Modell’s Struggles to Keep Family Sporting-Goods Empire Alive

Modell’s Struggles to Keep Family Sporting-Goods Empire Alive

Bloomberg, 15-Feb-20

By Katherine Doherty

Mitchell Modell, chairman and chief executive officer of Modell’s Sporting Goods Inc., has a framed letter from his grandfather, Henry Modell, hanging on the wall of his New York City office. He said he likes to look it over, to remind him what’s at stake as he struggles to keep the 131-year-old family business afloat.

“Keep and cherish the good name of Modell as long as you live,” the letter reads.

Sports merchandisers have experienced the pain of the retail upheaval that’s led to a wave of bankruptcies and a record number of store closings. For Modell’s, America’s oldest family-owned sporting-goods retailer, trouble deepened last month after a disappointing holiday season pinched cash flow.

Modell, 65, blamed warm weather, which translated to fewer outerwear sales, poor showings by professional teams like the Jets and Giants, which crimped merchandise demand, as well as the old bugaboos -- competition from big-box stores like Walmart Inc. and online juggernaut Amazon.com Inc. Modell said he’s trying to avoid the fate of rivals such as Sports Authority Inc., which liquidated in 2016, but added that every option is on the table.

“I will leave no stone unturned,” he said in an interview Thursday.

Cortlandt Street

Great-grandfather Morris Modell opened the first store on Cortlandt Street in downtown Manhattan in 1889. Three subsequent generations of the family expanded the business into a chain of about 150 stores from Virginia to New Hampshire, according to its website. The current standard bearer said he feelsthe responsibility of family history every day.

Modell said he’s looking for an outside investor who can keep the doors open, and is so consumed by the search that he sleeps only two or three hours a night. He brought in help from investment bank RBC Capital Markets, advisory shop Berkeley Research Group and law firm Cole Schotz. Berkeley’s Bob Duffyis serving as the company’s chief restructuring officer.

To succeed, Modell said 90% of the closely held retailer’s vendors and landlords need to support a turnaround plan. In return, he promised them greater visibility into the company’s financial performance. Modell said investors are “waiting in the wings” to see what kind of support the retailer can garner.

This week, the company held a call with some of its 300 vendors, which include international brands like Nike, Under Armour, Adidas and Champion. Modell gave his mobile-phone number and email address to everyone.

‘Text Me’

“Call me or text me,” he said he told them. “If you don’t get a response that same day, try again.”

Modell’s occupies a unique place because “what they have going for them is the relationship with vendors,” said David Wander, a partner at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, who has represented vendors in retail bankruptcies such as Sears and Sports Authority. He’s not involved with Modell’s.

Vendors will want to keep the retailer out of bankruptcy, Wander said, because they need Modell’s. With Sports Authority gone, only Modell’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. remain for some of them, he said.

Next week the company will start reaching out to landlords in hopes of negotiating savings on rents, Modell said.

Because many Modell’s stores are so big, it’s difficult for landlords to find a replacement tenant, said Matthew Mason of consulting firm Conway MacKenzie.

“The willingness of landlords to restructure a lease is usually related to their faith in the company’s reconstructing,” Mason said. “If you’re just delaying the inevitable demise, there’s no benefit in reducing the rent now.”

Hard Times

Last year, a news report that Modell’s had hired restructuring advisers caused vendors, squeamish as retailers face hard times, to quit providing goods to the company.

Modell compared the vendors’ pullback to “not watering a tree.” During the eight-month period that inventory levels dropped, the retailer had trouble keeping customers from shopping elsewhere.

In May, Modell loaned the company $6.7 million of his own cash to help avoid a bankruptcy filing. JPMorgan Chase & Co.and Wells Fargo & Co. have been the two largest bank lenders to Modell’s, he said.

“When the owner puts skin in the game, that’s the best signal to give to vendors,” Wander said.

“The name and the family go together,” he added. “No one can say, ‘Who is Mr. Sports Authority?’”

On the office wall near the letter from Modell’s grandfather is a mock front page of the New York Daily News. The headline reads, “Modell’s 100 years. Excellence: A Family Tradition.”

“When your last name is on the door, there’s a whole different set of values attached to it,” Modell said. “Either the vendors and landlords are going to help me and we hold hands together, or I move on to phase two of my life.

“I’m going all in.”

Justices OK immediate Trump crackdown on immigrants' use of public benefits

Justices OK immediate Trump crackdown on immigrants' use of public benefits

Yahoo News! 28-Jan-20

By Caitlin Dickson

The Supreme Court said Monday it will allow the Trump administration to begin enforcing a controversial new policy making it harder for low-income legal immigrants to obtain green cards or visas.

