Just Call Fandango CEO Chuck Davis 'Mr. Turn-Around'

By Michael Aushenker, Staff Writer

2009-11-12
In his modest office at Fandango's West Los Angeles complex, with an untouched lunch on his desk, an animated Chuck Davis eagerly shares anecdote after anecdote with the Palisadian-Post. He paces around as he tells the story of how his 18-year-old son, Jared, a freshman at Brown University, took a business class at Davis' alma mater with his former professor, Barrett Hazeltine.

'He got cold-called in his second class,' Davis says. 'Hazeltine said to Jared, 'You know all about cash cows?' Jared says, 'I do?' Hazeltine said, 'Hasn't your dad told you all about it?''

'It was a wonderful bonding moment,' continues Davis of that 'full circle' moment.

Davis, of course, does know about cash cows. The Fandango CEO has become a master at turning middling companies around and selling them for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The nimble executive vice president of Comcast Interactive Media, which acquired Fandango in April 2007, has always had the knack for adaptation. When he started out in the 1980s, he could not foresee where his career would lead, as there was no Internet.

Yet today, the Huntington Palisades resident leads movie-ticket outlet Fandango.com, one of the Internet's top entertainment sites (according to Alexa, it ranks #233 in site traffic), which sells tickets to more than 16,000 screens nationwide. Before Halloween, Fandango sold 25 percent of the opening night tickets for 'Michael Jackson's This Is It' and the company is currently bracing itself for 'Twilight: New Moon,' which has already accounted for 75 percent of advance ticket sales prior to its November 20 release.

In addition to Fandango, Davis oversees such Comcast-held entities as Movies.com, which was bought from Disney, and the fashion e-mail newsletter Daily Candy, which will launch its e-commerce site Swirl, a clothing and accessories marketplace, on November 19.

Davis comes across as personable and down-to-earth, and, for a man of his position in the business world, humble. He's not above deferring to a colleague or employee's expertise. Surrounding himself with the right people at his companies is one secret to his success over the years, and that passion for winning and teamwork transcends to the business arena from his passion for sports.

Many Pacific Palisades parents know Davis for his longtime involvement in the American Youth Soccer Organization, coaching Jared and daughter Jenna's teams. He has coached 600 youth soccer games, winning numerous Area championships.

'You get to know every team and every family,' Davis says. 'You really are plugged into the community.'

Davis grew up in Westport, Connecticut. His father, Joel, was in publishing, releasing such fare as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

While in high school, Davis would go into his father's office and mimeograph his sports fanzine, the Pro-Grid Weekly, a broadsheet he'd send out to family and friends. He also sent them out to the commissioners of the four major pro sports. All of them wrote back with thank-you letters, but one of them, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, struck up a regular correspondence with Davis.

In 1974, when Davis was 13, Rozelle said, 'Why don't you miss a day of school and join me for the NFL draft?' It was a day Davis has never forgotten. Davis went on to intern in Rozelle's office during his college summers.

'He loved his sample subscription of Pro-Grid Weekly,' Davis says, beaming as if relives that defining teenage experience all over again.

'The opportunity that this man gave me made me the businessman I am today,' Davis says.

After Brown, Davis followed his father into publishing, although not exactly. He tried to matriculate into Time, Inc., home of Sports Illustrated, on the strength of his sports reporting at Staples High School and for the Bruin Grid Weekly, but executives there saw something else in Davis.

'They told me, 'You'll be on the business side,' says Davis, who joined advertising sales, where he started in 1982 with insert cards in Life magazine. He excelled at Time, Inc., devising strategies and gimmicks to boost magazine circulations. 'I was one of the first direct marketers in the country,' says Davis, who helped boost group circulation by 50 percent.

Eventually, the writing was on the wall as long-running periodicals Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post faced cancellation. Shortly after New Year's in 1992, Davis went to TV Guide, which still enjoyed a circulation of 14 million in an era that would soon give way to the Internet age. Seven million subscribers grew to 9 million under Davis' watch, and he was promoted to senior vice president.

Things changed dramatically on August 2, 1995, when Netscape went public. 'It was massive,' says Davis, who was playing golf on his birthday. 'It was the IPO that blew off the doors. AOL was how you got to the Internet, but Netscape was opening the way [to the future of the Internet].'

