In Episode 174 of the Wealth On Any Income podcast, host Rennie Gabriel speaks with Bernie Mullin, a successful sports executive and founder of the Aspire Difference Foundation. Bernie shares his remarkable journey, from leading major league sports franchises to empowering single parents through education and job training. He discusses his new book, Reimagining America's Dream, which advocates for making the American Dream attainable for all, and highlights his innovative ideas for empowering youth and bridging political divides. Bernie’s mission is to inspire others to take practical steps toward financial empowerment and social change.
In this episode, Rennie and Bernie cover:
• (4:00) Bernie's Career Journey: Bernie Mullin shares his inspiring career path, from leading basketball, hockey, and baseball franchises to founding the Aspire Difference Foundation, dedicated to supporting single parents with preschool children.
• (6:30) Philanthropy in Action: The mission behind the Aspire Difference Foundation and how it provides resources for single parents and children in underserved communities, focusing on quality education and job opportunities.
• (10:00) Personal Experience as a Single Parent: Bernie opens up about his own challenges as a single father of three and how his experience shaped his commitment to helping others in similar situations.
• (12:30) Turning Failure into Success: Bernie shares a critical lesson learned from a marketing failure with the Pittsburgh Pirates, where a $250,000 direct mail campaign resulted in little to no sales until his team shifted to relationship-building with customers.
• (14:00) The Power of Relationship Marketing: How personal connections and follow-up calls with "grandmas" led to selling over $1 million in merchandise, a key turning point in Bernie's career.
• (18:00) Leadership Lessons from Dysfunctional Teams: Bernie reflects on his time managing high-conflict sports teams like the Atlanta Hawks, highlighting the importance of navigating dysfunction and building strong, cohesive teams.
• (20:00) The American Dream for All: Bernie discusses his book, Reimagining America's Dream, which advocates for making the American Dream attainable for everyone, regardless of background or education.
• (23:00) “Pura Vida” Philosophy: Bernie shares the Costa Rican concept of "Pura Vida" (pure life) and how it reflects his approach to life and leadership—staying positive and not sweating the small stuff.
• (25:00) Inclusive Vision for America’s Future: How Bernie’s vision of unity—bridging divides between the right and left—can help restore a sense of shared purpose and make prosperity attainable for all.
• (29:30) Empowering Youth for Success: Bernie outlines a revolutionary program idea for helping youth in underserved communities gain job experience, financial literacy, and education, including a summer boot camp to prepare them for future success.
• (32:00) Practical Solutions for Social Issues: Bernie advocates for practical, grassroots solutions—such as hands-on work experience and financial education—to help solve America’s social and economic challenges.
• (37:00) The Importance of Financial Literacy: Bernie believes financial education and job skills are crucial for empowering future generations, particularly for those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.
"The American Dream should be attainable for everyone, not just the fortunate few. It’s about giving people the tools and opportunities to succeed, no matter where they start." -Bernie Mullin
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[Rennie Gabriel]
Hi folks, welcome to episode 174 of the Wealth On Any Income podcast. This is where we talk about money tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration around your business and your money. I'm your host, Rennie Gabriel.
In past episodes, we spoke about how to understand the numbers from your business, how to measure the level of pleasure based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in 5 to 10 seconds, and what determines how close you are to complete financial choice, and how to run your business without being in your business. Last time, we had Ruchi Pinniger, the founder and CEO of WatchHerProsper, women are empowered to redefine prosperity in their business. Today, we have as our guest, Bernie Mullin.
Bernie is a highly successful sports executive. He's been a leader in basketball, hockey, and baseball. He's the first immigrant ever to be CEO of a major league franchise.
He has turned around franchises, set all time revenue and attendance records, and generated over $1.5 billion in revenues for brands from the National Football League to the US Open Tennis, and with his agency, Aspire Marketing. We're going to talk more about this. All net proceeds from his book and consulting goes to the Aspire Difference Foundation that supports single parents with preschool children to ensure they get a quality education.
Bernie, welcome to the Wealth on Any Income podcast. Well, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Rennie.
Absolutely. Well, tell me more about the work you do and why you're doing it.
[Bernie Mullin]
Well, the work I'm doing now, I sold my company a little over a year ago, Rennie, and always had a long-term plan that I'd start to give back. So I created the Aspire Difference Foundation. The reason why it's single parents with preschool kids is in 1988, when I was with the Pittsburgh Pirates, I got divorced.
