Post merger business integration

Charlie Tuzzi is the owner of Cameo by Copeland Cleaners and Winzer Cleaners.

In the realm of dry cleaners, my company works for an unusual clientele: the New York City theater district. The production teams of popular shows—there are usually around 40 big-name shows running at a time, if you include both On- and Off-Broadway shows—are our clients, and they require us to clean the costumes that bring these popular shows to life. On a given night, they might send us anywhere from 15 to 150 pieces, depending on the stage of the production (for instance, more costumes if it’s a bigger show or it’s closing). We often don’t know before we receive the order how many costumes it will even entail. Our job is to retrieve the costumes the minute they’re no longer being used (usually late at night), clean and press them, and return them to the theater, usually by early afternoon the next day.

On Mondays, Broadway is mostly dark, so we always have a huge inventory on Sunday. We work at all hours, including weekends and holidays—Labor Day, Christmas, New Years. Particularly if those holidays fall on a Sunday or Monday, we’ll be hard at work. You know what they say: The show must go on.

Working with these big-name shows on tight deadlines has taught me a great deal about the demands of running a specialty business. While costume dry cleaning is unique, there’s a lot to this business that can be applied to any enterprise serving high-profile clientele with very specific needs:

1. Always find a way.

You never know when the client is going to come in with some crazy order, like 200 particularly dirty costumes that have to be cleaned by 9:00 a.m. Our job as we see it is to never say no. No matter how crazy the turnaround, no matter how nitpicky the client’s request (some come with very specific cleaning or handling instructions) and no matter how many other things we have going on, we always find a way to get it done.

2. There are no off hours.

My phone often rings at midnight; this past Sunday night, for instance, I had two calls in the middle of the night. (I’ve gotten adept at just going back to sleep.) When you work with high-profile, time-sensitive clientele, you can’t say, “Oh, I’ll get to it tomorrow.” It has to be handled in the moment so the client feels comfortable that their problem has been resolved.

3. Take care of your people.

Because our work is so demanding and time-consuming and involves such an irregular schedule (which we recognize cuts into personal and family time), we take great care of our people. As a result, we are able to keep a very talented and hard-working production staff at the ready to handle all our clients’ needs.

4. Foster deep relationships.

The relationship that my cleaning company has with Broadway goes back 100 years, well before I took the helm. It’s a long-standing relationship because these shows know the quality we bring, know we stand behind our services and know we can meet the crazy deadlines. They’re not looking for “the next guy.” When you’re the cleaner of choice for an industry, you work hard to keep it that way.

5. Work it out.

Snafus can happen in any industry. In the rare event that something goes wrong on our end, we don’t just apologize for it—we resolve the problem to the client’s satisfaction. Sometimes the way forward may not be obvious, and I have to gather all the pertinent information and then tell the client I’ll call them back in five minutes so I can think it over. But particularly in a niche industry, it’s vital to offer the client whatever resolution is needed to make sure that they’re satisfied, relieved and feel comfortable with our work.

When you’re offering a premium product or service, you have to make it worth the client’s while. There should never come a point where they have to question the price or the value of your work. Rather, it should be intuitively obvious from the quality of that product or service that you are offering the best and only choice for their needs. Sometimes that involves making miracles, but more often it involves integrity, hard work, constantly fine-tuning and expanding your offerings and never saying no. That’s how, in whatever industry you’re operating, you remain the star of the show.

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Mary Ellen Coe was installed as YouTube ‘s Chief Business Officer last fall, just as the activity level at the company was beginning to surge even by the breakneck standards of a startup-turned-digital-behemoth.

Since she landed in her new role after a 10-year run at Google and a prior chapter at McKinsey, many major headlines have blared. The company secured NFL Sunday Ticket in a $14 billion, seven-year rights deal that kicked off this month. YouTube TV , now a top-5 U.S. pay-TV operator, got an unexpected boost from Disney ‘s battle with Charter over carriage on Spectrum TV. YouTube Shorts passed 50 billion daily views less than two years after its global launch. And on the corporate front, a leadership shuffle saw Susan Wojcicki hand the CEO baton to Neal Mohan and Robert Kyncl depart after 12 years and become CEO of Warner Music Group.

During a recent visit to YouTube’s offices at New York City’s Pier 57 for the company’s annual creators event, Coe sat down with Deadline to discuss a few of the many initiatives in her portfolio. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity:

DEADLINE: As YouTube has evolved and moved deeper into parts of the traditional media business, the creator community remains a central, signature element. Can you talk about the role their content plays overall and how it fits in strategically?

