Dot-com diehard credits hiring - Strategies of the Fittest - Michael Levy of SportsLine.com - Brief Article - Company Profile

Chief Executive, The, June, 2002 by Sonja Sherwood

Michael Levy has been running SportsLine.com for so long that back when he tried to drum up financing for the sports media site he was turned down by more than 100 venture firms.

That was 1994, before the gold rush. Eight years later, with major corporate support, celebrity endorsements and an IPO, Levy's still online and his model has been vindicated by five years of mad venturing. In addition to its flagship, CBS SportsLine.com, the company also publishes NFL.com and PGATOUR.com, among others. More than 9 million sports fans flock to the network each month on average, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, for fantasy football, office pools and coverage of the National Football League and the Professional Golfers' Association. SportsLine.com expects revenues to break even with cash expenses this year.

Though Levy isn't a typical dotcommer-he's 55, not 25; his base is Ft. Lauderdale, not Silicon Valley; and he's still in business-he echoes what many less successful brethren say they learned in hindsight: It is critical to hire the right people, right away.

"The first 100 employees are the toughest," says Levy, who now employs 434, "because I don't care how good you think you are at hiring people; you're going to make mistakes. And in a small company you can't let the mistake hang around."

Even if that means firing your vice president and most of his team - a fifth of your workforce - less than a month before your site launch, as Levy did when he decided his vice president wasn't driving his team hard enough to meet schedules. Worse, the man was a pessimist, in Levy's view. "You can't afford any pessimistic people in startup deals," says Levy.

Startups need people who won't get queasy when times are rough, he says. Levy hired his current vice president of finance, James Cline, from a company in bankruptcy, where Cline had to fight it out with creditors and cope with dwindling cash. "Battle-tested," Levy calls him.

Then there's the tech officer, as critical to an Internet company's success as the oil in a race car. Levy scouted recruits at AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe before eventually discovering a "happy-go-lucky-type guy" from Apple, who withstood a four-hour grilling by venture capitalists with flying colors. Levy got his funds, and the rest is history--always so much better than being history.