I had three kids, 13, 11, and 8. I was making six figure grade income, and I was terrified until I found a really good nanny babysitter. Fortunately, I got someone who was going to be a teacher.
She was in teacher training college, and Meg, wonderful lady, and my life became good again. But for a while, I was terrified. So I know how hard it is.
For me, it was then on a really good income. I can only imagine what it's like for a teenage pregnant girl, you know, having a baby, and certainly any of the young people who typically, you know, so many of our minorities in America, almost 70% of the kids are brought up by a single parent mom, and it's just tough. So that's what we're doing, helping them.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Thank you for that, because I understand where you're coming from, because when my children were 13 and 16, my wife decided to leave and leave me with the children. And so I became a single parent. And so, yes, I know what it's like.
So yeah, a lot of response.
[Bernie Mullin]
Wonderful experience of retrospect, right? But at the time, it was terrifying for whatever the reason. Fortunately, their mom is back in their life.
But I had, in 1988, there weren't too many husbands and fathers who got custody of their kids like I did, and I was very blessed.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Yeah, this was 1987 for me.
[Bernie Mullin]
Wow.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Same time frame. Yeah. So now tell me who your target markets are at this point now that you sold your company.
[Bernie Mullin]
Target markets, you know, for the book is pretty much everybody. I don't think it'll appeal to the extreme right wing MAGA. I don't think it'll appeal to the extreme left wing liberals, you know, and the woke folks.
I think it's, according to Pew Research, 65 percent of American voters are independents. They're in the middle, or they're near left, near right. They're not middle or far right or far left.
So I think it appeals to all of those folks.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Yeah. And I know the title is Reimagining America's Dream, Making it Attainable for All. So it's a fabulous title.
[Bernie Mullin]
Thank you. Yeah, I think it really was. I mean, I futzed around for about three years, writing chapters, rewriting them, not liking them.
And two things happened a couple of years ago when we went to Costa Rica with the co-author of my first book was an academic book. So I was a professor at the University of Massachusetts for 10 years building the sport business program and also being an adjunct in the business school. The sport business program was in the phys ed program.
And we spent the 10 years I was there getting it out of there and getting it into the business school where it belonged. So Dr. Bill Sutton and I were in Costa Rica. And first off, his advice was, well, get a ghostwriter.
And so I went and Googled best business ghostwriters in Atlanta, which is where I was living at the time. And 10 names came up, got down to a shortlist of three, did real research on three, start the first one, email backwards and forwards, and then I call him. And, you know, 0144, for any of your listeners, Rennie, 0144 is the country code for England.
So you would think a Brit, a former Brit like me, 51 years in America, would figure that out. But anyway, so Dr. Paul, where are you living? Williston.
Williston where? What's in the whirl? In the whirl?
What state's that in? It's in the, it's in Cheshire. It's across from the city of Liverpool where you grew up, Turkey.
You know, it's where my mom and dad retired to. And one of his favorite places to go with his wife is the Black Horse Pub, where I was the bartender going through college. So, you know, it was serendipity.
So the guy was, the guy was fantastic writer, as award winner, 18 months, two interviews every week, 90 minutes, you know, and he's got all the software that takes what we talk about and turns it into narrative. And then all he has to do is edit it. And so it was a brilliant book from that point of view.
So the book starts with all of the states that I've lived in as I've moved around America, starting with grad school in Kansas, and then teaching at the University of Massachusetts, then Pittsburgh with the Pirates, Denver, starting the Colorado Rockies, going on to a minor league hockey team, because to get, to become CEO of a major league team, I knew I had to have had experience running the team side, not just the business side.
So I did all of that. Vice Chancellor of Athletics at the University of Denver, taking them to division one, and then working for David Stern, most incredible experience, Commissioner David Stern at the NBA, building a team business unit, best practice unit, McKinsey style in-house consulting group. Then finally, CEO of the Atlanta Hawks with nine owners who are very dysfunctional, fighting each other in court for seven years for the years I put up with it.
And then I built my own business for the last 16 years and sold it a year ago. So that's the Bernie Mullen story, amazing story as an immigrant. Like you said in the intro, Rene, first ever foreigner to be CEO of a major league team, and two of them, the Atlanta Hawks NBA and the Atlanta Thrashers NHL team.
And I've been very blessed. And so the second part of the book is, you know, this thing was incredibly inspirational and aspirational for me. How about it being the same way for other people?
