply to every person in every situation. This is a very specific thing. It involved a huge war chest and that meant big startup costs to start this. And thankfully I was able to go to an investor, which is my father. And now he in this case was a very discerning investor. And it was really a big fight to get a launch. He didn't think this was going to work like it has.
- [25:47]
Ilana Golan
It's not easy. Like people are like, oh, you know, he can go to his father. It's not easy to go to your father. So take me there for a second. How do you even convince him? And how do you not make his pushback mean? Like you still work with that conviction of I truly believe this is an amazing opportunity. Take me there for a second, Tony.
- [26:09]
Tony Khan
I had to show him the opportunities there and also demonstrate that I put a business case together for the plan here because we didn't have a TV deal secured. @ first I had interest in the show, but I really had to make the commitment, sign up the Wrestlers at the start of 2019 and make a huge investment in this business, in the Wrestlers, the business plan, the marketing, and launching the promotion from scratch, which takes tons of capital before we're going to see the returns that now we're seeing as we build this thing and have become a huge TV promotion. And now in 2025, also for the first time, a major streaming promotion. As our AEW shows stream on MAX every week. There's Simon cast and those shows are also live on max. And we have a whole library of shows people can watch on max. And when we launched, we were a TV promotion and we still are a TV promotion that's on TBS every Wednesday and on TNT every Saturday. But we have something really special going now where we our simulcasting as well. And it affords us the ability to find new audience, reach new people that might not have been watching on cable or might not be watching cable at all anymore. And what's really great is there is a great audience on cable and we've been able to sustain that. We've actually had growth. What's amazing is in Q1 we started simulcasting and Q1 versus Q4, our cable numbers are up in every demo on both shows. And we're simulcasting on Max, so we've got new viewers streaming. We're one of the top sports streaming shows on the MAX platform. So really having a great run of shows. It's also just like the quality of the show, not the business. I'm a wrestling fan. I love the wrestling. And as a wrestling producer, our shows have been awesome this year.
- [28:01]
Ilana Golan
I mean, now AW is a big, big deal. Anywhere you look into it. It's like this is a big disruptor in the world, right? And it changes the whole landscape. But when you start, you need to earn people's trust. You need to get people to partner with you when you don't have a lot to offer. And I get capital is part of it. But how do you get people to trust you?
- [28:23]
Tony Khan
In the beginning, a bunch of people did not. And a lot of people in wrestling had heard hundreds of charlatans come through over the years trying to start another wrestling promotion. It was something people had dreamed of and it was one of those things where people had really lost faith. So it was hard for me to convince people. It was almost like at the start of a movie where you're trying to round everyone up and everyone's saying like, no, I'm not going to sign up.
- [28:49]
Ilana Golan
I'll wait for somebody else to start first. Right?
- [28:53]
Tony Khan
There was some of that and there was some people that at first didn't take it seriously. And then when I finally got a few people buying into it, all of a sudden a lot more people started to take interest in what was to be AEW. This promotion that I was working to launch in 2018 and then announced in 2019. And we launched, did our first shows in 2019 and we celebrated the five year anniversary of Wednesday Night Dynamite. Last year, the six year anniversary of AEW. Our first show, Double or Nothing, is coming up just weeks from now. And the six year anniversary of Wednesday night Dynamite is coming up in October.
- [29:32]
Ilana Golan
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- [30:30]
Tony Khan
Well, so I was in Los Angeles because we had just done a show in Salt Lake City on March 11th of 2020, and it became very apparent on March 11th of 2020 that everything was going to be shutting down. And probably our March 18th show that we'd been planning to have in the Northeast was probably not going to happen. We had a series of events in Rochester, in Newark, some major events that were canceled, and then moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where we did the shows instead. And I did some soul searching. I went to what I would call a dark place to figure out what people were doing in entertainment, what you would do if you switched off the audience, which is not something I had to think of. And it was a problem solving exercise. I watched stuff outside of wrestling. I watched some small wrestling studio shows, but they still had a small audience. But they weren't the big arena shows like we had been doing. I thought that was interesting. And that is a callback to the wrestling I grew up on as a tape trader. A lot of great Southern wrestling was like that. And then I started to watch what other people in TV did under environmental challenges. I thought there were some great shows David Letterman did during the hurricane. And it was like just Dave and the camera guys. They didn't even have the guys in the booth to do the top 10 graphics. So the guys were doing the top 10 list with cue cards in front of Dave's desk. And it was just David, Denzel Washington. And I watched that and I was like, okay. I think that worked really well because that was David Letterman and Denzel Washington I basically took away. I was like, I was captivated by those two guys. I mean, he stripped everything down and you didn't lose anything. And it actually put the focus on David Letterman and Denzel Washington. The problem with that is that only works if you have Denzel Washington. I thought they were fantastic. But I also thought you'd be crazy for anyone else to try what they did then. I watched Stephen Colbert in the Pandemic. His shows, which were that week, the Letterman shows I were watching were like, you know, at the time, probably 8 years old. Now they would be like 13 years old. And the Stephen Colbert Shows I thought were very interesting because he was trying to do something similar, and I thought he's a great comedian, but he was trying to tell jokes in an empty studio, and I thought it was challenging. And it's interesting because it's like he's talking to the camera, he's talking to the people at home, but there's nobody to react. And for a comedian else to hear the laughter for the jokes. And I think there's a similarity between wrestling and comedy because there's a lot of subjectivity. There's an art to it. There is definitely skill. There's people that are far better at the craft than others, even though there's a subjectivity to who's better than a. You know, than who's the best.
