Stop Trying To Start a Business! Here’s How To Buy One and Get RICH! | Jamie Salter

Jamie Salter founded Authentic Brands Group (ABG) and now serves as chairman, with a portfolio that includes Champion, Reebok, Forever 21 and Quiksilver. ABG also works with major personal brands including Shaquille O’Neal, David Beckham and Kevin Hart, and Salter said it owns the estates of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali.

Salter traces his entrepreneurial instincts to a paper route he started around age 10–12. He was getting up around 4:45 a.m., then persuaded his brothers to deliver the papers while he kept collecting the more lucrative customer tips—an early lesson that earning money did not necessarily require doing all the labor himself.

His childhood businesses expanded from newspapers into installing door peepholes, selling cassettes and later videotapes. One peephole job went badly enough that he had to replace an entire door, but he says these experiences taught him that consistent hustle could produce meaningful income.

At 63, Salter described himself as self-made and said he almost never relied on his parents for spending money. He recalled receiving about $20 a week for a short period but otherwise says he learned early to generate his own income.

The paper route also gave Salter relationships that lasted decades. He delivered to members of the Bronfman family, and says those connections eventually extended across generations, with his children becoming friends with their children roughly 50 years later.

Salter believes face-to-face relationships remain unusually valuable in business. He contrasts knocking on doors and personally collecting newspaper payments with people now hiding behind phones and computers, arguing that direct human contact creates relationships digital communication often does not.

An early windsurfing job taught Salter the danger of depending on suppliers he did not control. His employer sold product that never arrived because the supplier went bankrupt, which helped convince him to build businesses where he could control production and the supply chain himself.

That experience helped move him from windsurfing into snowboards, including Kemper Snow. He saw the smaller, more manageable product and greater supply-chain control as a better entrepreneurial opportunity.

In 1986, Salter saw a basic product opportunity in the fact that many snowboards lacked metal edges. He learned they were being produced using cross-country ski presses, whose products traditionally lacked edges, and concluded that snowboards should instead adopt the edge technology used on alpine skis.

He found an Austrian ski factory capable of producing edged snowboards and bought its entire planned production of 15,000 boards. He then took a small 10-by-10-foot booth at a ski show and began selling to virtually anyone willing to buy.

Salter deliberately sold snowboards to large sporting-goods chains that established snowboard brands were reluctant to serve. Buyers included Gart Brothers, Oshman’s, MC Sporting Goods and Big 5; he found these large customers also paid more reliably than many small specialty shops.

The entire 15,000-board production sold in three days. The episode reinforced Salter’s willingness to pursue customers competitors considered unfashionable or outside the core culture of a category.

Salter eventually concluded that acquiring established brands could be more attractive than creating them from scratch. Building a new brand requires years of advertising, marketing, persistence and capital, whereas an existing brand with residual recognition can sometimes be “dusted off” and rebuilt.

His turnaround philosophy puts product ahead of marketing. Salter argues that strong marketing can revive awareness, but it cannot compensate for a bad product; he considers product quality the foundation of any successful brand recovery.

He does not believe companies need to invent a completely new business model to create value. He cited Apple improving existing ideas and ABG improving an established licensing model, arguing that executing an existing model better can be enough to build a major company.

Salter sees uncontrolled category expansion as a common way strong brands damage themselves. A footwear company may enter clothing without the necessary expertise, or vice versa, allowing a weak new category to hurt the successful core business.

ABG’s licensing model is designed to solve that problem by assigning each category to specialists. A company that excels at underwear should make the underwear, while another specialist handles socks; Salter’s principle is that no company should assume it can be excellent at everything.

Tapout was ABG’s first brand acquisition. Salter entered the deal despite knowing little about fighting because his sons strongly believed UFC would become enormous, and he also had access to people around the sport, including UFC marketing executive Brian Johnson.

The Tapout acquisition occurred in the earlier UFC era around Georges St-Pierre and before Conor McGregor became a major figure. Tapout co-founder Mask had died, and people around the UFC encouraged Salter to acquire what they saw as the sport’s leading apparel brand.

ABG’s major early mistake with Tapout was abandoning the independent retailers that had formed the brand’s original base. It licensed the business to Global Brands, later Centric, and concentrated on large department stores because those customers were easier and financially safer to serve; Salter says that move caused Tapout to lose some of its “heartbeat.”

Kohl’s dropped Tapout even though Salter says it was doing roughly $20 million of business there. According to Salter, a mother complained that her son had gotten into a school fight and believed he was a UFC fighter because he wore Tapout; Kohl’s concluded the association with a “blood sport” conflicted with its family positioning.

