Cordish, Professional Bull Riders Continue National Expansion of PBR Cowboy Bars
The Professional Bull Riders and real estate developer The Cordish Companies this summer will be opening a PBR Cowboy Bar in Chicago less than a Pete Crow-Armstrong throw away from Wrigley Field, marking the Western-themed entertainment concept’s entry into its biggest city to date.
The 8,000-square-foot Wrigleyville site will be the concept’s seventh opening in the past three years (there are 16 overall), many of which are in markets that might surprise people.
In 2007 — there’s been a lot of dirt kicked up since then, so the exact date is a bit of a mystery — PBR’s Sean Gleason was introduced to The Cordish Companies’ principal, Reed Cordish, to discuss the possibility of opening a PBR-branded bar.
Gleason knew cattle, marketing and entertainment: He grew up as a ranch hand in his native Eastern Washington; had run business development for the sports games at the old Sierra Sports; had overseen six Grammy-nominated video and record projects and six multiplatinum video projects during his time at Miramar Productions; and had been PBR’s CMO since 2001.
Cordish, a Baltimore native who played tennis at Princeton and then on the ATP Tour for a short time after college, was running the eight-year-old Live-branded entertainment district portfolio for the real estate company founded nearly a century earlier by his great-grandfather.
After communicating over long distance, Gleason flew to Kansas City from PBR’s then-headquarters in Pueblo, Colo., to review in-person an agreement that was in place. The two sides met at Cordish offices at the under-construction Kansas City Power & Light District.
“It was just me from the PBR side, and on the other side of the table, Reed had a number of their key executives and a bunch of lawyers,” Gleason said. “So I took a couple hours to read through the agreement and when we reconvened, their team sat down and said, ‘Well, do you see any deal breakers in there?’ I said ‘You bet there’s a deal breaker in there!’ You know, they were kind of shocked!”
Gleason then set the fundamental ground rule for the entire concept.
“The agreement required that we serve a ratio of 60% food to 40% alcohol,” he said. “I told them, ‘I don’t care if they serve so much as a pretzel. What we want is a cowboy bar that harkens back to the old honky-tonks. We had no interest in trying to be, you know, a serve-all-customers, family-oriented restaurant.”
Laughter filled the room, and both sides quickly agreed: Cowboys don’t need food.
That’s when Gleason, now CEO of the PBR, set the second mantra.
“You know why most of those [branded bar] formats don’t exist anymore? Because they just weren’t that much fun,” he said.
The partnership, including branding and signage for what became PBR Big Sky Cowboy Bar at KC Live, was out of the chute in less than a month.
“We’re the PBR,” Gleason said. “We live eight seconds at a time!”
Since 2009, the K.C. location’s first full year of operation, the bar’s annual sales for the Cowboy Bar division have grown from $6 million to more than $55 million last year, which Cordish said “was the best year, revenue-wise.”
Read the full article on Sports Business Journal here