“It’s my personally held belief that I do the best when I’m fit. I feel the same about people that work in our businesses.” Mark Ein, CEO of Venturehouse Group and Owner of the Washington Kastles on tennis, business alignment and cohesion.
Mark Ein is the CEO of Venturehouse Group and Owner of the Washington Kastles. He holds a BS in economics with a finance concentration from The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. A native of Chevy Chase, Maryland, he attended Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where his love of sports was fostered by participation. Recently married, Mark talked to UPtick’s Julian Tait for Cadence, sharing his focus on not only the business of tennis but on work-life balance.
Cadence: Tell us about your motivation and love of the game of tennis. How did it develop?
Mark: So tennis has been a sport that has been a part of my life from the time that I was really young. I played a lot of sports. I played soccer and basketball and tried just about everything. I think with tennis one of the things I always was drawn to is that it teaches you all of life’s lessons. It teaches you self-reliance, discipline, and fair play. When you’re on the tennis court and it’s a tight match you can’t sub yourself out, you can’t pass the ball, you can’t run in the corner and hope you don’t see the ball. It’s only you and you have to figure it out and even at a young age I sort of relished that opportunity to try to figure it out. I think one of the things that I am passionate about with Team Tennis is that it combines all those great individual characteristics of tennis with the team environment. We exemplify that with our team tennis environment. But even as kids we played on high school teams and played on other teams where you would have that intense individual experience but with teammates. So, you got the best of both worlds.
Cadence: How do you balance your work and fitness life now?
Mark: Truly for me health is wealth. Nothing else matters, nothing is more important than staying healthy—besides family—to me.
Cadence: And, congratulations on your recent wedding, Mark.
Mark: Thank you, Thank you! I know on a personal level that if I’m staying fit, I can do everything at the level I want to do it. When I have periods where it drops because of time or injury everything in my life drops, because of things that aren’t physical – work stuff, concentration. How I feel about the day and go about it relates to making fitness a priority. This has always been huge to me. In life I’ve seen people who have what appears to be great success and they don’t have health; they would give up every dollar they had to have good health. And I’ve seen people who are healthy and they are as happy as anyone you’ll ever meet. To me, it’s a huge priority.
Cadence: Who are some of your own role models?
Mark: I’ve admired people who try to do things at a really high and world class level, have built great companies and organizations and do it with a sensitivity of the world around them—people who feel a debt to give back in whatever way they can and have sort of a holistic approach. One guy that comes to mind is Mitch Rales. He and his brother have built a great company called Danaher. He is one of my friends whom I really admire.
Cadence: The US Marines define cohesion as the relationships between groups to one another. In your own work environment, how do you foster vertical and horizontal cohesion?
Mark: Alignment and communication are two mantras that we live by. All great organizations to me are aligned on the mission. Alignment, communication and continuous improvement are three things that we really focus on and they all take a lot of effort. They are always directly related to completing the task at hand but they are all investments in organization cohesion. When you get that you really harness the power of cohesion. I believe in face to face meetings. I know we are in an environment where people don’t often like to do it or think you can do it all virtually. There’s no substitute for in-person—everyone sitting around the table. Put away your BlackBerrys and focus. We do that with our organizations. And we really try to insist that they be there. When they can’t, we tape record the meetings so people can go back and see what they missed. Investments in alignment, communication and continuous improvement lead to that cohesion which I agree is a hallmark of all great organizations.
Cadence: How do you foster wellness in your work life among your leaders and direct reports?
Mark: Take Kastle Systems. It’s a company I acquired. We’ve instituted a lot of wellness programs where it didn’t exist before. We heavily subsidized gym memberships, but to continue the subsidy an employee has to show they are going.
Cadence: How do you manage that?
Mark: We have reports that show the people are going to the gym. We don’t just subsidize the gym membership but actually encourage the use of it and corporate fitness and team things—whether it’s kickball, running events. Discounts and incentives that focus on weight loss and smoking all those sorts of things which obviously are good business. But beyond that, as it’s my personally held belief that I do the best when I’m fit. I feel the same about people that work in our businesses.
Cadence: What lead to the acquisition or the start of the Kastles team?