- [33:15]
Ilana Golan
But you need the energy to flow inside. You need that energy, I assume, just like any performer.
- [33:22]
Tony Khan
Yeah, absolutely. And hearing the live crowd, it's a big part of it.
- [33:27]
Ilana Golan
Right.
- [33:28]
Tony Khan
I think that it's interesting because when I watched the Colbert show that first week of the lockdown, there was nobody in the studio to react to the joke. So then I watched what Jimmy Fallon was doing, and I thought that was really interesting because he had the crew and people from the office behind the camera. So there was. It sounded like maybe a dozen or maybe even a couple dozen people in the studio, and it sounded like a small comedy club. I thought that was the closest thing, and I really thought the spirit of that was right. So I decided to do the same thing. And I would take the crew of my show and have some of the wrestlers that weren't wrestling that night, some of the crew that weren't being put to work at that moment, and have them sit around the ring and react to the matches. And then we'd have an audience, even though you couldn't sell tickets in lockdown. So we never stopped. We never took a week off, ran every week through the pandemic, and we never put a rerun on.
- [34:31]
Ilana Golan
There's actually a beautiful research on Covid. You could see CEOs split to three. And it was just a beautiful story. Tony the first. And I'm telling this to the listeners because I think it's so important. Like, there's a first group that just were so stressed about what's coming that they were just numb. Like, they just couldn't do anything because they were in this really, really dark place. Right. And the second group is basically the group that just ignored it. Oh, it's nothing. I will just continue as I am because that was not it. Right. Like, it definitely took effect. And the third group is exactly what you're talking about. They were listening, they were getting all these ideas, they were adapting really, really quick. And it's incredible to watch. So, Tony, that's why it eventually wasn't even a big bleep. It was just one of those things. I'm just going to adjust the sale and I going to go. So I just love that it was.
- [35:25]
Tony Khan
Like a period that is known by the wrestling fans as being a really great period at where the company really focused and delivered. And it's considered a golden era of AEW wrestling by our fans. And it was an area and a time where we really set ourselves apart and closed the business gap. We came out of the lockdown a lot stronger than we went into it. I use an analogy for people that watch Star Trek. In Star Trek, to the original Rathicon, there's a nebula and it's a terrible place. And you won't be able to use your radar, you won't be able to use your shields, your weapons won't work. Nothing's going to work. But it is like that for everybody. So if you're the challenger and you're the underdog, then you're better off in there because then it comes down to skill and acumen and creativity and really strips down a lot of those things. So that's how I felt about the lockdown, that it really opened it up for us where we could explore new ideas, try new things, and we would have this really exciting period that went from March of 2020 until the summer of 2021. And then when we went back on tour in the summer of 2021, we were in a much better place than we went into lockdown. We came out far stronger. So that was really exciting.
- [36:55]
Ilana Golan
I love that example because you were right. When everybody is in the same boat and it's hard on everybody, then it's really more about who's going to be the problem solver, the innovative, who's not gonna let the stress take them down. It's so true. And I think in 2022, if I'm not mistaken, you OC acquired, right? Ring of Honor.
- [37:16]
Tony Khan
Yeah. Ring of Honor was a company that was a challenger brand. They weren't the biggest company in wrestling, but they built a great tradition of wrestling and they had built great momentum right as we were launching aew, honestly. And the launch of AEW did slow down Ring of Honor. And then in the lockdown, Ring of Honor ended up shutting down completely. And in 2020, one, they ceased operations. And they were a company that was really hardly hit by the lockdown. And Sinclair Broadcasting was looking to sell the company, and so I did purchase it from them. And it's a great company with a great history. It frankly never reached the heights of aew, and it was a great challenger brand with a great history that I have a ton of respect for. Some of the greatest wrestlers of all time competed in Ring of Honor, and I thought it was a cool thing to keep a lot of those people wrestling. There were some people that were contracted to Ring of Honor that I brought in as part of the agreement. There were some people that I wanted to use a lot, like the Briscoes that was able to start to work with and get to know and the friends I've made and lost along the way. But I do think it's another thing that I'm really excited to bolt on here and now as we're in streaming era, it gives more resources. We put the library on max and we have tons of options now to build out, build more things. Fast channels and exciting possibilities and ways. I can leverage the history of AEW and also the history of Ring of Honor to create new content. And also, the Ring of Honor has great history. They have great champions, great wrestlers. So, yeah, I was happy to keep it alive. And like I said, it never reached the heights that we have here with aew, but it's a great promotion and it has a great voice and a great history.