MARY ELLEN COE: From a business vision perspective, creator- or user-generated content is special to us at YouTube. It is the biggest differentiator on the platform. I’ve spent a lot of time with the NFL, and with media partners, and with music partners, and all of that has to be balanced with what’s happening with user-generated content, because that is what our users uniquely come to YouTube for. Take the living room as an example, our fastest-growing surface. Shorts is the fastest-growing format there. So, our users are expecting that level of innovation, and kind of to see a continuous stream of new ways that creators are telling stories. That’s what keeps it inventive, and you know, it’s almost like there’s always a rising expectation for unlocking all of that potential. It’s the scale and it’s the amplification of all of that content.

DEADLINE: You guys made an aggressive play for Sunday Ticket, which gives subscribers access to network broadcasts of every Sunday afternoon game regardless of their local market. It’s the first time a pure streaming entity is offering it, which has caused excitement in some corners and a little anxiety in others. Now that it’s up and running, what can you say about how it is performing? Is it meeting expectations?

COE: Let’s talk product experience. The feedback has been incredible: reliability, low latency, and Multiview. Multiview [which allows viewing of four games within the frame of a single screen] has been the biggest hit ever. So, great fan engagement on the experience. In terms of subscriber momentum, it’s exceeding our expectations. So, we feel great about the subscriber trajectory. And then we had a lot of [co-marketing] partnerships with third-party partners like Verizon, Comcast and FanDuel. So, we’re actually feeling really bullish about how it’s trending, but we’re not out of the sign-up window. So, we’re two weekends in, and you’re still going to see a ramp, but we’re excited for the first year.

DEADLINE: With these kinds of full-season packages, a lot of times there are discount offers for prorated subscriptions with a smaller number of games left. Are you planning those?

COE: I can’t preempt any plans that are happening, but that’s something that’s in the mix. Ultimately, we want to make sure that pricing is relative to what the user-value proposition is.

DEADLINE: Since you mentioned the fan feedback, one thing that’s come up is that people want to be able to select the games in Multiview themselves instead of YouTube picking them. Is there an official response to that request?

COE: That is a very hard thing to do technically. Put it this way, the feedback is, we hear you loud and clear. We have a seven-year relationship and will be looking to innovate in the future.

DEADLINE: Got it, OK.

COE: And one thing that we’re doing to address that is, we have a lot of insights on the game combinations and what matchups fans are interested in. So, we can use those insights.

DEADLINE: Meaning, essentially, that you don’t just automate it or jam the four games in there that the league or owners or networks want?

COE: Not at all. In a sense, you don’t need to provide infinite combinations. We actually will have insight into what are the games that are the must-watches, and then we can preload those combinations. I think as you see the season go on, the demand [for customization] will become less, because people will see the combinations they want will be up.

DEADLINE: At the start of this football season, a carriage dispute between Charter and Disney kept a lot of early college games and Week 1 of the NFL off of Spectrum TV in large swaths of the country. YouTube TV, which had more than 5 million subscribers in 2022 by your most recent official estimate, got a rare plug by both companies as a solution for frustrated customers looking for their games and shows. By promoting services like YouTube TV, Charter says it was able to keep broadband customers even though some moved their TV service to you from Spectrum. Did you see a subscriber bump during that period?

COE: Here’s what’s interesting, it was right during the Sunday Ticket ramp. We’ve not yet looked at it as to how those two things are related. We’re having incredible growth because of the Sunday Ticket relationship with YouTube TV. It is interesting that both Charter and Disney referred to YouTube TV as a place to go when they couldn’t get content. I think that’s an endorsement for the user experience on YouTube TV, which we appreciate.

DEADLINE: Prior to the Charter-Disney situation, YouTube TV implemented a price hike , going to $73 a month from $65 for your base plan. Typically in these situations, a number of customers react by canceling their service. Did you see that initially or has some of that churn been offset by the NFL given that YouTube TV subscribers get a cheaper rate for Sunday Ticket?

COE: The growth on YouTube TV is robust, and we attribute that to, you know, there was a real purpose for the NFL partnership, and there was a real purpose to when we started with the NFL. We said, ‘It’s really important to us that we integrate with creators.’ So, that’s a big feature to every weekend. You know, we have full access to creator on the field, behind the scenes, et cetera, and it’s been a big feature, too, it’s really drawing fans into YouTube TV. And by the way, this was interesting: We announced the price increase when we announced Multiview , which was heading into NCAA March Madness. And we had an 800% increase in call volume, and it was 80% attributable to Multiview.