The administration's new, expanded “public charge” rule, which makes it easier for officials to bar immigrants who use, or are deemed likely to use, non-cash government benefits such as Medicaid or food stamps, is one of the most consequential policy changes by the Trump administration to date in its efforts to curtail legal immigration. (Under previous practice, the public charge rule was only applied to immigrants who were considered likely to receive cash welfare payments.)

Like a number of controversial rules, it has been challenged in federal court by immigration advocates and several states. The lawsuits are still making their way through the judicial system, but a stay on enforcing the change imposed by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York was lifted by the high court Monday in a 5-4 decision that broke along familiar ideological lines. Other rules that have also been allowed to take effect pending a final resolution in the courts — a process that can take years — include the travel ban for nationals of several majority-Muslim countries, a change in asylum rules affecting Central American migrants who arrive at the southern border and the diversion of military appropriations for border wall construction.

The Trump administration’s approach of imposing its hard-line views by presidential proclamation, executive orders and regulatory changes rather than through Congress, has been met with lawsuits across the country — and resulted in a much larger role for the courts in shaping immigration policy.

Judges in federal district courts in Washington State, California, Hawaii and elsewhere have granted emergency requests for nationwide injunctions to block the government from implementing the policies in question while the case plays out in court. The administration has responded by asking higher courts to overturn the injunctions, and in cases that have reached the Supreme Court has generally prevailed.

The first time the Supreme Court took the unusual step of weighing in on an immigration-related case during the Trump administration was in December 2017, when the court ruled that a third version of Trump’s travel ban, which restricted entry to the U.S. for nationals of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Yemen could fully take effect while legal challenges continued to make their way through the courts. The decision, issued nearly six months before the Supreme Court would actually hear arguments in the travel ban case, overturned earlier orders by federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii to block parts of the updated ban while the lawsuits against it proceeded.

In June 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor on the merits of the travel ban.

Since then, the Supreme Court has overturned injunctions by federal judges in a number of other immigration-related cases, granting the Trump administration permission to implement other policies amid ongoing litigation, including a requirement that asylum seekers who arrive at the U.S. southern border after traveling through another country — in practice, Central American migrants by way of Mexico — must show that they requested and were denied asylum in the country they transited. In another ruling over the summer, the justices once again voted along ideological lines to allow the Trump administration to continue using military funds to build sections of the border wall.

The conservative justices of the Supreme Court aren’t the only ones ruling in Trump’s favor. Last May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the administration could continue forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings in the U.S., overturning a lower court’s injunction blocking implementation of the policy formally known as the Migration Protection Protocols amid ongoing lawsuits.

Karen Tumlin is a longtime civil and immigrant rights litigator who has served as counsel in a number of high-profile legal challenges to Trump administration actions on immigration, including the effort to terminate legal protections for so-called Dreamers and the various iterations of the Muslim travel ban. She told Yahoo News that the history of the travel ban case, in which the Supreme Court overturned an injunction that had been upheld by multiple lower courts and then eventually ruled in favor of the policy, raises concerns about the future of policies like the public charge rule.

In the travel ban case, Tumlin said, “It turned out the stay result was 100 percent predictive of what the Supreme Court ultimately did.” In the public charge case, she admits it may be hard to find a justice among the five who voted to allow the rule to take effect to change his mind when the case finally reaches the court, especially if the government can show that “the sky isn’t falling.”

“It shouldn’t be that way,” she told Yahoo News. “Just because a divided court allows something to take effect, that shouldn't be the writing on wall for [the] ultimate decision.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the five justices in the majority, wrote in a separate concurrence explaining his vote to allow implementation of the public charge rule that “the real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them.”

“By their nature, universal injunctions tend to force judges into making rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions,” Gorsuch argued, writing that the “increasingly widespread” use of such orders in recent years “is not normal.”

“He’s right,” said Jesse Bless, director of the litigation department at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It's not normal because the administration’s policies and the way they’re issuing them are not normal.”

“I’m not a historian, I’m a trial lawyer, but I’ve never seen a period in time when courts have been asked to do so much not as a result of legislation, but as a result of executive power,” Bless told Yahoo News. He suggested that Gorsuch’s comments reflect “a growing frustration, by everyone, on the way in which [immigration policy] is being settled in the courts.”

