Minding the store.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS

Alan Fey grew up in a different world than you and me--unless you happened to hang out with Mick Jagger backstage at McNichols Arena. His dad, Barry, was the dean of rock promoters in Denver for more than 30 years, a guy who could speed-dial Stevie Nicks and snag the sweetest-seats in town.

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Barry Fey's oldest son is now following in his father's footsteps. But they're not the footsteps you think. For all the supposed sex appeal of the entertainment business, Alan Fey learned early in life that promoting concerts is mostly hard work. "Unloading boxes at 4 a.m.," is how Alan Fey describes the business behind the scenes. "It's not as glamorous as you'd imagine."

Neither, it turns out, is the sports business, which is where Fey, 40, applies some of the reality-checked lessons his dad taught him. Fey's Denver company, XP Events, runs retail operations for the likes of the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Charlotte Bobcats. When a fan buys a Diamondbacks T-shirt at Chase Field Ballpark in Phoenix, it's an XP employee who rings the cash register.

Teams enlist Fey's company as a transparent outsourcing organization, figuring they can focus on their main business while they leave the peculiarities of retailing to somebody else. XP splits revenue it makes from merchandise sales with its contracted teams, typically leaving them with just as much net profit as they'd make running stores on their own. It's a formula that guarantees a margin for the teams, and almost total anonymity for Fey's company.

"If someone comes into our store at a game, they're going to think it's the Diamondbacks' store. And we like it like that," says Tom Harris, the team's executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Harris says he hit it off with Fey from the start, shortly after the son-of-a-promoter quit his job as a marketing executive at AEG Entertainment, the Los Angeles sports conglomerate owned by Denver financier Philip Anschutz. Armed with lots of sports industry contacts from previous jobs with the National Basketball Association and the Vancouver Canucks, Fey started XP Events with sports-merchandise veteran Jeff Newman and with backing from Denver apparel firm XP Companies. That was three years ago.

"Through a recommendation from the (Phoenix) Suns, we ran across...