- [39:11]
Ilana Golan
Entrepreneurship is really, really hard. In my mind, it is really, really hard. And there's raising capital, and there's dealing with hate, and there's dealing with doubt, and there's dealing with money issues. There's always something, right? First of all, can you share, except for Covid, can you share another challenge that hit you and how did you overcome it? And just a little bit of how, in general, do you personally cope with these things?
- [39:37]
Tony Khan
I think the hardest things that have happened have been friends that we've lost along the way. There have been, in two cases, wrestlers that I was very close with and people that were beloved by our locker room that we've lost in AEW. Mr. Brodie Lee, who is a beloved wrestler in AEW and all over the world of wrestling and had been known to all the fans and all the wrestlers all over the world and left behind a beautiful family. And honoring him was a great challenge. And I think the company put our best foot forward to honor our greatest champion and his family. And Mr. Brody Lee left behind a great legacy and Putting tribute that is befitting that legacy and the man that he is and was and the family that he's left here with us. It's one of the hardest things we've ever had to do. And I think that is one of the most important things we've ever done. We also then in Ring of Honor, lost the late, great Jay Briscoe. And when I acquired Ring of Honor, the Briscoe brothers were its greatest stars. And they're a tag team of brothers. They are closer than anybody could ever imagine. They had a bond of brotherhood that extended into the wrestling ring that brought them even closer together because their brothers and their tag team partners and best friends and Mark Briscoe is a huge part of Ring of Honor history. And Mark Briscoe came from Ring of Honor and now he's a huge part of. And his brother, Jay Briscoe never got the chance to be part of aew. I was very honored to work with him. And losing friends like Jay Briscoe and Mr. Brodie Lee along the way, and then that we're all responsible for honoring them and their legacy. I think that's challenging, but also an important responsibility that we have. So that's probably been the hardest challenges along the way. Is when you work with people that.
- [41:43]
Ilana Golan
You lose, does it change your perspective on anything in terms of legacy, in terms of what's important for you in terms of life overall?
- [41:53]
Tony Khan
Yeah. I mean, these are very upsetting things. And whenever you lose somebody that's in your life, you're going to take it. And there's a lot of different takeaways, but, I mean, a lot of bad things. Yeah. And I'm sure you've worked with people over the years that you've lost and had friends that you've lost and friends at work. And it can be really hard. And those are people that the wrestling fans really respected and people that everyone our companies really respect and I really respected and people I really liked in both cases. So those are really hard challenges along the way. There's business challenges. And when you're dealing with an aggressive competitor like we are, who is. I think. I mean, it's important to know it. I think one of the really cool things about the success of AEW is that AEW is a challenger brand competing in an industry where the industry leader historically has been the most adept company at crippling and smashing their competitors in the history of business. So AEW's existence in this industry signifies not only the challenger brand, which is really cool, an alternative, which is really cool. But we're doing great things. We're having a lot of fun, and we exist. And our mere existence speaks to the fact that we've been able to do something very special that actually nobody has ever been able to do in terms of the competition, in terms of the hikes we've hit, and what we continue to do with aew. We exist in the face of the most aggressive, dominant business competitor in the history of business. No business competitor has faced more different challengers from different regions in different parts of the world, particularly concentrated around the U.S. and not just one part of the U.S. the state, Southern, southeastern United States, Minnesota, Canada, all these places, they effectively smashed the competition place after place after place, successfully with a hammer and done incredibly well and thrived in doing so. And this has been going on for over 40 years, since before I was alive. And it's really cool to exist in the face of it.
- [44:15]
Ilana Golan
Well, it's amazing that it doesn't scare you, and it's amazing that it doesn't take you down. One of the questions that I'm sure a lot of our people in the audience will have is they would love to get in front of TV and entertainment and shows and media, whatever, but it's such a hard place to crack, and you're somehow not only cracked it, you're like, you know, you have all these entertainment things, like you totally nailed it. What are some tips maybe that would help somebody that doesn't have connections, doesn't know they have a good story, but have no clue how to crack the code?
