La Jolla-based management consulting service Bainbridge has launched a new service called Bainbridge’s Professional Athlete Due Diligence. Its target is professional sports organizations.
The service will provide insight into a player’s character and into the player’s past. It is a proprietary insight using research methodology to look into that player’s past character in order to predict whether the player will be a good fit with the franchise.
The service is designed to provide teams with information necessary to make informed and prudent player investments, such as offering the player a long-term contract.
The service is rooted in a professional sports team’s need for research and analysis to support its draft selections and long-term contract negotiations.
Bainbridge’s managing director is Dr. Kenneth Wagner, but the company’s roots in management consulting go back to its beginning in 1975. Boulton Bainbridge Miller, Ph.D., founded the company. He was a professor, consultant and author.
Bainbridge targets Fortune 1000 corporations, private equity groups and start-ups by providing similar due diligence services to support brand strategy, market entry and crucial investment decisions, including mergers, acquisitions and divestitures.
Essentially, Bainbridge’s Professional Athlete Due Diligence builds on the process similar to what a major league scout would.
It employs a consultative approach by conducting personal interviews with potential draft picks and goes beyond conducting computer-based background checks to look into secondary sources of information.
“Our open-ended questions center around a player’s past behavior,” Wagner said. “We only conduct interviews with the permission of the player in question. Of course, players will be motivated to grant permission when they are told that a certain team is interested in drafting them.”
Then Bainbridge research analysts conduct interviews with people important in the player’s past to get a better feel for the character behind the player. This information is provided to team management.
In the end, the process provides the team with a third-party insight into whether a player’s values are consistent with those needed to effectively compete and win.
“Given how important the issue of character is to professional sports teams, we think it is prudent to employ trained and experienced consultants to conduct interviews with prospective players, former coaches, teachers, teammates and personal acquaintances,” Wagner said. “Such due diligence provides a valuable source of information to a team prior to its decision to invest millions of dollars in a player.”
Wagner said that due diligence is increasingly important to professional sports teams in these days of multi-year contacts and large signing bonuses. In the aftermath of incidents such as pro football player Michael Vick’s conviction for dog fighting and cruelty to animals, a player’s character is becoming more important to the organization.
“Bainbridge’s full reference interviews offer a third party, unbiased perspective for assessing if a player’s values are consistent with those needed to compete and win,” Wagner said. “To make more prudent and sound business decisions, teams must go beyond basic background research.
Bainbridge’s clinical and sociological approach to interviews will provide the information needed to guide the most informed player selections, investments and contract terms.”
Bainbridge is offering its due diligence services to organizations in the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer.
“Leveraging our expertise in primary-source research and history of successful investment due diligence, we have developed a new service for professional athletes,” Wagner said.
Visit www.Bainbridge.com for more information.