By Chris Taylor
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Here is a good rule of thumb for entrepreneurs: Opportunity does not always look like what you expect.
In fact, sometimes it looks like its exact opposite. It might come in the form of a phone call famed sportscaster Rich Eisen got while at the Los Angeles airport on Dec. 23, 2019, telling him his network was shutting down and his show was ending.
Getting bad news like that can make anyone feel like their world is falling apart. But for Eisen – who first came to prominence as an anchor with ESPN’s flagship show SportsCenter – it turned into a career pivot, mainly because he did not know what else to do.
“I hung up the phone and became the owner of my own business,” Eisen recalls about buying back his show from DirecTV, which was shuttering its Audience Network. “I honestly never thought I was going to own something, or hire employees, or deal with negotiations for a growing business. It’s been a heck of a challenge.”
Indeed, fast-forward a few years, and the 53-year-old finds himself with “a lot of spinning plates.” Those include hosting a three-hour daily talk show on streaming service The Roku (NASDAQ:ROKU) Channel, dishing the scoop to 1.3 million Twitter followers and being on-air talent for the NFL Network for 20 years.
Eisen is particularly ubiquitous in April, in the weeks leading up to the National Football League’s annual draft, when it can seem like he is on people’s screens 24/7. This year’s edition will kick off April 27 in Kansas City, Missouri, and Eisen will be assuming hosting duties once again.
It is at moments like that – helming one of the NFL’s marquee events, watching early-round draft picks come into millions of dollars for the first time in their lives – that he thinks about how far his environment has come, from a modest childhood on Staten Island.
His first job back then: Cold-calling people to sell subscriptions to the New York Post, which rewarded teenage Eisen with a lot of “colorful language on the other end of the phone,” he remembers. Other humble gigs included being a cashier at supermarket chains Pathmark and Waldbaum’s, as well as being an intern for the Staten Island Advance newspaper.
It was only much later, once he graduated from journalism school and lucked into a “winning lottery ticket” of getting hired at SportsCenter, that Eisen first started seeing real money. That helped him pay off his student loans, car note and buy a small apartment in Manhattan.
But when he thinks about his financial life, Eisen does not focus much on areas like stock picking. Rather he is one of those entrepreneurs who prefers to “bet on myself,” investing in his own show, brand and production company.
Since DirecTV, his show has had a few different stops along the way, including YouTube and Peacock, before finding its current home at Roku.
"Rich is one of the most recognizable, well-respected, smart, and funny voices in sports," notes Charlie Collier, Roku Media's president, a former Fox and AMC alum who has been tasked with boosting Roku's content offerings. "That he's a Jets fan is pure coincidence, but it's absolutely extra credit."
Eisen says it cost him a “nice chunk of change” to purchase his own show but found a lesson in the steep learning curve of becoming his own boss.
“My advice is, never think you can’t do it. When I first got that call, I didn’t have the first clue about how to run a business," Eisen says. "I had to become the boss and figure out month by month how to stay alive.”
He attributes that gritty ethos to his parents, who were New York City public school educators. Now he passes along those principles to his own kids – now 14, 12, and 9 – by supplying a steady diet of chores, from handling the dishwasher to taking care of the family’s two dogs.
It is clear what money lessons he is instilling: “That everything needs to be earned, and that nothing is given. They need to understand that. It’s a nonstop drumbeat from their mother and me, that hard work pays off.”
Eisen does not take success for granted and references some advice he got the week of his wedding 20 years ago: “Take a moment, and take it all in. Because it all goes really fast.”