Within 90 days, Davis received five offers to join new media companies 'even though I didn't have a computer.'

One of those companies courting him was Disney.

Davis recalls having an interesting conversation with then-Disney chief Michael Ovitz, who told him, 'We don't know if it's [the Internet] a fad, but if it is, you'll still have a job at Disney.'

Then-Disney Internet Group chairman Jake Winebaum brought Davis into the Disney fold in 1996 and Davis relocated his family''including Jared and daughter Jenna (now 16 and a student at Brentwood School)''to California, where he became president of Disney's new ecommerce division, overseeing eight Internet product groups. 'I launched Disneystore.com, Disneyvacations.com,' recalls Davis.

'People were very surprised when we actually moved and stayed in California,' says Jan Davis, his wife of 22 years whom he met at Brown. 'But we've kept our East Coast roots. We're bicoastal in mentality.'

Scott Schiller, senior vice president of Advertising Sales for Comcast, has known Davis since 'we met on Super Bowl Sunday in 1997 via phone and spent the entire second half of the Packers-Patriots game figuring out how our worlds collided. We've been great friends ever since, and we've worked at Disney and Comcast/Fandango together.'

'Chuck has an uncanny ability to understand numbers and their implications for a business,' Schiller says. 'He knows how to develop and grow a brand. At Disney, he was behind the early years of selling advertising/media, theme-park tickets and Disney merchandise online.'

At the dawn of the Internet, Davis put his money where his mouth was and purchased a vehicle and beloved cocker spaniel Moka, 11, online (Jenna, Jared and Moka even appeared in a 1999 Post 'Young Palisadians' article on an initiative to keep Pampas Ricas dog-poop free.)

Davis left as president of Disney's e-commerce division in December 1999 and kicked off the new millennium working at BizRate (which became Shopzilla), where he became president and CEO.

'BizRate had a great management team and a great customer base,' says Davis, who started an e-commerce consumer reporter; a click-and-rate venture that turned BizRate into the leading shopping comparison site.

'When we were almost on empty is when it finally took off,' continues Davis, who attributes part of that success to simplifying the rating method to a happy-face rating system. 'It's important to understand consumers and not overthink things sometimes.'

For the longest time, when the Internet relied on dial-up, most of the online consumers were men, who bought music, electronics, computers, etc. Meanwhile, Davis was readying the Shopzilla site for its close-up.

'We were betting the women would come,' Davis says. 'When high-speed Internet hit the suburbs, they came in droves' to buy women's apparel, home goods and other targeted projects.

There were 10,000 unique visitors a month at the site when Davis got to BizRate and 2 million per day when he left. In 2005, BizRate sold to E.W. Scripps Company (which owns various daily newspapers and broadcast stations and United Media) for $569 million.

'They say that I'm good at organizing chaos,' Davis says with a smile.

In January 2006, Davis took charge of Fandango (first as chairman, then as CEO by July of that year). Formed in 2000 by seven of the largest movie theater exhibition companies with the goal of creating a competitor for Moviefone, Fandango had become a limited endeavor with lackluster financials which focused solely on moving movie tickets. Whereas another incoming corporate leader might have purged the company of its staff, Davis retained his employees and introduced methods to re-invigorate them. Even during this difficult economic climate, Davis insists on company perks to keep employees satisfied and engaged, instituting flexibility in working schedules, company-wide lunches twice a week (with excess food delivered to Upward Bound House, a Santa Monica homeless assistance agency), and sports and volunteerism to cement staff bonding and relationships. Davis swells with pride over the fact that Fandango was recognized by the Employers Group as one of 'California's Best Places to Work.' Additionally, Fandango was named as one of the top 50 companies to work for in L.A. earlier this year.

He pushed his team to expand the Web site's scope while doubling the staff, in effect pushing the company to be more ambitious. 'I wanted to get all of the extraneous words out of the way, to de-clutter the content,' he says. 'I thought we could sell more and we did.'