Ultimately, the absence of congressional action on immigration has enabled the executive branch to push the boundaries of what is legal, said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. This trend began under President Barack Obama, whose administration faced legal challenges over a number immigration policies including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a work authorization extension for foreign students post-graduation, and the use of family detention. But, Pierce said, “the amount the Obama administration was entangled in the court system is laughably small compared to the Trump administration.”

Pierce suggested that the new public charge rule could be “one of the most problematic policies to go into place while legality is being questioned.” Studies predict that the proposed changes will have serious impacts on many legal immigrants as well as their U.S. citizen children and spouses, giving it the potential to dramatically reshape who is allowed to immigrate to the United States.

The White House praised the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday as a “massive win for American taxpayers, American workers and the American Constitution. This decision allows the government to implement regulations effectuating longstanding federal law that newcomers to this country must be financially self-sufficient.”

Bless argued that such victories “emboldens an administration who wants to build an invisible wall in this country” and “sets the stage for immigration to become a very big part of the November election.”

Prannoy Roy, Ruchir Sharma On Top 10 Trends Of 2020s

Autistic futures trader who triggered crash spared prison

Autistic futures trader who triggered crash spared prison

AP, 28-Jan-20

Micahel Tarm

A U.S. judge Tuesday sentenced a socially awkward math whiz-turned-futures trader who earned tens of millions of dollars over several years and helped trigger a U.S. stock market “flash crash” from his parents’ suburban London home to time served and a year's home confinement, sparing him imprisonment after prosecutors praised his cooperation and said his crimes were entirely unmotivated by greed.

Government prosecutors and defense lawyers described the 41-year-old Navinder Singh Sarao as autistic in memos filed before sentencing in Chicago federal court. They highlighted Sarao's savant - like ability to spot numerical patterns in split seconds, saying he regarded trading as a video game in which the object was to compile points not money.

The sudden tanking of shares on May 6, 2010, earned Sarao nearly a million dollars and temporarily wiped billions of dollars off the value of publicly traded companies, denting investor confidence and leaving many wondering if the market was rigged.

Despite earning some $70 million as a trader over several years, Sarao often ate at McDonald's using discount coupons. His priciest purchase as a multi-millionaire was a second-hand Volkswagen that cost under $10,000. His modest lifestyle has altered little from his days as an active trader, living today on $336 in British government benefits.

Before U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall imposed a sentence, Sarao apologized to those he harmed with his market manipulation, and he expressed remorse for the trauma his prosecution put his family through.

“I will never do anything illegally again,” he said.

Defense attorney Roger Burlingame described his client as a "singularly sunny, childlike, guileless, trusting person who is instantly beloved by all who encounter him, including the FBI agents and prosecutors."

"Navinder Sarao lives outside the reality those without his autism inhabit," Burlingame added in his filing.

Before his own indictment, Sarao himself lost millions in assets to fraudsters who found him uniquely gullible and easy to cheat, his lawyer said.

Home confinement may not be much of a departure from Sarao's typical life. He has lived in the same small room with his parents in Hounslow, United Kingdom, since childhood, rarely venturing out, in part due to his inability to complete the simplest everyday tasks, including doing laundry, Burlingame said.

Sarao spent four months in a British prison — the time Judge Kendall referred to as served — after a grand jury indicted him in Chicago in 2015. A U.S. judge later granted him bond, secured by his parents' home, which allowed Sarao to return to Britain as criminal proceedings in the United States played out.

Sarao, his lawyer said, prefers the company of children and is obsessed with animals, repeatedly enlisting his lawyer's help to convince his parents to let him keep rabbits. He fantasizes about setting up a home for unwanted pets but has no practical ability to make those plans a reality, Burlingame told the court.

After his extradition to Illinois in 2016, Sarao promptly agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and spoofing, which refers to bidding with the intent of quickly canceling the bid to manipulate prices. And within weeks, he returned all his illegal profits — more than $12 million.

He also walked prosecutors step-by-step through how he — and others — employed lightning fast programs to buy and sell in milliseconds, scooping up quickly-accumulating profits. His attorney said Sarao was motivated in part to begin using the techniques himself because he spotted how so many others were cheating the system.

In their sentencing memo, prosecutors agreed that imprisoning Sarao would be pointless, heralding the cooperation he pledged to provide in his plea deal, saying his "extraordinary" cooperation and insights have helped catch other market manipulators.

His lawyers said the time Sarao spent in jail in Britain was "unbearable" because of his autism, saying it amounted to "a torture of sensory stimulation, sleep deprivation and forced socialization," and that he became suicidal. They said they were concerned that Sarao may not be able to survive another stint behind bars.

