Worst businessman - Tony Khan or Paul Heyman

[theghostofalwilson]

Not taking things as booking skills into consideration, who out of these two is/was worst when it comes down to running a business, Tony Khan with AEW or Paul Heyman with ECW? 

[Denny Zen is Cooking™]

Is this even a question at this point in history? Heyman couldn't even pay his employees and ran his business into the ground in less than a decade. Khan is running a business which, by all reasonable standards, has been successful and thriving for going on 5 years now.

Now, granted, Khan had a substantial head start on Heyman by virtue of being born a billionaire but, like, there's absolutely no objective evidence whatsoever that Khan is a "bad businessman" beyond the likes of Bully Ray and Jim Cornette grifting to try and get clicks on their podcasts.

[Viking Hall]

Yeah, this isn't even a race they're that far apart. Tony Khan would need another decade of pure incompetence and then self sabotage any attempts at saving the company/paying his employees for it to even become a close run thing.

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

If anyone votes Tony Khan I'd LOOOOOOOVE to hear a damn good explanation.

You can argue booking. Heyman used 911 effectively. 911!

Not business.

[Ben Wyatt]

In what universe is this even a debate worthy question?

[Viking Hall]

Apr 3, 2024 13:09:28 GMT -5 YAKMAN is ICHIBAN said:

If anyone votes Tony Khan I'd LOOOOOOOVE to hear a damn good explanation.

You can argue booking. Heyman used 911 effectively. 911!

Not business.

Even in terms of booking their own promotions I'd say there's an argument for TK tbh. I think Heyman is the better creative mind of the two, but he was almost the flipside of TK in being too slapdash and booking on the fly at times when he should have been more considered. TK could definitely do with a little more of that at times, but the ideal booker would be somewhere in the middle of both of them.

[Ronny Rayguns Is All Elite]

TNT/TBS seems to love Tony Khan and keep giving him more TV time.

Paul Heyman refused to make the concessions TNN requested when they signed a TV deal, would cut shoot promos on the network, and went as far as to actually make "The Network" the on air villain of his program.

It's not a question

[eJm]

I honestly don’t think I could have come up with a more one sided question.

You might as well ask what was the more successful promotion, TNA or the UWF (Abrams version, obviously).

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

Apr 3, 2024 13:32:30 GMT -5 Ronny Rayguns Is All Elite said:

TNT/TBS seems to love Tony Khan and keep giving him more TV time.

Paul Heyman refused to make the concessions TNN requested when they signed a TV deal, would cut shoot promos on the network, and went as far as to actually make "The Network" the on air villain of his program.

It's not a question

Maybe it was some sort of The Producers situation?

[TOK Hehe'd Around & Found Out]

The crowds AEW is being mocked for having are usually larger than the biggest houses ECW ever drew. What are we even doing here?

[jean0987654321]

Paul Heyman and its not even close. AEW has lasted longer than ECW did under Heyman's rule

[The Ichi]

One of Heyman's ex-employees legitimately considered jumping the barricade at WM17 and murdering him, which I'm not at all justifying as rational, but that's how much he screwed people over.

Khan is an excellent businessman. It could be argued he's not a great boss (as in isn't tough enough on people), but even that's seeing some improvement after the Punk mess.

["Playboy" Don Douglas]

A more interesting question for me would be “Tony Khan or Jimmy Crockett?”

Even then, it’s too far skewed to get an actual answer.

[Magnus the Magnificent]

*Worse*

and it's Heyman.

[eJm]

Also asking this after the DSOTR episode on Chris Candido where we found out Heyman was using his credit cards to pay for ECW related stuff when he left the company, never mind during his time in the company, just makes this question easy to answer.

[Cyno]

Tony Khan is an objectively better businessman. Like this isn't even a debate.

[Ludwig Kaiser’s Walk]

I don’t like Tony Khan and think he needs to hire different people to run AEW if he wants it to be a long-term success

I’ve also never clicked the answer to a poll faster in my life.

Tony Khan pays his workers in his company, that alone puts him over Heyman. Heyman was/is a creative genius and motivator, but was/is a terrible businessman.

