2024 Hall of Honor: Matt Brown
NOW OPEN: Matt Brown, shown at the groundbreaking of the Steven Tanger Center, the crowning touch in his 50-year career in venue management. (Joey Kirkman)
Matt Brown: Taking Private Approach In Public View
Greensboro Grew Into S&E Mecca Under His 30–Year Watch
Matt Brown walked into Greensboro Coliseum early in his tenure as executive director and noticed a glaring omission — the arena had zero suites. The year was 1994, about 35 years after the building opened, and there was no premium seating to produce incremental revenue streams at the 23,000-seat venue.
“I walked into the largest seated arena in North America and said, ‘This is embarrassing,’” Brown said. “We had all these companies in the area and none of them were taking advantage of events coming to the coliseum by hosting their clients in suites. I went to them and used language they weren’t used to hearing. They had to step up and do something if we wanted the ACC tournament to come back in 1995. I had the city invest ($5 million) in the building and told those companies to buy a suite and have pride in their own venue.”
Fast forward 30 years later and, as Brown exits his post to start another chapter as a partner in the industry’s first minority-owned facility management firm, he’s left a strong legacy in Greensboro, a community of 300,000 in central North Carolina.
The arena, now First Horizon Coliseum, has 30 suites, three club lounges, wider concourses and new technology after spending tens of millions of dollars in upgrades. It flourishes in a fiercely competitive market for events among six arenas in the Carolinas.
Over Brown’s tenure, the complex has grown to cover nine venues. In downtown Greensboro, the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Center boasts one of the nation’s highest subscription bases for Broadway productions.
All told, it’s the biggest sports and entertainment destination in the country, considering the sheer number of venues and the sports and entertainment markets it serves, said Peter Luukko, among Brown’s closest friends and colleagues in the industry.
His accomplishments over 50 years in the business, most notably Greensboro, have earned Matt Brown inclusion into the VenuesNow Hall of Honor, our version of the lifetime achievement award.
The evolution of Greensboro into an S&E mecca wouldn’t have occurred without Brown’s leadership and assertive manner to get things done, according to his friends and colleagues. Along the way, his no-nonsense demeanor ruffled a few feathers, as chronicled in the Greensboro media over the past three decades.
At the same time, it’s hard to argue with the results under Brown’s watch over the 30-year stretch.
The list includes updating the coliseum to remain in rotation for the coveted ACC tournament; expanding the arena to include a 30,000-square-foot exhibit hall; converting an old Canada Dry bottling plant into a concert hall; building a top-flight aquatics center that hosts NCAA championships; constructing an amphitheater out of land shaped with a natural incline; transforming a temporary structure into a permanent G League venue; and regrouping after the pandemic to open the hugely successful Tanger Center, which was originally set to debut in March 2020.
“Matt has always had that ability to make the tough decision, go hard at something, but also maintain the relationships with the CVB and politicos in town,” said Luukko, now chairman of facilities and alliances for Oak View Group, which took over operation of all Greensboro venues in July after Brown stepped down from his position. Oak View Group owns VenuesNow.
“What he has done is incredible, working in the public sector in Greensboro,” Luukko said. “We’re fortunate at OVG, to have private equity supporting us. For Matt to be able to raise funds and convince people to do the impossible in the public realm is much more difficult.”
Luukko and Brown worked together at SMG in the 1980s in the early days of private facility management. They’re both from the northeast, both love hockey and hit the ice on their off hours and formed a common bond as they leaned on each other for advice and assurance over the course of their respective careers.
“Foxhole buddies,” as Luukko described their relationship. It remained strong after Brown went to Greensboro after spending six years at SMG, while Luukko went on to be named president of the Philadelphia Flyers and the company that would eventually become Comcast Spectacor, both owned by Ed Snider.
“Matt can be tough and demanding, but he’s also one of the most fiercely loyal and caring people I’ve met in my life,” Luukko said. “Under that hard exterior, there’s a special person in there that will do anything for anybody.”
As a city employee, Brown embraced the private management model of running public venues, taking an entrepreneurial approach to grow business and produce a greater return on investment for the city. It meant getting the city’s permission to give him free reign to pursue all types of events with promoters and taking financial risk to co-promote concerts to guarantee Greensboro was in the mix for concerts and family shows, where the arena led the region for several years booking the circus, ice shows and pro wrestling.
