Wisdom at the Top

Ed Snider, Chairman, Comcast-Spectacor

From a very early age, Ed Snider was interested in business.

“I can’t say it’s true for everyone,” Ed told me, “but I feel a large percentage of entrepreneurs are born that way. Remember how you had friends in school who always knew they wanted to be doctors or lawyers? I never gave a second thought to wanting to be a doctor, but I was always looking to do things related to business.”

Snider was fortunate to have a father who encouraged his interests.

“My father had a little grocery store in D.C. when I was a kid,” he went on. “Dad was fantastic. Even when I was eight years old he let me rearrange the shelves. He let me use my own mind. He wasn’t the kind of father to say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ He just had phenomenal instincts on how to raise his son. In raising my own children, I still use 90% of the stuff I learned from him.”

Today, Snider is chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, the Philadelphia-based sports and entertainment firm.

“We own the Philadelphia Flyers, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Wachovia Center and Wachovia Spectrum,” Ed explained. “We own Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia, a regional 24-hour sports programming network. We have a ticketing company, New Era Tickets, a food concession company, Ovations Food Services, and an international management company, Global Spectrum. We manage arenas, stadiums, convention centers throughout the country and in Canada, and we’re now expanding throughout the world.”

Of all his numerous achievements in business, Snider is perhaps most proud of his role in bringing the Flyers to Philadelphia in 1967 as an expansion team. The league was doubling from six to 12 teams that year, but Philadelphia was not on most people’s radar for a team. Snider waged a one-person campaign to convince the NHL otherwise.

“I think my biggest achievement was creating the Flyers out of thin air where everybody said it was going to fail,” he said. “Hockey in Philadelphia? Nobody even knew what a puck was. There had been an NHL team in Philly in the 1930s that had the worst record in the league, drew no fans, and lasted one year. So when I wanted to bring major league hockey to the city, everybody thought I was nuts. The Hockey News voted us the least likely to succeed of the six expansion teams. But I was young enough to be nuts.

“The reason I ended up with as much of the team as I did is because I had tremendous difficulty getting financing. I wanted to own 10% of the team and get a bunch of investors. I originally owned 60% and eventually ended up owning 90%.

“But I was young enough to be confident that we could make it work. As it turned out, of the six original expansion teams that came into the league, we’re probably the only one that has been consistently successful. It’s been a gigantic success.”

The new team needed an arena. Snider convinced city officials that he would build one, if they would provide him five acres of land on what was supposed to be part of the parking lot for the new Veterans Stadium. Snider oversaw the construction of the Spectrum and eventually took control of it.

Snider attends 76ers and Flyers games to keep in touch with how well the company is performing. “Being at the games tells me a lot about our operation,” he said. “Not only the team on the court, but what’s going on in the stands, how we’re treating the fans, and all the other things that are involved in the hospitality business.”

But Snider also pointed out how his management style has evolved over the years.

“When you’re starting something and you have to make it work or you’re broke, you’re a micromanager. You know every single detail of every single thing that’s going on. So when I started the Flyers and the Spectrum, I knew absolutely everything that was going on because I had to make payroll every week and I didn’t know how I was going to do it. Now that we’ve grown and are much more prosperous, I don’t micromanage. My people keep me informed and the things that come my way are the things that are really important. I put someone in a job and let them do it.”

Check out more of Ed's interview with Scott Rosen in Wisdom at the Top.