About 2 1/2 months ago, B.A.S.S. announced Bruce Akin as its CEO. Akin had previously been serving as president of ChipRewards Inc., a healthcare incentive and rewards company, and before that held several key positions at Birmingham-based Southern Progress Corp., a subsidiary of Time Inc., between 1985 and 2008.

At Southern Progress, Akin worked for Don Logan, then CEO and later chairman of Time Inc., who purchased B.A.S.S. in 2010 along with partners Jerry McKinnis and Jim Copeland.

Akin's charged with the day-to-day operations of B.A.S.S. and reports directly to the three owners.

That was all announced at his time of hire. But in the time since, the public has heard little from the boss of the sport's most powerful brand.



B.A.S.S. ownership partner Jerry McKinnis said that was purposeful: Akin first needed time to orient himself within the business.

Akin's now oriented and ready to talk. Earlier this week, BassFan was able to sit down and interview Akin. The summary of that interview follows in Q&A format.

BassFan: What specifically are your responsibilities as CEO of B.A.S.S.? Do you oversee the tournament side and the publishing side? Just the publishing side? Can you explain?

Akin: Really I'm responsible for all of it – the day-to-day operations of the company including the tournaments, the media and television. JM is part of B.A.S.S. now so all of that comes under my purview. Obviously I work closely with the owners and the management staff. I don't know that the buck stops here, but that's the way it's set up – as CEO of the whole organization.

There's still obviously involvement from the owners in major decisions and strategy, and I'm continuing to learn a lot from them as well.

Can you describe your relationship with the three ownership partners? Obviously you go back a ways with Mr. Logan, and it was stated that you report to all three, but how often do you interact with them?

Fairly regularly. Almost daily I'm talking to different partners on some things, all of them on some things and the various matters that we have going. I've been to Little Rock a couple of times and spent a good bit of time with Jerry over there. I was with all of them last week over there. So it just varies depending on what the matters are.

As you said, I do go way back with Don and right now he has offices in Birmingham, where my office is as well, so naturally I see him more.

You've been in your position for over 2 months now. How would you describe the transition? Have there been any big surprises?

No big surprises. It's a fascinating business and I think it's probably more complex than I understood or realized, having been familiar with the organization for years – the media parts of it. But I've really grown to appreciate what's done at B.A.S.S. and all the moving parts of it. That all kind of comes together, but tournaments have their own challenges, and television, the website, magazines, the membership, marketing. But I've been very impressed with the knowledge and dedication of the staff and willingness to teach me the business too – the parts I'm not as familiar with.

So there were no real surprises. There are always challenges in business, and particularly in the economy that we've faced over the last few years and continue to face. But nothing like, "Wow, I didn't know that." No huge surprises.

What's your first order of business for B.A.S.S.?

As I've alluded to, I'm really just trying to understand the landscape a little better to know where we need to work to improve the business. Obviously we're a membership and tournament and television organization and there are a couple things on each front that we're attacking and trying to improve to service our sponsors better.

I think on the memberships side, we want to make sure we're serving the grassroots of the organization. I'm not sure we haven't taken the eye off the ball a bit in recent years. So we're trying to build the membership even greater.

Obviously sponsorships are very important to us, and getting more of those is important. We've got great sponsors now, but we're working hard to get other sponsors onboard.

On the tournament end – making sure we've got a long-term plan together, and we're working on that now. What size should the Elites be? Where should the tournaments be? How many events should we have? How to enhance the experience at the events we have? Those are just some of the things that we've got the teams working on here.

What's your favorite thing you've learned about B.A.S.S. over the past few months?

I'm real excited about the tournaments. I think I wasn't exposed as much to that, but I just came from a site visit for the upcoming Classic in Shreveport and that's got my adrenaline going a little bit. People who know me know I can be pretty dry and not that excitable, but that was pretty fun down there. Especially because I'm a big college football fan and Leon who owns the marina down there – we got to talking a little Alabama-LSU football. That was a lot of fun.

During the ESPN era, it was difficult to obtain an accurate estimate of the health of the B.A.S.S. business. People still really want to know: How healthy is the B.A.S.S. business?

I can let you know it's healthy and the owners are committed to getting it healthier, as am I. We're a solidly financed organization. I think the owners who bought the organization from ESPN are pretty astute businesspeople, and I can assure you they wouldn't have bought it if it wasn't in good health. That's probably all I'd say about that: We're on good, solid footing and ready to make it even better.

There's a belief among many that over the past decade, B.A.S.S. sort of lost its way – that it was a membership organization with some tournaments that became a tournament organization with some members. What's your assessment of the balance? Where is it now and where would you like to see it?

I think it's all important. As I said earlier, that kind of balanced, integrated approach to it is the way we view it, where the tournaments and the media, the magazines, the website are all important to it and they all work together, plus the relationships with the anglers and sponsors.

The tournaments have become forefront and certainly we're looking to balance that. As I said earlier, we're looking at ways to enhance the membership and to really bring it back to where it was and beyond. Also there's the conservation efforts and I think you'll see a lot more about that in the coming months as well.



What would you say are B.A.S.S.'s main assets right now?

Obviously the storied history and being the leader is part of it. The Elite anglers – we've got the best of the best pros in our circuit and our league. I think that really gives us a foot up. The ESPN relationship is very important to us and our anglers. And the publication – Bassmaster magazine – is one of the biggest benefits of membership now that the members really like. So I think that continues to be a great asset. And the website – I think you'll see that continue to improve over time. We're putting a lot of time and money and effort into (Bassmaster.com) and obviously that's a big part of our future as well.