Brown’s mantra was “one success leads to another” in teaming with promoters to fill the coliseum with events.
“We serviced them to death, which was unusual for them; they weren’t getting the respect and appreciation for events from competing venues in our region,” Brown said. “We worked with Tony Williams, the Black promoter in Greensboro. When I first got there, he had a lawsuit against the city. We sat down and resolved that issue with him, and we became partners from that day on.”
Scott Johnson, promoted to general manager of the complex and Tanger Center after Brown stepped down, is a Greensboro native and has spent 33 years at the complex. At the time Brown took over at the coliseum, Johnson was relatively new to the arena business, three years into his tenure.
“It was a little scary, but he gave me confidence and put me into different roles that allowed me to move up in the organization,” Johnson said. “I’m one of the rare fools that stays in the same place the whole time, but a lot of that is because he allowed me to grow and ultimately get to be deputy director and now (GM). I can’t thank him enough for everything he’s done for me.”
Brown caught the bug for taking charge of venues and events in Niagara Falls, New York, where he grew up and attended Niagara University. At the time, the school had just started a new curriculum in tourism and hospitality management. Brown earned a degree from the program and took a job running the Niagara Falls Convention Center in 1974, handling the facility’s grand opening and managing the city’s golf courses and sports venues.
On June 13, 1974, the convention center played host to the New York State Democratic Convention, and Brown got to meet Hubert Humphrey, former vice president under Lyndon Johnson who ran for president in 1968. It was an early example of hosting high-profile events that got the adrenaline flowing for Brown, coupled with preparing for events and having the instincts to anticipate and provide a client’s needs before they ask for it.
“It all came very natural to me, and it set the tone for my future career,” Brown said.
In the early 1980s, Brown took the job running the New York Yankees spring training complex in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which had him working with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a demanding person in his own right. It proved to be a valuable learning experience for Brown, who oversaw all the city’s facilities.
The two initially had a confrontational relationship over proposed improvements to the Yankees complex, which the city wanted the team to pay for and sign a long-term lease extension. Steinbrenner argued that the city should pay for the upgrades, resulting in a stalemate over renewal negotiations.
One night, Brown went into Steinbrenner’s office while he was surrounded by all his team executives and told him to stop complaining about how the Yankees were treated by the city of Fort Lauderdale and do something about it. Brown brought architectural plans he developed to build a third practice field and a new half-field pitching space and laid out new terms for the team.
In the end, the city funded the projects, and the Yankees signed a long-term lease. Brown sweetened the pot by allowing the team to select its own concessionaire, the old Volume Services, which had hired former Yankees shortstop Wayne Tolleson as a sales representative.
“I delivered everything I proposed to do,” Brown said. “I found that if you stood up for yourself and challenged him on defending yourself without being obnoxious, he respected your opinion more.”
In 1985, Brown returned to the northeast and ran the Philadelphia Civic Center under SMI, which was Snider’s company that eventually merged with FMG, owned by the Pritzker family, to become SMG.
Over the next six years, Brown rose to become one of the company’s top executives.
At the time, Brown left in 1994, SMG had grown to run 35 arena, stadium and convention center accounts in an industry that had several third-party management firms, years before consolidation whittled the pool to essentially three national players in the biz.
Working out of SMG’s corporate office in Philly, Brown was responsible for hiring general managers across the country. Scott Mullen, now executive director of Vibrant Arena in Moline, Illinois, was among his hires, cris-crossing the country to run SMG venues early in his career, extending from New York (Nassau Coliseum) to California (Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center).
At one point in the early 1990s, Mullen was a candidate to run the old Gator Bowl Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, a city pursuing an NFL expansion team, which it was awarded in 1995. For Mullen, a former college football player at Drake University, the prospect of running a potential NFL venue was enticing, until Brown talked to him. The next thing he knew, Mullen was headed for Long Beach to run their facilities in southern California.
“Either place would’ve been great, but Matt knew what he wanted,” Mullen said. “A lot of people (feared) Matt, but he was in my corner. Matt was the one who started it all; he’s the one who got me into SMG, and it took off from there.”