- [44:54]
Tony Khan
Well, you have to build credibility, and the best way to do that is to find a way to get your foot in the door. And that's the hardest part is getting your foot in the door. And that's really a head start in doing so and being able to get into the NFL. So I able to take advantage of the opportunities that I've been given and make the most of the openings. And that's all they really were in all these cases was openings. Nobody was asking me to start an analytics department at the Jaguars. It's something I always really wanted to do, and I think there was a need that the team had that we were able to fill. So I think if you can find a need or a role that you can fill to somebody of great importance, then that is the best way to get your foot in the door in any industry. And if you can find a way to make yourself useful or important to somebody who's important and makes markets or makes opinions, then you have the ability to get your foot in the door.
- [45:49]
Ilana Golan
And you're not shy of hard work. I always laugh that I think sometimes there's these myths about the four hour work week, etc. And I like no, I'm kind of working my ass off. Maybe from time to time I'll can have a little more than freedom because it's my decision. But eventually, if you're driven by definition, you're going to work really, really hard. And you travel a ton.
- [46:11]
Tony Khan
Yeah, there's no off in wrestling. So we do shows 52 weeks a year. So like that's the tier. We used to travel a ton. It is a serious undertaking because we do just on TV, 104 shows, not including the pay per views, 104 events and that's just wrestling. That's before I touch on football. And I've never missed a show. I've been in every show we've ever done. And to do 104 TV shows, plus nine pay per views, a handful of other major live events, it's a lot. So over 110 wrestling events a year. Plus I'm at all the Jaguars games. Unless there's some major conflict, you can count on one hand all the games I missed in 13 years of the Jaguars. I come over as much as I can to Fulham and yeah, it's a lot. The travel is a big piece of it. But just really staying on top of everything is a lot of fun. You know, as a sports fan, a wrestling fan, a football fan, it's easy in that sense.
- [47:09]
Ilana Golan
So it doesn't burn you out because you love it so much because it's something that you're so passionate about.
- [47:14]
Tony Khan
Yeah, because that's what I would be doing anyway. So there's a lot to it. But that's basically what it is, Alana is it doesn't. Because I love it.
- [47:24]
Ilana Golan
This is incredible because I think for those listening and want a bigger life, it's beautiful to see how you were managed to basically create your passion into your life and your business and you know, it just all gels and intertwines and it's beautiful to see. But you also have this amazing portfolio career. Like you're doing so much and we're big believers in portfolio careers. I think we're the only place that actually teaches how to create Pretoria career. But you live it. What would you say to people that are listening to this and saying, I want Tony's life, but I don't know how to get it?
- [48:01]
Tony Khan
Well, it's I very fortunate I think I was born on third base and I've stolen home several times to where I've scored a lot of runs where I was able to take advantage. So I'd stolen home at least seven or eight times. Now, thankfully, I was put in the game at a very advantageous position. But then I've been able to make the most of the opportunities I've been given every time. And I think that's the best advice I can give is make the most of the opportunities you're given. I was dealt a really good hand and then played it Billy well, time after time after time. And I think even if you're not dealt the best hand, hopefully you'll be able to find a way to make the most of the hand you are dealt and get a better hand and work with it. So I can't give advice that applies to everybody because my situation is very, very unique. And I realize that a lot of the advice I'm giving probably doesn't apply to 99.999% of people. If you do find yourself with an opening, though, especially if there's a way to do it without totally unethically shanking someone in the back or doing something I don't want to do, then, you know, it's always great if you can find a way to take that opportunity and make the most of it.
- [49:09]
Ilana Golan
Yes, there's a lot of people that were dealt a pretty good hand, but they still didn't build such an empire and they didn't disrupt such a big market. So I think the way you are, to some extent, yes, you got some luck and everybody needs some luck, but you're creating your own luck as well. Right. And you're just creating such a massive impact with that. So if you take it back in time, what would be some advice that maybe you would share with your younger self?
- [49:37]
Tony Khan
I wouldn't change anything. I'd be afraid of changing a single thing. I don't want to butterfly and affect myself and not sit on that plane next to Bernie, not run into Kevin that night. So I wouldn't change a thing. I wouldn't want to mess with the past. So I have no advice for my younger self. Remember to steal your dad's keys like Bill and Ted do. No, I don't actually have any time traveling advice.
- [50:01]
Ilana Golan
So it's amazing to see where you guys are and what you're creating. And I loved researching a little bit about all the things that are even coming your way and what you already accomplished. So thank you for coming to the show.
- [50:15]
Tony Khan
Tony, thank you for having me. I really appreciate you having me on. It's very kind and I really enjoyed spending time. You're such a great interviewer and not only inquisitive, but made me feel very at home here. So thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it.
- [50:29]
Ilana Golan
Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you. Tony, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you did, please share it with friends now. Also, if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30 minute free training@leapacademy.com training. That's leapacademy.com training. See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan Show.