What are some of B.A.S.S.'s main weaknesses right now?

Probably the CEO (laughs). You know, we've had so much change, and certainly with change comes opportunity, but also challenges. We're in the middle of a transition and moving the headquarters to Birmingham, and I'm certainly looking forward to getting that behind us, because that's disruptive in many ways. It's not a weakness though. In fact, one thing coming out of it is how pleased we are with the number of people making the move to Birmingham.

So getting things settled after the change and transition is probably the biggest challenge right now.

You come from a heavy publishing background and the landscape's really changed over the past decade and even over the past 2 years. Can you describe some of the challenges a publisher faces in such a tightly defined category as bass fishing? And how does the bass market differ from other categories you've served over the years?

I think one, the bass market is a niche, although a very large niche, with a passionate special-interest following that I think probably doesn't get affected as negatively as a general-interest magazine – even something like Southern Living or food magazines like Cooking Light that I've worked with a good bit.

Of course we were part of Time Inc., so there was a variety of magazines there, but my thinking is: In a category like bass fishing, from a consumer standpoint, the interest there is very strong. Obviously, the economy has an impact on advertising and sponsorships across the board no matter what industry you're in, and we're no exception to that. But we're doing fine. Our endemic sponsors and advertisers have hung with us and some of the non-endemics have as well. Sponsorships have continued to be strong for us as we continue to try to do a good job servicing those advertisers and sponsors.

I'll add that we've seen some of (the market) bouncing back, even in recent months. We've got some new sales folks with the change in ownership and we're really seeing a lot of renewals of sponsorships, and some new sponsors we're in discussion with that you'll probably be reading about in the next few months.

Again going back to some of your past history, in the press release that announced your hire, you said you've been a fan of the organization over the past 40 years. How were you acquainted with B.A.S.S. and how closely did you follow it?

Mainly through media circles. Of course it all started in Montgomery. I grew up in North Alabama there on Lake Guntersville, and just followed it that way. Then later, I knew the folks in Montgomery. When I was coming through it was more the Helen Sevier years, and we actually had talks with them about doing a book series. That was right before the ESPN acquisition, so it never happened, but we had discussions and followed them.

And 40 years back, I guess I was in middle school about then. I didn't have a pickup truck, but if you had one in Scottsboro, Ala. and it didn't have a B.A.S.S. sticker on the back of it, you just weren't up to snuff.

Do you like to fish?

I do. I'm not a tournament fisherman and I don't get out as much as I'd like to. Actually, I probably shouldn't say it, but I'm going to play hookie this Friday and get out with our tournament director Trip (Weldon) down on Lake Martin. We're going to try to sneak out Friday and do a little bit of fishing.

In that same announcement, you expressed the belief that B.A.S.S. has a bright future. Can you go into some of the reasons for that optimism?

Part of it is I think there are a lot of people who fish, and I think we've got a huge market out there. As we continue to show people how to catch more and bigger fish, I think we'll be successful. Also I think that, like I said earlier, if we can get back to our core roots and our grassroots, and really push that, we've got a lot of opportunity ahead of us.

I also think the online and the web component has a lot of room to grow. I did spend a couple of years as president of Southern Progress Digital, starting those websites for the company, so I began to see some of the things you can do to make money with websites. I think we're going to do pretty well there.

A lot of my background's in marketing as well as publishing. We had several marketing companies that I worked primarily with in book publishing and also product marketing. We had a company called Southern Living At Home and I also worked with consumer marketing groups there. So I think personally there are some things I can bring into the business to help it grow.

As I said earlier, and you did too: Under ESPN's ownership, I think there was more focus put on the tournaments and television, and there was a lot of improvement there and good things done. But I think in some of the other areas of the business there's some real opportunity.

The other thing is, I think we just scratched the surface in how we work with and partner with the anglers to support not only our business but their personal businesses as well.

What's the status of the relocation from Florida? Are things on schedule, and when will it all be completed?

Nov. 1 we'll move in. We started shutting things down here in Celebration (yesterday), then movers come and we should be up and running (in Birmingham) by Monday or Tuesday of next week.

Do you have any specific goals you'd like to see the organization achieve in the short term? How about over a longer term?

The short-term goals I think are to get more sponsors aboard and enhance the membership. We've already started some efforts in that direction and I think you'll see some things early in 2012 where we're being more aggressive to enhance the membership quite a bit. We're already out signing up new sponsors and advertisers for 2012 and that's going well. Those are really the two top-of-mind things right now.

Longer term, as I said earlier, we're trying to get a solid long-term plan for tournaments and the different series put together, so all the constituencies will know what to expect and what's coming down the pipe. Some of that you've probably heard here and there as rumors, but we want to get all of that in place so we can communicate it and head down that road so everybody has the same expectations.

The Classic timeframe of February has been somewhat controversial over the years. Have you considered moving the Classic back to summer?

It's something that we're studying, but for now – at least the next couple years – we're set on that last week or so in February. We're looking at other things too – mid-year kinds of events – but for the Classic, right now we're leaving it where it is.

Notable

> Akin is the first B.A.S.S. CEO since Helen Sevier. Under ESPN ownership, B.A.S.S. leaders carried the title of general manager.