Hey, it's Adam.

In the last issue, I wrote that the order has flipped. The audience comes first, the promotion second, and the promoter is often a bigger draw than the people he promotes.

That's true. It's also the sentence that ruins a lot of promotions, because people read it as permission.

So here's the part I left out. The face of a promotion is a job, not a status.

The test is simple. Does the face serve the product, or does the product serve the face?

Where this comes from.

Boxing wrote the template. Don King was as recognizable as most of the heavyweights he promoted, Tyson included. Wrestling took it further, with Vince McMahon turning the owner into a character the storylines needed.

The UFC understood it early. When the Fertittas bought the company, they ran the business from behind the scenes and put Dana White in front of the cameras from day one. It took him twenty-plus years to become more famous than most of his roster. He still knows exactly what to say to make you care about a fight.

Eddie Hearn is the opposite style doing the same job. Dana is the American bulldozer, his way or no way. Hearn is articulate and quick, the Englishman who looks nothing like a fighter and still holds a room full of them. Different personalities. Both sell fights.

David Feldman at BKFC is a quieter version. He loves the sport, and it comes through every time he talks about it.

Some of the newer lane gets it too. BRANDRISK, for example, is built around Adin Ross, with an audience bigger than anything else on the card, and they point that audience at the fights.

The promotions with no face.

Then there's the other end. Some promotions have been around for years, run big events, sign real talent, and I couldn't tell you who runs them. Neither could most of their fans.

That's a choice, and it isn't automatically wrong. It's how corporations work. Name the head of Mercedes. Porsche. General Motors. Most people can't, and those companies sell millions of cars.

Now name the face of Tesla. You didn't have to think.

That's the trade. A face makes a brand relatable, because people buy from people, not logos. It also means the brand carries whatever that person does. Elon Musk has sold more Teslas than any ad campaign could, and when he went deep into politics, the brand took the hit with him. Same face, both directions.

Apple is the version I'd study. Steve Jobs was part of the product. Tim Cook was calmer and less of a showman, and it still worked, because he had enough presence for what the company needed. Last month, John Ternus took over, a hardware engineer most people had never heard of until the spring. Three very different people in the same seat. None of them had to be Jobs. Each had to fit the job at the time.

A faceless promotion is running the Mercedes model in a business that sells like Tesla. Fight fans don't buy specs. They buy stories and people. You can survive without a face. It's much harder to be talked about.

What failure looks like.

I'm not naming anyone. You'll recognize them anyway.

The promotion where every post on the brand account is the promoter. His meetings, his travel, his takes, his face on the thumbnail. The fighters show up in the caption, if at all.

The CEO or president, sometimes not even an owner, who notices the brand has reach and starts using it to build his own platform. The promotion becomes his content engine.

The one who turns every press conference into his stand-up set.

None of this is hidden. Ego reads through a phone camera instantly. Fans see it, fighters see it, and so do the sponsors deciding whether to come back.

The job is to sell the promise that this fight, this fighter, this promotion is worth your Saturday night and your money. If what you're selling is yourself, you're doing a different job on the company's budget.

Too many chefs.

The other version is structural, and it's harder to fix because nobody did anything wrong on purpose.

Two, three, sometimes four founders. Same equity, same title, same stake. Everyone does a bit of everything, so nobody is the captain. Even when they agree on paper who fronts the company, someone resents that the other guy gets more camera time. Same stake, less light.

You see it at the press conference. More executives at the table than fighters. Two or three people standing in the face-off instead of one. It tells everyone watching that the promotion hasn't decided who the boss is, and that always gets expensive later.

This is different from the Ki MMA stage I wrote about last issue. Three people, but three jobs: money, promoter, matchmaker. The problem isn't the number of people. It's duplicated roles fighting over the same spotlight.

You can watch this question play out right now. MVP and PFL merged at the end of July under the MVP name. The structure on the announcement was clear: Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian as co-founders on the board, and John Martin, the former Turner CEO who ran PFL, as CEO of the combined company. Less than two months later, Martin stepped down, and Bidarian was named as the person to lead what comes next.

I'm not going to guess what happened behind the scenes. That could be its own newsletter edition. But it shows that the question of who leads doesn't end when the press release goes out. When you merge two companies, you merge two sets of founders, two sets of instincts, and two groups of people who expected to be in the room.

The UFC shows the clean version. The Fertittas had more financial power than Dana. Today Ari Emanuel and the TKO side sit above him. They're at the events. They're not the face.

The part of the job nobody films.

The face is also the person who stands there when it goes wrong.

Orlando, 2022. Karate Combat 37. Co-main event, world title fight, Lopez versus Chelmia.

Lopez looked like he was winning in everyone's eyes. Our computer system had him ahead. We announced him as the winner and new champion. He did the in-ring interview. In Peru, people were already celebrating.

Then the head of the commission came to me. The official scores had Chelmia winning. We had announced the wrong champion.

So the executive director looked at me and asked what I was going to do about it.

I had a few seconds. The main event was about to start, and the whole arena believed Lopez had won decisively. I decided not to reverse it in the building mid-show. I'd go backstage to the medical stations, tell Chelmia he'd kept his title, and then tell Lopez.

Lopez was dehydrated and banged up, and by the time I got there he was being taken to the hospital. I wasn't going to give a fighter that news on his way into an ambulance.

So I followed him to the hospital and waited. Around 3 a.m. he was discharged and walked out of his room with the belt on his shoulder.

That's when I told him.

He didn't believe me. He thought it was a setup. Everyone had told him he was champion, his country was celebrating, and now the president of the league was standing in a hospital hallway at three in the morning telling him it wasn't true. The next day I had to sit down with him again and convince him it was real.

We did what we could to make it right. Chelmia agreed to an immediate rematch. We still paid Lopez the bonus. And I went on camera and said it publicly: we made a mistake, the result is different, Chelmia is the champion, and there will be a rematch.

It wasn't the fighters' fault. Most of it wasn't mine either. But my face was on the brand, and if your face is on the brand, you own what the brand does. That's the half of the job the clown-show promoters never sign up for.

My own seat.

It would be easy to write this as if I'm exempt, so I'll be honest about my side of it.

I became the face of Karate Combat because somebody had to, and it was the job. I didn't hate it. It wasn't my favorite part either. A Hungarian with an accent was never going to be Dana White, and I knew it. I was never the loud, high-energy promoter you see in boxing.

What I had was two decades on the other side. National team, a lot of fights, then BJJ. I knew what this sport takes out of people, and fighters could tell. That gave me a common language with them that no media training would have.

The risk still applies to me. Anyone who holds the mic long enough starts to like how it sounds. The guardrail is remembering why you picked it up.

Where I land.

Every promotion needs a face. Fans want to put a name to it, and that name can be likable or controversial. Both work.

But treat it like any other role. One person, decided before the first press conference, and decided again after every deal that changes who owns what. A job description that says sell the fights and take the hits. And a scorecard: are the fighters bigger because of you, or are you bigger because of them?

If it's the second, that's not a face. That's a passenger with a microphone.

Talk soon,

Adam

P.S. If you're building something in this space and want to think through the business side, that's what SKOVAX does. Reach out.

P.P.S. If you have capital to deploy in combat sports, that's a different conversation and I'd like to have it. Reply to this email.

P.P.P.S. Full newsletter archive HERE.