Once Kohl’s dropped Tapout, J.C. Penney and other major retailers followed. ABG had to rebuild relationships with the smaller independent stores it had previously neglected; Tapout still exists, and Salter said ABG is currently working on another significant project involving the brand.

All four of Salter’s sons now work in the family business, predominantly on ABG’s entertainment side. Corey, who helped start the company with him, is CEO of the entertainment operation, while Salter initially concentrated on lifestyle brands.

Salter considers his sons’ willingness to challenge him a major competitive advantage. They will directly tell him when they think an acquisition or strategy is wrong, even in boardrooms or company meetings; that lack of filtering can be uncomfortable, but he says ABG would not be where it is without them.

His sons also helped push ABG into children’s intellectual property. Their argument was that children’s products are relatively resilient, while ABG already had experienced licensing employees—average age about 35—who increasingly had children themselves and therefore understood the customer personally.

The Care Bears acquisition represents a new strategic pillar for ABG and its first children’s property in 16 years. Salter noted that younger children may not know the property as well as adults, but the adults recognize and love it—and adults are the people actually making children’s purchases.

The first major test for a potential ABG acquisition is whether the brand can operate globally. Salter wants to understand exactly where its audience is and treats geographic and demographic data as critical; he said ABG reaches roughly a billion social-media followers and operates across about 150 countries.

The second—and, in Salter’s telling, most important—acquisition test is whether a brand still has a “heartbeat.” By that he means durable recognition and emotional relevance among consumers; if people no longer know or care about the brand, ABG generally does not want it.

ABG generally sees itself as a buyer of fixer-uppers rather than brands trading at their peak. Salter also investigates why the asset is available: an owner may want liquidity, private equity may need to return capital after roughly five years, the company itself may be distressed, or a seller may need to solve problems elsewhere in its portfolio.

Salter prefers direct consumer testing to relying heavily on consultants when judging whether a brand still matters. His rough test is to walk the streets and ask ordinary people whether they recognize something like Care Bears; broad spontaneous recognition is evidence that the brand’s underlying equity remains alive.

A 1993 Japanese order for Ride Snowboards fundamentally changed Salter’s view of international business. The buyer offered to prepay a very large snowboard order in exchange for a discount, giving the company badly needed production capital at a time when Salter says he was borrowing from friends to finance manufacturing.

Salter recalled the Japanese order as somewhere around 10,000–20,000 boards, though he was uncertain about the exact number. He also cited a roughly $30 million figure and a roughly $600,000 discount; the figures as recounted are not internally consistent, but his central point was that advance payment from Japan transformed Ride’s ability to finance production.

The financing advantage was striking because Japanese interest rates were around 2% while Salter described borrowing costs back home as roughly 10–15%. Ride subsequently came to depend on large annual Japanese advance payments, and Salter said the experience opened his eyes to using different economies around the world to offset one another.

Global diversification also protects a business from local economic and even weather cycles. Salter’s simple example was that a poor snow season in Europe could coincide with strong snow conditions and demand in Japan.

Salter believes younger entrepreneurs have a major structural advantage because information and creation tools are dramatically faster than they were when he started. He specifically uses ChatGPT—nicknamed “Charlie”—and believes that someone with comparable drive starting in their twenties today could build far faster than his generation did.

He singled out China as a place young entrepreneurs should study closely. Salter praised its pace in automobiles, robotics and livestream shopping and said he believes Chinese technology is substantially ahead in several areas.

ABG treats partnerships with living celebrities as substantially harder than owning conventional brands or estates because the relationship may last for life. Salter compares those arrangements to marriages: the economics matter, but the parties must also be able to survive disagreements and difficult periods together.

Family orientation is one of Salter’s filters when choosing celebrity partners such as Shaquille O’Neal, David Beckham and Kevin Hart. He believes stable personal values reduce the risk of building a large commercial partnership around someone whose behavior may later damage the brand.

Global relevance and willingness to work are equally important in celebrity partnerships. ABG examines where a person’s followers live and whether the celebrity is prepared to travel, including to markets such as China and India; Salter says global brands are difficult to build when the principal refuses to travel.

Major ABG deals can take years of relationship-building rather than being negotiated quickly. Salter said he and Shaq pursued Reebok for about five years before ultimately buying it, and described celebrity partnerships as a long “dating process” in which both parties determine whether the relationship works for them.

Salter is concerned that ABG’s increasing size and corporatization could weaken the personal relationships on which its entertainment partnerships depend. He does not want celebrity relationships reduced to transactions, and sees his sons’ continued involvement as one way to preserve personal accountability.

The sons have distinct responsibilities inside that relationship structure. Salter said Tyler handles Kevin Hart, Matthew works on collaborations, Dylan handles Shaq, and Corey oversees the broader entertainment operation.