Mark: I had been doing a lot of philanthropic work and thought what I didn’t have was a platform I could use to channel the many things I was interested in doing. It was really about bringing our city together, promoting physical fitness creating a center of fun activities and helping our charitable partners around our founding principles. So I had known of World TeamTennis for years and that Billie Jean King was the founder. A friend of mine who played in the league in 2007 told me it was just an incredible experience that he loved. A light bulb just went on in my head; I wondered why we have never had a team here? When I met Billie Jean, she said she thought Washington was the perfect place and it took off from there. The goal was not so much to have a team as it was more a platform to do good things in our community.
Cadence: On leadership. How did you select Murphy Jensen as your coach?
Mark: When I started the team, I realized that having a great coach was going to be really important. I asked around a lot and really looked hard to find that right person. We had a really good coach our first year–Thomas Blake. He did a really good job helping to get the team launched. But that first year, when Murphy came to a Kastles match while working for the Tennis Channel, I just watched people gravitate towards him. I watched kids gravitate towards him and I saw how he interacted with people. Literally within 15 minutes I said, “If I could get this guy, he would be the perfect guy.” Murphy also looked around at the Kastles and said, “This is an incredible platform.” So it was sort of one of those “bro-mance” moments when I looked at him and said “would you consider” and he said “would you consider” and I said “being our coach” and he said “letting me be your coach”. And we kind of came to it at exactly the same moment!
Cadence: So when we look at owner coach relationships–like Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick with the Patriots in the NFL and Greg Popovich and Peter Holt with the Spurs—we see longevity and success. You‘ve had such great success with the Kastles. What is the key ingredient that make you and Murphy such a great tandem?
Mark: I think the success of the team is totally due to culture. It goes to the point that we were talking about: how do you align and bring together an entire community? To me, the keys to the success of the Kastles is the culture, the ownership, the fans in the community. Other teams you mention have built this amazing culture of winning and winning in a disproportionate way. You think of a team like San Antonio in a small market, but the team is all about culture. They attract the kind of people they do because people want to go to those places. It’s the same for us. A lot of our players would not play World TeamTennis, but they’ll play for us because they know they are part of something special. Now there’s something that people really appreciate and value.
Cadence: Ergo, Serena,Sam Querrey. And I hear you have a new local addition?
Mark: Dennis Kudla–He’s a local player and came to the matches over the years and it was always his dream to play for his hometown team.
Cadence: Is that you or Murphy, how does the selection process work?
Mark: Its’ a combination, there’s a team of us that do it. I’m pretty intimately involved.
Cadence: I happen to be a Washington Kastles Ambassador. And I think that’s a great example of societal cohesion. How did that idea come about?
Mark: We have a passionate number of tennis fans. We wanted to empower those people to be our ambassadors in their communities and be recognized. It’s been a huge help in our grass roots campaign, too.
Cadence: All your locations—from City Center, to the Wharf and now George Washington University—have been near train stations. Is that by design?
Mark: Yes 100%. When I started this a lot of World TeamTennis teams started in the suburbs and, in some respects that makes sense as it can be a lot easier for a number of reasons. One of our founding principles was to bring the city of Washington together, so I wanted it to be in places where everyone can get there. I think the biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten and I’ve gotten it twice by very senior government people as they look around our stands and they say this is the best melting pot of our community I’ve ever seen. For me that’s the biggest compliment I can ever get. When you come to our matches you see representation from all parts of our city across all lines. The physical location has to match that and be a place that works for everyone. It’s one of our very important criteria.
Cadence: I see you have plans to return to the Wharf in Southwest when that development is complete. What other goals do you have for the Kastles?
Mark: Just to continue to grow it and impact more people and create these great experiences for more people. That’s the motivation for me. We’ve had this incredible success on the court. That success has definitely helped our success in the stands and in the community. Those are the goals that I’m most focused on: How do we bring more people into it? And how do we grow the experience?
Cadence: That’s excellent. I think you do a great job and I see the Tennis Channel and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) doing such a great job packaging the sport.
Mark: It’s one of the great “on ramps” for someone to learn about tennis. Even if you’re not a tennis fan, you can come out and root for your hometown team. Everyone can get into that. You’re going to see a lot of women’s, men’s doubles and singles and you’re going to be there for 2.5 hours. And it’s going to be fun. It’s like going to a basketball game or a hockey match. So when you come to our matches, you’re not only going to see tennis fans; you are going to see fans that want to have a great night out and I think we want more things like that. Tennis fans are fanatical. There just aren’t enough of them! They care; they are just fanatics, but it’s part of their lives. We have a small number of people who are passionate and don’t even think about it and things like World TeamTennis brings more people into the fold and exposes them to the game. This is the most important thing we can do.