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.”

White readily admits now that he wasn’t a good interviewer at first. “I was horrible,” he said. “I'll be straight honest with you. I literally had 20 different prepared questions that I just read like a machine gun, basically just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Whenever a subject finished giving an answer, White didn’t have any follow up questions based on what the person had just said. He would end up with these two-hour recordings that took over four hours to transcribe, and it didn’t take him long to realize that this approach wouldn’t generate very compelling content.

So he switched things up. When prepping for an upcoming interview, he would only write down three questions in advance. “I had three questions and then everything else I asked after that was based on what the person said.” White had realized that the best interviews aren’t interviews at all; they’re conversations. “I took a public speaking class in college and it was one of the most beneficial classes I've ever taken,” he said. “It eventually got to the point where I became a pretty good interviewer, and now I've done hundreds and hundreds of these.”

During those first few years, Front Office Sports never experienced explosive growth. Its readership just steadily grew as its interview subjects shared it within their networks. “I remember we’d get these little milestones,” White recalled. “We published an interview that got 100 pageviews, then another with 200 pageviews, and then we had our first one with 1,000 pageviews. And then I remember we got to 5,000 followers on Twitter and we got verified. There were all these little things that kind of just started to stack on top of each other until they became big things.”

For those first several years, Front Office Sports generated no revenue, and so White didn’t have any money to pay people. But early on he posted to a University of Miami Facebook group asking if anyone wanted to join him. He got one response from a fellow sports administration major named Russell Wilde. “I reached out because it seemed like a really great idea and I wanted to work on the website,” Wilde told a journalist earlier this year. He spent much of his free time helping Front Office Sports grow its social media presence, and he continued to pitch in on the site after graduating in 2015.

White didn’t graduate until 2017, and he immediately set about getting a job in sports administration. “I had gone 14 rounds of interviews with a sports league, and I thought for sure I had the job. I was like 100% sure. But then somehow I didn't get the job.”

This was an inflection point for White. He could no longer live in student housing, and he didn’t want to move back home with his parents. Luckily, his girlfriend at the time lived in an apartment owned by her parents, and she offered to let him live with her, rent free. He then made a crucial decision that would change the course of his life: instead of continuing to pursue roles in sports administration, he’d get part time jobs as a server and pour all of his remaining time into building up Front Office Sports. 

White was soon burning the candle at both ends. He’d wake up in the morning and go to work at a TA job at The University of Miami. “I would be working on the site while I was there. They knew about it, so it was cool. It was part of our setup.” He would go home around 4 p.m. and then go to work at his restaurant job until midnight. “It was honestly a wild, wild 12 months or so.”

But the brutal schedule eventually paid off. Within a year, White landed his first major sponsor and his first investment. He then had what he needed to take the business to the next level.

Scaling up

White had two big breaks in 2018, both in quick succession. The first was that he landed his first major sponsor: Anheuser-Busch. He also struck up a friendship on Twitter with Jason Stein, a managing partner at SC Holdings, and that relationship led to his first major investment. “It took about six months for everything to come together, but we got the investment at the end of 2018. I moved from Miami to New York on Black Friday, and have lived up here ever since.”

With real money in the bank, White could now do two crucial things:

1. He could finally pay himself a salary.

2. He could also hire people.

His first hiring decision was easy. Russell Wilde, the University of Miami graduate who had been working on Front Office Sports during his free time, came on as COO and is also now credited as a co-founder.

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Over the next year, Front Office Sports grew from zero to 10 full-time employees. With more editorial resources at his disposal, White began to experiment with new content formats and areas of coverage. “We shifted our focus during the pandemic when everything kind of went to hell,” he said. “We found that the one guiding light during that time was the newsletter. It just started to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow.” The results were so encouraging that the entire company reoriented around the newsletters, becoming what he called “the Morning Brew for sports.”

Its main newsletter is now delivered twice a day — once in the morning and another in the evening. Every issue packages together around four stories, each approximately 250 words long. Native ads are nestled in between them. On the day I’m writing this, the two sponsors are Fidelity and a fitness-tracking watch called Whoop.

Though the analysis is still there, the site now has a much higher metabolism and is partly scoop-driven. “Our whole entire edict is just to figure out how to find a way to get the biggest stories so that we can drive top-of-funnel audiences to the site and get them into the newsletter from there.” Once a reader is signed up for the newsletter, then the goal is to create a daily habit. “We like to call it Curation as a Service. We don't have a SaaS business, we have a CaaS business.”

In White’s view, the inbox is the new homepage. “When was the last time you went to espn.com?” he asked. “I cannot tell you the last time I went to espn.com, but I read their newsletters all the time. One thing we always say is, ‘why go where you think consumers are when you can go where you know they are?’ And right now, most working business professionals spend six to eight hours of their day in their inbox.” 

Though the company is still very much focused on its B2B offerings, it renamed its parent company to FOS and has begun to experiment in new verticals. For instance, they launched a standalone B2C newsletter called Sports Section. Whereas Front Office Sports covered the business operations behind sports, Sports Section was geared toward the fans. “We did launch an NBA-specific vertical and a sports betting newsletter,” said White. “They didn't take off like we wanted them to, so we folded them back into Sports Section.” Earlier this year, FOS brought Sports Section back onto the main Front Office Sports website and rebranded it as Front Office Sports Scoreboard.

The post-pandemic chapter

In our interview, I asked White what his ambitions were for FOS and whether he could ever see it copying publishers like The Athletic and SB Nation by launching team-specific verticals all across the nation. He didn’t express much interest in going that route, especially since it would require a massive infusion of capital. “We can't overextend ourselves,” he said. “We just don't have that money and we'll never have that money, because with most media businesses, unless you're able to reach massive scale or bring in massive talent, you're just not going to see the multiples and returns that the VCs want to see.”

Right now, he’s hyper focused on serving the most influential people in sports — those who work for the leagues, the media, and brand marketing. “That's fashion, that's venture capital, that's private equity, that's food, that's innovation. We have the general counsel of Netflix as part of our audience. I know this because we have his email address and he opens the newsletter like 90% of the time. That's perfect, because Netflix is doing a lot of stuff in gaming. Netflix is doing a lot of stuff in sports. They've talked about it, they're thinking about it, and that's the perfect person that we want to have reading this.”

FOS has eschewed programmatic advertising thus far and is focused entirely on selling native ads, mostly within its newsletters. It also developed an exclusive sports betting partnership with DraftKings; in fact, a DraftKings widget is embedded within all of its articles and displays live odds to potential sports gamblers.

In late 2021, shortly before I spoke to White, FOS launched Insights, a $300-a-year subscription vertical. The company hired Liam Killingstad, a former Goldman Sachs associate, to run Insights. “I don't want to wall off our content if we can,” said White. “I want to keep everything that we do accessible and then basically build enough value that people want to take the next step with us. Insights is all about market trends, research, data insights — basically helping the industry see around corners. Instead of paying McKinsey to do this research for them, they pay us instead.” He said he’d like subscription revenue to eventually make up between 20% to 30% of the business.

During our interview, White kept name dropping people who had tweeted out links to FOS, and it was a Who’s Who in sports and entertainment: Lebron James, Maverick Carter, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When White launched FOS in college, sports media was a very crowded market, and yet he’s managed to muscle his way in despite no prior experience in media or business. This year, Crain Communications bought a 20% stake in the company at a $25 million valuation, but I don’t think White is near to cashing out anytime soon. 

After all, the kid’s not even 30 years old. He’s just getting started.

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.