On June 25th, we had a Public Relations (PR) panel featuring Joe Favorito and Bryan Harris. Our speaker series recently has featured panels of professionals discussing specific areas of Sports Business. We’ve had a law panel, a sponsorship panel, and now it was time for PR.

Joe Favorito and Bryan Harris have over 50 years of PR experience between them, making them excellent subjects for the panel. Joe Favorito is an independent consultant who has worked with such prestigious companies as Bloomberg LLC, Lionsgate Films, and Ponturo Management Group. Bryan Harris is the COO & Managing Partner of Taylor Productions. Having worked there since 1989, Bryan has risen through the ranks at Taylor, at the same time helping to lead them through significant growth and evolution over the past six years.Joe and Bryan had lots of great advice about how to use PR. As we’ve been hearing from all of our speakers, it’s all about relationships. In PR, if you have relationships with the media, and with the content producers, you will succeed. Another thing they emphasized, is “PR is the appetizer, not the entree.” PR is about creating the initial buzz, but after that spark, the product launch or event succeeds based on its quality. The reason for Joe and Bryan’s emphasis, is that people often blame PR for their product failing. But as they showed, this is a misconception.

The PR Panel was very instructional but what really hammered home their talk for me, was work this past week. Most of my internship has been focused on the creation of a new sports league called the International Calisthenics Federation. For more information, check out our website at icfederation.com With my partner Tee, we’ve been working on the first Calisthenics event, the July 4th Coney Island Invitational. It was many weeks in the making, but with Tee and the rest of our team, we were able to put on a successful event. One of the awesome parts about the event, was that I got to work with Joe Favorito on the PR.

This post is entitled “from Mentee to Colleague,” because as part of the Manhattan Sports Business Academy, I went from sitting in a lecture listening to professionals like Joe and Bryan, to getting the opportunity to work with them. Joe became my colleague, as we worked the PR for the July 4th event. I got to learn first-hand, “in the trenches,” about the methods and the value of successful PR. This was definitely one of my favorite experiences from MSBA so far. Guiding me from “Mentee to Colleague,” that’s where MSBA took me.