Agencies Trending Toward the Central United States

The recent re-location of top CAA sports agents to St. Louis will begin a growing trend of similar moves toward the central United States.

Although the majority of Entertainment Agencies are located in cultural hot-spots such as Miami, Los Angeles, and New York, the next wave of arising agencies will follow the precedent CAA has set and begin relocating in more central areas of the U.S. In analyzing the motives behind these moves, consider the following:

The representation industry (whether it be sports or entertainment) thrives on personal contact. Regardless of contrary reports, the most successful agents are the ones who care about their clients and who invest themselves into their clients’ lives. The more an agent/client personal relationship develops, the more incentives arise for helping that client succeed. Obviously, there are the financial incentives (which exist whether or not any personal relationship exists). Furthermore, though, there are personal incentives that derive from a desire to help a client because he is a friend, rather than simply a client. This desire runs deeper as an incentive than a purely economical desire. It also, as a result, will snowball into more financial benefits for both the agent and the client because of the added incentives of the agent.

This having been said, agencies located in the central U.S. will better allow a more personal relationship to develop. Let me illustrate an example: An agent located in Los Angeles has clients scattered across the U.S. In order to meet with these clients face to face, the distance and inconvenience of travel are significantly burdensome. This burden translates into the agent neglecting (in terms of personal contact) his more unknown clients. This neglect translates into resentment on both fronts and eventual dissolution of the relationship. A centrally located agent could remedy this problem due to his general close proximity to all his clients. The distance and inconvenience of travel has been lessened and, as a result, less clients are neglected.

In terms of the Entertainment industry, unless a new Midwestern entertainment hub develops in the near future, this analysis does not hold as much water as with the Sports industry. Southern California is the entertainment capital of the world and as long as this is the case, the majority of agencies will continue to pop up there, rather then the central United States.