How a college student launched one of the most influential B2B sports media companies
Adam White explains how Front Office Sports grew from a college project into a media powerhouse.
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Most college freshmen can be forgiven if they don’t have their entire careers planned out ahead of them when they’re 18 years old, and that was certainly the case for Adam White. When he started at the University of Miami in 2013, he had no idea what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, much less which college major he should enroll in. “The one thing that I did know I liked was sports,” he told me in an interview. “I had played sports my entire life growing up and it was just something that I really enjoyed.” Without much else to go on, he decided to major in sports administration, a subject that at least had a high likelihood of holding his interest.
That’s how White found himself taking a class called Intro to Sports Administration in the spring of 2014. For one of the class projects, the professor asked each student to go out and interview someone who worked within the industry. “One of the things that our professors preached to us at the time was that it's not about what you know, it's about who you know … That was kind of their guiding light.” White ended up interviewing Blake James, who was then the athletic director at the University of Miami.
White didn’t record the interview; instead he just transcribed it and then made a brief presentation for the class. But the experience opened his eyes to how easy it could be to convince some of the most accomplished professionals in his industry to sit down and talk to him. Certainly, he thought, there was some sort of value contained within that level of access.
That idea continued to percolate at the back of his mind as he finished out his freshman year and then went home to Phoenix, Arizona for the summer. He initially tried to get a job as a restaurant server, but there wasn’t much seasonal hiring. “It's like 110 degrees in the summer in Arizona,” White said. “I was playing baseball at night, working out in the morning. I had no idea what I wanted to do in the afternoon.” That’s when his idea for a website about the sports industry began to solidify. His initial inclination was to call the site Executive Report, but his dad convinced him to instead name it Front Office Sports. “I paid $40 to one of my buddies to make the original logo and launched it on Wix.”
The early version of Front Office Sports focused entirely on publishing longform Q&As, and the site slowly started to build up an audience as his interview subjects shared it with their networks. Flash forward to today, and the outlet has over 800,000 newsletter subscribers, nearly eight figures in revenue, and around 40 employees. It also recently sold a 20% stake to Crain Communications at a $25 million valuation.
How did a site that started out as a class project rise to such heights? In an interview last year, White walked me through his journey from running the site as a side hustle to landing his first investor to pivoting to newsletters during the pandemic.
Let’s jump into my findings…
A college side hustle
Initially, White only published Q&As. He started by putting together a list of industry professionals and reaching out to them. “I just really leaned into it and I said, ‘Hey, I'm a student. I would love to tell your story.’” White was again surprised by how many of these elite professionals were willing to speak with him. “Everyone loves to talk about themselves. It was something that was easy for them to do and nobody else was asking them.”