David Beckham was offered as an example of the work ethic ABG expects from a major personal-brand partner. Salter described Beckham repeatedly traveling between Atlanta, Miami, New York and England during an eight-week World Cup period and credited that work with strengthening both the sport and Beckham’s commercial brand.

ABG nearly acquired Marc Jacobs but walked away because Salter did not accept the proposed transaction structure. G-III and WHP ultimately acquired the business on a 50/50 basis; Salter says ABG could have done the deal, but chose financial discipline instead.

Salter does not yet know whether walking away from Marc Jacobs was a mistake. He expects it may take another three or four years to judge the outcome and said some other deals ABG previously declined could still return to the table.

Financial discipline is deliberately built into ABG’s acquisition culture. Salter said the company carries very low leverage and will not pursue a deal that does not make financial sense simply because he dislikes losing transactions.

Salter still thinks about ABG’s capital as family money rather than anonymous corporate money. Although private-equity firms and sovereign funds are partners, he said his family continues to own a substantial part of ABG, so a billion-dollar acquisition exposes meaningful family wealth as well.

ABG is deliberately evolving from primarily a commerce business into a much larger content business because Salter believes “content drives commerce.” His view is that buying decisions are increasingly formed through creators, friends, celebrities and social influence rather than traditional advertising.

Salter believes the strongest modern consumer companies increasingly behave like small entertainment companies. Traditional television commercials and outdoor advertising have lost relative power as audiences move to streaming and social platforms, making continuous content and influence part of the selling engine.

His core advice for building a brand is still to create a detailed business plan rather than relying on ambition or AI-generated material. He wants teams to specify where they will operate, what they will sell in each market and how the economics work rather than simply claiming they intend to build a billion-dollar company.

Salter pushes ABG teams to examine countries individually rather than dismissing whole regions as too small to matter. He used Africa as an example: identify its 54 countries, determine which are commercially viable and map the categories ABG can sell in each instead of treating the continent as one undifferentiated market.

He uses AI but warns against outsourcing understanding to it. Salter sees AI systems such as Claude producing polished résumés and business plans, but says the danger appears when the supposed author enters a meeting and cannot explain what the document actually says.

Salter does not describe ABG as a conventional private-equity firm; he calls it a platform or ecosystem. The company combines entertainment, lifestyle and services while using its portfolio of intellectual property as the central asset.

ABG is asset-light operationally but asset-heavy in intellectual property. Rather than owning every factory, distribution operation or product company itself, it licenses brands such as Reebok to specialist partners by geography and category and supports those partners with services from the wider ABG platform.

Salter contrasted that structure with a company such as Nike, which he described as a roughly $45–50 billion, asset-heavy operating business. In his hypothetical ABG model, Nike’s IP could instead be licensed across many categories to specialist operators around the world.

His hypothetical “Nike water” example shows how far he is willing to extend a brand when the category reinforces its identity. Salter argued that if a water company paid Nike $100 million a year in royalties, branded water could keep the swoosh constantly visible while strengthening Nike’s association with fitness and wellness.

That idea does not contradict his warning against brands entering categories they do not understand: his solution is licensing. The brand supplies the IP while a best-in-class water, footwear, apparel or other specialist supplies the category expertise, avoiding the need for the brand owner to become an operator in every business itself.

Salter once registered the Under Armour trademark for deodorant because he thought the name fit the category naturally. He had a deodorant company called Kick prepared to license it and proposed sharing the royalties with Under Armour founder Kevin Plank.

Kevin Plank rejected the deodorant idea and asked Salter to sell him the trademark instead. Salter sold the rights back for $1, telling Plank not to forget him; he says he valued preserving the relationship more than extracting immediate value from the trademark.

Salter still believes Under Armour deodorant would have made commercial sense even though Plank disagreed. The story illustrates both Salter’s enthusiasm for logical brand extensions and his willingness to sacrifice a small asset when the long-term relationship matters more.

His simplest advice to younger entrepreneurs is to maintain a written daily task list and rewrite unfinished tasks for the following day. He attributes a meaningful part of his success not to elite academic training—he contrasts himself with a Harvard MBA—but to being consistently organized.

Salter extends that emphasis on organization into ordinary physical habits. He asks job candidates whether they make their bed and argues that keeping the bed, closet, desk and kitchen organized reinforces the discipline needed to run work and life effectively.

Salter wants to be remembered primarily as a father and grandfather rather than as a billionaire. He said family is the most important thing in his life and described his real wealth as four children, eight grandchildren with another on the way, his wife, friends, employees and associates.

His closing view was that financial wealth is not the only meaningful definition of being rich. Salter said friends with far less money can be just as rich through spouses, children, grandchildren and friendships, and argued that people should remember that life is short and relationships cannot be treated as secondary.