Sverdlik Brady LLC
An old friend of mine from fX, went to work for a company in Philadelphia who had agreements, through his Direct Response company, in place with 100’s of cable MSOs across the country to supply them with commercials to run in their unsold time. Cable companies had just successfully negotiated a fixed amount of commercial time on all of their networks for them to sell locally. It was a massive amount of commercial inventory but it was cost prohibitive, except for the largest of operators, to build a sales staff to sell the time. That is why they loved this guy’s commercials and ran them through their schedules on all their networks for a share of the revenue.
He was trying to build his own system to sell the time nationally, so he hired my friend and he hired me. We quickly hit the streets and found some willing partners that wanted high quality, low cost national ads. We were soon more than two thirds of his business and I was getting tired of commuting back and forth to Philadelphia so we quit the company and turned around and sold our services to the guy in Philadelphia. He was our first client.
We got corner offices on 3rd Avenue and 43rd street in a business coop. We used Legal Zoom to form our LLC, Yahoo bulletin boards to communicate, Microsoft excel to build our system, bought our domain and set up email, and were in business for a fraction of what it cost to start Media Partnerships.
We started to branch out and sell our expertise. We got the USA Today to hire us to develop and sell a daily sports program. We entertained an offer to do the same for a late night comedy show, which we declined, and we also tried to put together an successful bid to buy the Ovation Channel, we didn’t. We had a nice little company, a lot of freedom, and a decent cash flow. Then my wife was offered an incredible job in Chicago so I sold my half to my partner and we moved to Chicago, where I abandoned the television business one more time.