I believe it is, can be, should be. So let's get it back, particularly with the toxicity in America and politics right now, the extreme right, extreme left, and people calling each other deplorables and fascists and all this other, you know, garbage. Let's come together around a united dream and a purpose.
And let's this time make it attainable for everybody, because truly it isn't attainable for everybody. And it hasn't been, you know, for those who are poor and those generally who are less well-educated, which in this country generally means minorities.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the timing for the book is ideal right now. And let me ask you something a little bit.
I know that there was a situation, I think it was with the Pirates. And I'm going to have this be a two-part question. The first part is, what would you say was your biggest failure and what insight did you gain from that and what was the result?
[Bernie Mullin]
It was very simple. I'd written a book on sport marketing. The book was all about three things.
Build a database. In other words, don't just go out there and shoot up and build a database. We would have kids from Robert Morris University standing in line in the ticket lines at Three Rivers Stadium, you know, having the fans fill out application blanks.
Free scarf, free hat, free tickets, whatever it may be. Okay, database building. So database building, even before social media, before email, we were doing database building.
Number two, we were doing our best intelligent marketing of who the hell is this Renny guy? You know, what is this Renny Gabriel all about? What's his association with baseball in LA and Dodgers or is it the Angels or whatever?
You know, get that information so I could then send a direct mailer to you in those days. Now, email, text, social media, whatever it may be. But it was intelligently masked and matched, rather, to you and who you are and what your level of association was with the club.
And then number three, when people responded, we would call. Now today, they open up the email, they click through, they share, they post, you know, whatever it may be. They answer an email ad that we do on a social media site, whatever it may be, and we would do the follow-up call and we get five, six times X conversion on the call.
So, I mean, as good as social media marketing, intelligent marketing, database marketing was, the add-on phone call was massive and it was all about building a relationship. Who are you? What are you?
Who do you come with? Why do you come? How do I get you to come back?
And we do a lot of work with college marketing. You know, we have LMU, Pepperdine, that we work with in the LA area. Obviously, I've done a lot of work with the Dodgers back in the day.
And where we have great success is building those relationships. And it could be somebody that's living in Texas that is going to give, that play tennis at Pepperdine and that wants to give a donation to the tennis program. So, that's what we've done.
And that's where we built the 1.5 billion in revenue for over 300 clients, purely and simply by building a relationship, getting to know people, and who are you? What are you? What do you want from your sports and entertainment dollar?
And how do we match it up?
[Rennie Gabriel]
And what I remember from, you know, the guest intake form that we had prior to doing it in the way that produces these results, I remember when you were with the Pittsburgh Pirates Club, you'd spent a quarter million dollars on a direct mail campaign to sell small season plans and single game tickets and sold next to nothing until you started realizing it was the grandmas that you could appeal to.
[Bernie Mullin]
Well, thank you for pointing out the question you asked, which I never answered. I'm sounding like a politician here. The question you asked was the biggest failure, and that was exactly it.
And thank you for reminding me on that one. We did spend a quarter million dollars on a direct mail campaign. So, what happened was we had with Giant Eagle Grocery Markets, or in Pittsburgh they call it Jan Tiggle, and we had a million entries into the Home Run Sweepstake Contest.
And it was for the radio, KDKA radio. So, one inning game, Lanny Fritteri, our broadcaster, will pull out a name. And if you, if we hit a home run in that inning, you got groceries for a month free.
And if we hit a home, a Grand Slam, you got them for a year. And so, it was a really big deal. So, a million people applied.
They netted down to 400,000. This is so old. This is 1988, in 1987, that we got a tape, you know, of all the 400,000 people.
We sent it to a fulfillment house along with postcards. And out went our postcards to try and sell tickets. We saw nothing.
I mean, really close to nothing.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Oh, my gosh.
[Bernie Mullin]
And I was terrified. I thought I was going to get fired and should have been fired, because I was arrogant enough to believe that the book, you know, that sport marketing book in those days was correct. And it couldn't possibly fail.
And so, anyway, all of a sudden, you know, my head of customer service, Kathy Murphy, was a grad student from UMass that I brought with me as my right-hand person. And she had five people in a customer service department. She said, we'll start calling.
So, they started calling, you know, it took a while to get phone numbers, because we had their mailing address, but not phone numbers. Got the phone numbers, called. And it was all little old ladies, all grandmas who were listening to the radio, sitting on their porch in Du Bois, Pennsylvania in the summer.