DEADLINE: The internet pay-TV bundle sector has stabilized a bit but some early players are gone and overall cord-cutting is continuing. While you’re the leader, skeptics note that programming costs money, especially sports, so they say you are going to keep passing rising expenses on to the consumer. In the interest of transparency, I am a paying YouTube TV subscriber and have also covered the business since it launched in 2017, right across the street at Chelsea Market. So, the question that comes to my mind is: How do you avoid squandering all of its technological innovation and let this become just another TV operator annoying customers with higher rates?

COE: Well, let’s hit the price point. I thought it was interesting, the media covered the pricing on Sunday Ticket, and nobody reported on the all-in cost of a two-year contract, a dish [for DirecTV, the satellite operator that launched Sunday Ticket in 1994] and Sunday Ticket on top of that. You know, I think the saving to the user is 45% reduction in price, signing up with YouTube TV. So, we actually feel great about the value, and I think the growth speaks to the value the consumers see. Now, to step back to the broader platform, so much of the content that our users want to see is what you only uniquely find on YouTube. So, when you’re in the living room, and you can be in the app, and you are watching Shorts, you’re watching MrBeast, or you go to Primetime Channels, and you pull up Sunday Ticket, or you pull up Paramount, or any other partner, all the content is there that you want to access, and that is uniquely to YouTube.

DEADLINE: I am glad you’re bringing up the relationship between YouTube TV and YouTube writ large. On the YouTube TV side, you have programming contracts to honor, so you need to maintain a wall between the vast, free, ad-supported world of YouTube and what subscribers pay for on YouTube TV. In the future, though, could there be a far different-looking bundle? MrBeast’s audience, since you mentioned him, is exponentially bigger than that of a lot of the cable networks you’re paying to carry. Maybe his channel will get swapped in for a lower-tier cable network?.

COE: Here’s how we think about it: The consumer ultimately will decide what do they want bundled and what do they want unbundled. We’re going to let them make the choice, and they can choose to find that however they want to, and we’re going to make a great experience in both.

DEADLINE: YouTube TV already knows my favorite TV channels and serves them up to me on the home screen. Will it start to incorporate a dashboard of the YouTube channels I subscribe to, all integrated together within the same app?

COE: I’m going to give this feedback to our product team, and you might at some point see that evolution.

DEADLINE: I can’t be the first person to have wondered this!

COE: I mean, you know who our partners are, and what those relationships are like, and you know our user experience, clearly YouTube TV is a very special experience because the subscriber growth has been phenomenal. But we don’t want that to have to be the only experience, so that’s why we offer things like NFL, Paramount, all these partners in Primetime Channels. If you want to be à la carte , and if you are a DirectTV subscriber or a Comcast subscriber, you can easily do that. We actually did integrations with our partners so that they could actually advertise YouTube as part of that. So, I think it’s a follow-the-user story. For our partners, it’s a look at the array of business models for you to find audiences.

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan has offered a fresh update on the framework agreement between the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF).

Monahan shocked the world of golf in June, after confirming the Tour had reached an agreement with PIF that would see them work in unison with their LIV Golf rivals after a 12-month feud. In the weeks following details on what comes next in regard to the proposed ‘merger’ have remained sparse.

Soon after the announcement was made, Tour boss Monahan was forced to take a leave of absence , citing medical issues for his decision to take a temporary step back. He has since made a return to his post, but has come under huge pressure on the back of the PIF deal.

In recent weeks doubt on the final framework that any agreement has crept in amongst players, with world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler claiming the PGA Tour has a ‘long way to go’ in its negotiations with PIF, whilst Tom Hoge claimed it was a ‘very real possibility’, that the deal could fall through.

Amid the speculation Monahan has opened up on what comes next for the Tour ahead of the ‘proposed merger’ with the LIV setup. Speaking at this week’s Tour Championship, the commissioner confirmed that ‘frequent talks’ had been held with their Saudi counterparts.

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Addressing the doubt cast on the agreement officially being signed off, Monahan claimed that the circuit’s leadership were: ” Confident that we will reach a positive outcome for the PGA Tour,” adding that there is ‘no reason’ to think the deal will not be finalised by January 1.

One of the dark clouds hanging over the proposed deal was the legal litigation between the two parties, which had been at the forefront of the Tour’s battle with LIV Golf for almost a year. Monahan however confirmed this court battle had now been ended.

“We have put an end to the divisive and distracting litigation,” he added. “We have safeguards in place to control the future. I am confident we will reach an agreement that will have a positive impact for the PGA Tour and our fans. I’m confident in that.”