The 2015 indictment said Sarao manipulated E-Mini S&P, which helped spark the 2010 “flash crash” when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 600 points in just five minutes before rebounding. Sarao allegedly earned around $900,000 in profit on that one day, according to court documents.

Natural Gas Price Collapse Has Shale Drillers Hitting the Brakes

Natural Gas Price Collapse Has Shale Drillers Hitting the Brakes

Bloomberg, 23-Jan-19

By Naureen S. Malik

As U.S. natural gas prices plummet to 1990s-era lows, production is finally showing signs of a slowdown after years of runaway growth.

Output from the lower 48 states has dropped to the lowest level since September, data from BloombergNEF show. While production usually slips in January as frigid weather disrupts drilling, weak prices are driving the decline this time around, according to BNEF analyst Tai Liu.

Explorers have been completing fewer wells in Appalachia and in Louisiana’s Haynesville shale since the second quarter of 2019, data from BloombergNEF and the U.S. Energy Information Administration show. The pullback means output is poised to fall even further, Liu said.

NYC Apartment Building Sales Plunge After Rent Rules Dent Values

NYC Apartment Building Sales Plunge After Rent Rules Dent Values

Bloomberg, 27-Jan-20

By Oshrat Carmiel

Sales of New York City apartment buildings tumbled to near-decade lows last year, after new rent rules scared investors away from properties with regulated units.

By every measure, it was a terrible 2019 for those in the business of owning and selling multifamily properties. The dollar value of purchases across all boroughs fell 40% from the prior year to $6.91 billion, the lowest total since 2011, according to a report by brokerage Ariel Property Advisors. There were 290 multifamily deals -- a 36% decline, and the first year with fewer than 300 transactions in records dating to 2010.

Apartments fell out of favor for investors last year as they digested New York’s new rent law, which governs about 1 million apartments in the city. The overhaul took direct aim at landlords’ income by making it almost impossible to raise rents, remove units from state regulation or even recoup the costs of capital improvements. In doing so, it upended a basic tenet of apartment investing: that spending on renovations could bring higher returns.

“The fact that there’s no correlation between the amount you put into a building and the amount of rent you can charge has completely shifted investment interest in rent-stabilized buildings,” Shimon Shkury, president of Ariel, said in an interview.

In Manhattan, south of East 96th Street and West 110th, investors steered toward non-regulated units, and paid up for them. More than 60% of the units that changed hands last year were market rate, according to the report. Buyers paid an average of $758,217 per apartment, up 14% from 2018.

Investors who did acquire rent-regulated properties demanded lower prices. In Queens, where about 67% of the units sold were under rent regulation, prices fell 7.7% to $276,261 per apartment. And in the Bronx, the average sale price per unit was $171,855, down from $185,006 in 2018.

Buyers of properties subject to the new rules “expect to get a higher yield on day one,” Shkury said.

Today's Reads

• California Wanted to Protect Uber Drivers. Now It May Hurt Freelancers (NY Times)
• Two Histories of Financiers Profiting From Real Estate While Homeowners Go Belly Up (NY Times)
• The Founder of Chewy.com on Finding the Financing to Achieve Scale (Harvard Business Review)

He Created A Seven-Figure, One-Person Business Helping People Maximize Their Credit Card Points

Forbes, 31-Dec-19

By Elaine Pofeldt

When Alex Miller moved to the U.S. from England in 2012, the passionate world traveler noticed something many Americans take for granted: the large number of credit cards offering rewards points that can be traded for cash-back or gifts.

“Travel points are discussed everywhere in America,” says Miller. “In England, there are very few credit cards that can help you win points. There are very small signup bonuses. It’s wonderful, the competition over here. It creates an incredible environment for the consumer. The credit card companies are always battling each other and competing.”

That realization sparked the creation of Upgraded Points, a site that looks at how to maximize credit card points, based in Austin, Texas. Miller, 35, has grown it to seven-figure revenue since he started working on it in 2015. The site generates revenue from commissions the site gets when its visitors apply successfully for credit cards listed on the site. It has grown to more than 2 million visitors a month, he says. Traffic, most of which is organic, has grown 260% in the last 12 months, according to Miller. It hasn’t hurt that in his earlier career, the graduate of University of Exeter worked in the search engine optimization field.

Miller is part of a fast-accelerating trend: the growth of the million-dollar, nonemployer business. Nonemployer firms are those where the owners are the only employees.