Davis helped Fandango expand its content to include more than 400,000 entertainment listings, more than 500,000 performers and filmmakers, interactive participation such as the Fandango Fan Meter, where moviegoers rank all movies from the best ('Must Go!') to the worst ('Oh, No!'), and departments and features such as movie-related road trips. Fandango has launched its Facebook and TiVo applications, and an iPhone app which has seen 3 million downloads. Fandango's Web site has grown by more than 30 percent in unique visitors in each of the last two years.

Davis ultimately re-branded Fandango into a market leader that made the company so attractive, it led to its acquisition by Comcast. (Fandango executives will not divulge how much the company sold for, but tech blogger Michael Arrington, citing unnamed sources, wrote that 'Comcast paid $200 million, or perhaps a bit more. We're also hearing Fandango revenue is in the $50-million-a-year range, split roughly evenly between ticket sales and advertising.')

Davis stayed with Fandango and also became an executive vice president within Comcast's Interactive Media division, where he is responsible for identifying acquisitions and strategic partnerships for the company.

Davis is now in a position to volunteer and give back, which he will do in 2010 as one of the judges of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards' Los Angeles winners (and where he won the 2004 award for BizRate). He is also an active board member of the Young Presidents' Organization, both in the Los Angeles Chapter and the YPO International Board. Davis also serves on the boards of Shop.org, The Teaching Company (with Bill Barnum), and LeadPoint.

'It was very Rozellian,' Davis says. 'He gave to me and I gave my time to do this.'

Since moving to California, Davis has felt very comfortable in Pacific Palisades.

'We were blessed by finding this community,' says Davis, who appreciates the folksiness re-enforced by the town's traditions. 'You see it in the July 4 parade, the first pitch at the PPBA and pancake breakfast, the farmers' market. The key is for the town to not lose that charm.'

Davis' passion has always been team sports, whether it's watching NFL football or coaching AYSO soccer.

'AYSO soccer is the binding force in the community,' says Davis, who remembers calling 454-KICK as soon as he was about to relocate to the Palisades to enroll his children.

'They said, 'Sign up ended two weeks ago, you're out of luck unless you can coach.'' Davis had no experience coaching, but he wasn't about to let that stop him. He even roped his wife into serving with Denise DeSantis as co-commissioner of the U10 and U12 girls for three years.

'AYSO stands for 'All Your Saturdays are Over,'' Jan jokes.

Davis says his coaching did not interfere with his work at Disney. 'It was en vogue for a family-minded company like Disney to let executives leave early to coach kids,' a philosophy that former Disney executives Joe Roth and Charles Hirschhorn shared.

In his first year as an AYSO coach in 1996, Davis and prominent Santa Monica orthopedic surgeon Bert Mandelbaum led the Purple Royals to an Under-Six (U6) season. In 2001, Davis and co-coach Barnum led the U10 Rattlers to a 53-8-3 mark. In 2003, the duo took the Rattlers to another Area P U12 championship with a 61-2-4 record. With co-coach Nancy Babcock, Davis led Pali Storm to a 2006 championship victory with a 45-11-10 record.

'My kids have made it to the Area P championship eight times,' Davis says.

Winebaum, the founder and former CEO of Business.com, has known Davis since they were out of college, working at Time and Disney together. 'Chuck hasn't changed much since we were both 22,' Winebaum says. 'He and I sat on each other boards. Mine at Business.com, his at Shopzilla.'

Davis and Winebaum, a Brentwood resident, co-coached the Red Fireball in 2004, which won the area championship.

'His most famous line on the soccer field is when the game is not going so well and we're behind or tied or whatever, 'Who's going to be a hero?,'' Winebaum says of Davis.

'The key to winning is to get those girls to become contributors,' Winebaum says. 'Everyone's got to pull together. He's good at getting the most out of his team. It's the same in business.'

Davis hung up his coaching cap three years ago but still volunteers as a referee, having officiated more than 300 youth games.

'It's remarkable that as busy as he is that he still finds the time to referee two or three games on the weekend,' Winebaum says. 'He's the mayor of the weekend. He knows more kids through his reffing than probably anyone else in the Palisades.'

When Davis shares his philosophy on sports, he's also talking about his perspective on the corporate world: 'One weak link can crater the whole team. Teams win championships, not individuals.'