2/18/23 - Weekend Listening from Intercontinental Exchange
Our guests this week: Emerald Holding CEO Hervé Sedky, CFO David Doft, and Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall
It’s not as big a spectacle as Super Bowl LVII last weekend, but the 2023 NBA All-Star Game tips off tomorrow night at 8:00 p.m. EST at the Vivint Arena in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This is not your grandfather’s (or your father’s) all-star game. For the first time ever, 30 minutes before tip-off, Eastern Conference and Western Conference team captains Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James will “draft” their starters and reserves from each conference. $750,000 in charitable giving hangs in the balance.
Team Giannis will play for Raise the Future, which aims to decrease the number of youth in foster care and increase the chances of lifelong connection by providing trauma-healing services to young people and families. Team LeBron will play for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Utah Chapter, which creates and supports one-to-one mentoring relationships that ignite the power and promise of youth.
The NYSE was proud to welcome a group from Big Brothers Big Sisters to ring the Closing Bell back on January 24. Both causes deserve generous support, but I’ll stand with Lebron and the “bigs” and “littles” that his squad represents.
And yet, the big winner of the game may be Salt Lake City itself. With construction cranes rising in every direction downtown, the place is booming.
I visited SLC recently to record this week’s episode of Inside the ICE House, where I spoke with the CEO and CFO of Emerald Holding (NYSE: EEX), Hervé S. and David Doft on the periphery of their massive Outdoor Retailer ’23 trade show at the Salt Palace Convention Center. The All-Star Game will only burnish Utah’s allure as the fastest-growing state in the nation.
Salt Lake City’s mayor, a quietly confident Erin Mendenhall, crashed our podcast party. In late January, Mayor Mendenhall unveiled an ambitious set of more than 60 goals centered on growth, the environment, the community, and what she calls “our city family.”
Strong municipal and regional leadership is one of the reasons that Emerald chose to return Outdoor Retailer to Salt Lake City after a 5-year hiatus in Denver. The show brought 10,000 attendees along with it, spending liberally in the new hotels and restaurants in the city’s core, and drawn to the unparalleled recreation in the peaks above the surrounding Cottonwood Canyon.
Hear more from Hervé, David, and Mayor Mendenhall in this week’s episode.
The view from Salt Lake City:
Live from SLC: Emerald Holding CEO Hervé Sedky, CFO David Doft, and Mayor Erin Mendenhall For this week’s episode we went on a road show to Outdoor Retailer's Snow Show '23, the big annual gear-fest in Salt Lake City put on by Emerald Holding Inc. (NYSE: EEX). Joining us on the pod were Emerald CEO Herve Sedky, CFO David Doft and Salt Lake City’s Mayor Erin Mendenhall. The three have formed a unique alliance to help drive the city’s growth and fuel the outdoor economy in the face of climate change. “O.R.”, as its regulars call it -- moving to three events each year to satisfy the immense demand for the stuff that gets us up and down mountains -- is a staple of Emerald’s growing annual portfolio of 142 live events and 16 media properties connect entrepreneurs to buyers in the B2B space.
If you’re on a smart phone, all of our Inside the ICE House podcast episodes are available wherever you get your podcasts, including the Apple Podcast App, Spotify, and Stitcher, and other audio platforms. Feel free to reach out to me with any feedback about our show, or suggest any guests for future episodes.