As OVG settles in at Greensboro, Brown has formed the industry’s first minority-owned venue management firm, Coliseum Management Associates, whose nine partners are all people he’s worked with over the past 30 years, including Tony Williams and Ollie Harper, former GM at Richmond Coliseum in Virginia.
The company is 60% owned by minorities and their first client is OVG, serving as a consultant to help them program the complex and get through construction projects Brown left with them after he stepped down last summer.
In 2025, Brown hopes to bring on John McDonald as co-owner and president of Coliseum Management Associates and serve as the face of the company. As the new year approached, no deal was signed.
McDonald operated arenas in Arkansas and North Carolina and has run his own consulting firm, Prism Sports and Entertainment, for 22 years. At some point in the future, Brown expects Coliseum Management Associates to pursue deals outside of Greensboro.
In the meantime, Greensboro remains in good hands with Scott Johnson strengthening his leadership and the continuity he brings to the city,” Brown said.
“I’m proud of my contributions and hope people see that,” he said. “I could only do it with one of the most hard-working and dedicated staffs in the country.”
Tanger Center PACs Them In For Broadway Shows
By Don Muret
For Matt Brown, the crowning touch in his 50-year career in venue management came with the opening of the Steven Tanger Center in September 2021, following an 18-month delay due to the pandemic.
Three years later, the 3,000-seat theater has 17,569 subscribers paying for Broadway events in Greensboro, the largest season-ticket holder base in the country, Brown said.
The story behind the venue started with the old War Memorial Auditorium, part of the original coliseum complex, and which staged Broadway productions. At one point, there were 5,500 subscribers, despite a building in dire need of renovations, he said.
“I always believed Greensboro had a penchant for Broadway,” Brown said. “A lot of the companies in the region all had offices in New York, between all the textile, tobacco and furniture makers. They had apartments there and they all went to Broadway shows.”
After two public referendums in Greensboro failed to pass tax measures to pay for upgrading the auditorium, the city’s plan shifted to building a new performing arts center in the downtown district, three miles northeast of the coliseum complex.
At that point, Brown began a 10-year journey to develop a new venue and come up with a financing model that would not tax Greensboro residents. The plan relied on parking revenue and a $4 facility fee for every event ticket sold at the theater to help pay off the bonds sold to initially fund construction for the $92 million project.
The CVB committed $10 million to the project. Private donors contributed $43 million, which included $7.5 million in naming rights revenue from Steven Tanger, the man whose name is on 38 shopping centers across the country. Three years after Tanger Center opened its doors, ticket fees and parking revenue have exceeded the $2.1 million in annual debt payments to cover the bond, Brown said.Back at the coliseum, War Memorial Auditorium was torn down 10 years ago, replaced by 330 parking spaces for premium seat holders that became a new revenue stream for the complex.
Apart from financing Tanger Center, the biggest challenge for Brown was finding a partner to program the building with theatrical productions. He eventually found one in Lynn Singleton, whose Professional Facilities Management company runs the Durham Performing Arts Center, a one-hour drive east of Tanger Center.
Together, they brought in a third partner, The Nederlander Organization, the industry’s biggest provider of live theater.
“I had to convince Lynn and Nederlander that we were a separate market from Durham,” Brown said. “I told them they needed to be our partner, and if they didn’t, I could become their competitor with Broadway Across America or Disney, buy shows and promote with them.”
Nederlander officials were smart enough to agree with Brown’s vision and told Durham city officials that Greensboro lied outside the exclusionary clause that the theater promoter had to protect itself in Durham.
Singleton, whose relationship with Brown dates to the late 1970s through booking bands in college gyms, bought into it as well, knowing that he could risk the loss of events as the operator of DPAC, which on its own has 17,000 subscribers for live theater.
The question remained: Could two performing arts centers situated 50 miles apart both thrive without cannibalizing each other for content? The answer was a resounding yes, reaffirming Brown’s vision for the project.
“Our projections for Greensboro were 10,000 subscribers and they kept growing,” Singleton said. “All buildings have their honeymoon, but the reality is the venue has exceeded their dreams and mine. Matt kept pushing it. Tanger Center would not have been built if it wasn’t for Matt’s efforts.”
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