The U.S. Census Bureau found that there were 36,984 firms bringing in $1 million to $2.49 million a year in revenue in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a 38% increase from 2011, when there were 26,744. The businesses were not confined to any one industry. Among the major categories were professional services, construction, real estate, retail, healthcare and social services and finance.

What’s driving the trend are a variety of factors. Low-cost technology is making it easier and less costly for the average person to start a business than ever before. Many people, seeking more flexibility than traditional jobs can offer, are gravitating to self-employment and find it is easier than ever to extend what one person can do by using automation and to find outside vendors and contractors on fast-growing freelance platforms. And the rise of social media has made it possible to spread the word about a small business without a giant advertising budget.

So how did Miller break seven figures? Here are his strategies.

Find a way to stand out. 

There are many blogs and websites on making the most of credit card points, so Miller needed a way to distinguish himself. He decided to do that by providing more in-depth information than he found on existing hubs. “I saw there was a need for a resource online that would give consumers a whole lot more information than was being given by other blogs,” says Miller. “Other blogs would cover a huge array of topics. They tended to be rather brief and tended to miss out on a lot of details. As I was researching how to earn points and maximize points, I noticed when I read a post on these blogs they gave me 60% of what I needed. In the end I would find my answer by reading three, four or five more articles.”

He focused on publishing 3,000-word articles one to three times a day, rather than churning out 12 to 25 shorter articles a day, like some of the sites in the space.

“We don’t cover any news at this point,” he says. “All of our articles are very extensive—long-form, well-researched articles.”

Although he hired freelance editors, he signed off on each article.

Miller also made a commitment to keeping his articles up to date, after getting frustrated that details about the points programs he found on other sites’ articles were outdated.

And he avoided the temptation to expand into different media like audio and video, sticking to doing written content well instead. He stayed similarly disciplined about the social media he used to promote the site, to avoid getting distracted by whatever platform was newest. “This took a long time for me to keep in mind,” he says.

Choose action over perfection. 

Instead of waiting until he could build the perfect website, Miller hired a freelance developer to put up a basic site right out of the starting gate. “It was everything I needed to get going,” says Miller. “You can throw something out there to get started or you can be planning for months and months and never get anything out there.” He upgraded the site as he went along. “I’m obsessed with making the site as easy to navigate as possible,” he says.

He took a similar, gradual approach to bringing on freelance writers, starting out with one travel specialist and then gradually expanding to 15, based in the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and the Middle East, whom he found through word of mouth and referrals. His wife Erin Miller helped him, contributing content and serving as a social media manager.

This strategy allowed him to self-finance. He used his income from an existing marketing firm he founded with a partner in 2012, and savings he might otherwise have put into buying a house to keep the business going.

“I had the choice of either buying a house or starting a business,” he says. “I wanted to start a business. I thought it was more suited to my personality.”

Find the right business model. To bring in revenue in the beginning, Miller used Google AdSense, but as the business grew, he decided that affiliate marketing would work better for his site financially, and he switched to his current approach. By investing in developing high-quality content that attracts a premium audience, he has been able to participate in affiliate programs that only reward him when someone actually clicks through from his site and successfully applies for credit. “They only want to pay us for high-quality leads,” he says.

Revenue grew gradually. In 2016 and 2017, Upgraded Points hit the five figures. By 2018, the year the business turned profitable, and he hit six figures. In 2017, revenue hit seven figures and has kept growing, he says.

Stay inspired. 

To keep growing as an entrepreneur, Miller joined a Mastermind group focused on marketing. He deliberately looked for a small group: This one has 12 entrepreneurs. “I’m a big believer in education,” he says. “I’ve learned the most so far from Mastermind groups, but they have to be smaller ones. The really big ones are a pitch fest and there are so many people it’s confusing and distracting.”

He also follows entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and has attended his speaking events several times. “We’re in such a pushbutton era,” Miller says. “That’s the worst mindset to have when it comes to setting up a business. He talks a lot about putting work in, day in and day out.”

As Miller has found, “at some point, when you put in a lot of work, your revenue has increased. You can then afford to hire additional contractors who can probably do some of the tasks in the business better than you.”

Fortunately, he realized early on that by choosing a business in an area he was very excited about—travel—the hard work he put in wouldn’t feel like work much of the time.

“You have to be incredibly passionate about your industry as it will get tough, especially in those first few years,” he says. “That passion will drive you to overcome a never-ending set of obstacles.” Ultimately, that’s the way every entrepreneur grows and scales a business to new heights.