And, you know, but in that conversation Kathy and her staff had with these grandmas, they're like, yeah, but I've got grandkids and I've got kids. Send me a brochure for Pirates merchandise, for the sweaters, for the hats, for the scarves, you know, for all the other stuff. And of course, fortunately, we sold over a million dollars worth of merchandise.
And so, they kept me going for at least three more years. Great lesson, don't ever assume anything and don't think you know everything. And today, you would never do that, because you would do a test run of, you know, a thousand or a thousand here, a thousand there in the database for different target segments, and you'd never waste money like that.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Exactly, you do your A-B testing, what works right, what's the right phrasing and all the rest of that. Yes, times have changed in marketing, but now we're about to wrap up. So, I want to know, because people in my listening audience, they're primarily entrepreneurs, will want to get a hold of you.
And do you have something that you can offer as, you know, an inducement for people to reach out to you?
[Bernie Mullin]
Absolutely, first of all, I'll talk to everybody. So, I will definitely call them back and I will definitely email them back. So, if they do, bernie.mullin at playfly.com.
So, b-e-r-n-i-e dot mullin, m-u-l-l-i-n at playfly, p-l-a-y-f-l-y dot com. First of all, you know, if they would do that, and I'm happy to talk to them about, you know, the consulting in terms of the core of how we grow revenues as a business consultant. I'm also happy to talk to them about the core of the book, which really, the essence, the unique part of the book is recommending for rising freshmen going into high school, an eight-week boot camp away from home in these mothball military camps.
The kids will get up early and do exercise every morning. They'll learn how to cook. So, particularly for poor kids, you know, living in food deserts where Monday is McDonald's, Tuesday's Domino's, and Wednesday's out of a can, you know, they would, they learn and actually will have prepped and cooked eight meals, eight breakfasts, eight lunch, eight dinners in the eight weeks.
They will earn minimum wage of at least 15 bucks an hour. Then the program recommends that they work junior before their sophomore, junior, and senior years. One business, one government agency, one volunteer or charitable organization.
By the time they're 18, they will have worked. They will have earned $20,000, no tax, no deductions. Okay.
We'll get banks to give them 7.5% interest with free checking. Those kids could have $25,000 nest egg. So, if you think about the biggest problem in America, it is, we've got to, you know, sound like one of the politicians here.
We've got to allow people to have one job and be able to pay their bills. Okay. And particularly single parent females, you know, who are trying to get a GED and, you know, the teenage pregnancies are just such a problem in this country.
So, we do that for them, get their kids learning, getting a resume together, knowing if they want to go to college or professional certification. And then we give them four years of professional certification free for either, you know, becoming an esthetician, whatever it may be, or going to college. Now, what does that do?
It's $100 billion a year, the program, the cost of the program that the government would need to spend, Rene, just in the first year for the boot camp, and then each year for the years of college. That's what we just gave to Israel and Gaza and to Ukraine. So, if we can come up with that, it's not budgeted program money.
Can't we do that as an investment in our own youth to level the playing field and make the American dream attainable for all?
[Rennie Gabriel]
Oh, thank you, Bernie. Thank you so much for being on the Wealth on Any Income podcast. I'll put your email in the show notes so people will have that if they, you know, they're driving while they're listening or whatever.
And again, thank you for being on the podcast.
[Bernie Mullin]
Well, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate you getting the word out. Somehow, we've got to get America back together again.
And the last thing is, which came from Costa Rica, when you go to Costa Rica, unlike Mexico, you say muchas gracias, they'll say in Costa Rica, they'll say Pura Vida, pure life. Don't sweat the details. And so, in that respect, we're in the book recommending PAL.
So, Bernie, you're now my PAL, I'm your PAL, and PAL stands for peace and love.
[Rennie Gabriel]
Oh, thank you, Bernie. Very simple. And to those who are still listening or watching on YouTube, if you'd like to know how books, movies, and society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com forward slash TEDx. You'll hear my TEDx talk and can request a free nine-step roadmap to complete financial choice and philanthropy, and receive an email once or twice a month with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or your money. And if you'd like to see how you can increase your wealth and donate to the causes that touch your heart, please check out our affordable program, Wealth with Purpose. To my listeners and viewers, thank you for tuning in.
You can listen to the Wealth on Any Income podcast on your favorite platform, and please rate, review, and subscribe. Until next time, be prosperous. Bye-bye for now.