[Moppy]

"Which is worse, petting a bunny or being mauled by a bear? Vote now!"

[sdoyle7798]

Apr 3, 2024 13:09:28 GMT -5 YAKMAN is ICHIBAN said:

If anyone votes Tony Khan I'd LOOOOOOOVE to hear a damn good explanation.

You can argue booking. Heyman used 911 effectively. 911!

Not business.

Looks like 1 person did, but I will bet its a troll vote.

[theghostofalwilson]

I didn't expect it to be this one-sided I can't vote in my own polls. I would have voted Heyman because he was so awful as a businessman, and with shitty morals to boot, but I don't have high opinions on Tony as a businessman either.

There are some things to take into consideration though, mainly Tony having more money at his disposal making things easier for him and the landscape being different now with tv companies being willing to pay hundreds of millions for wrestling programming these days, whereas Heyman had to pay channels to get on, and fans spending more money on wrestling per head than they did 25-30 years ago.

Would Paul have been able to make ECW a financial success if he had a bigger budget and big money coming in from tv stations? Possibly, but it doesn't really matter since it's all hypothetical. The fact that ECW was so hot, it was during the middle of a wrestling boom and he couldn't make a financial success of it is telling of how bad of a businessman he was. Even with getting backing from Vince he wasn't able to make ends meet. Looking back he should have hired a Nick Khan type to handle the business side and focused on only running the wrestling side.

Tony Khan I think is good with networking, and his connections from his NFL job will have helped a lot, and he did get a good tv deal and has built a good relationship with Warner Bros Discovery so in that aspect he's a good businessman and I will give him credit for decisions such as booking Wembley which was a ballsy move and turned out to be a big success, but I think he has done a lot of questionable business moves, which is why I raised the question.

Some of those are:
* big salary costs (is it worth signing Chris Jericho to a 10-year deal at 52 years old? Is it worth signing Kenny Omega with all his injury history? Is it worth signing Kota Ibushi who was seemingly shot even before signing with AEW and now is out with another injury? Is it good business to spend big money on Mercedes Moné when you don't have much of a much a woman's division to build around her? Is it good business to have twice as many wrestlers on the roster than you really need? Instead of cutting them? Not cutting them is probably a combination of being nice and afraid of confrontation and while the first is admirable it's not really a sign of a good businessman.)

* the video game. We know very little about this, but this was a very big undertaking for them with big costs and the consensus is that had it had been a success for them, we would have heard about it.

* booking buildings too big (Whereas Heyman's philosophy was always going for smaller buildings and making sure they sold out to make the product look hot, and you could argue Heyman overdid this at the cost of revenue, Tony books bigger buildings that are often half empty resulting in higher costs as well as the product looking cold. Now I could understand if this happened early on if they expected bigger attendances and/or were tied up with longterm contracts with buildings but this is still happening 5 years in and even in new markets)

* letting Cody Rhodes go. (Looking at where Cody is now and his value today, it would have been worth paying him CM Punk money. But to be fair, it's unlikely Cody would be where he is now as the AEW fans had rejected him and he was going nowhere and as he said himself he "needed to leave the territory" so even if Tony had paid him what he asked for to stay it probably would not have been worth it. Although you never know, a heel turn might have reignited him and made AEW fans accept him).

* losing CM Punk (Now let me start by saying I think it was the correct call to fire Punk after All In given everything that had happened, but had Tony nipped it in the bud when the problems started to appear in early 2022, and definitely after the Punk-Hangman situation we might not have had Brawl Out or the fight at Wembley, and Punk might have still been with them today. This is more being a bad boss than a bad businessman, but it all ties in.)

I think a lot will come down to the new tv deal. If he gets a good deal you can justify his spendings on salaries and he should be good to go for another 4-5 years or whatever the length of the new deal is, but what if it doesn't? Is the current model with all those high salaries sustainable then?

So to summarize I will say Paul Heyman is worse based on what we know now, because he is a proven bad businessman, whereas with Tony a lot is up in the air since we don't have access to bottom line results given AEW is not a public company and I might have to reevaluate who was the worse businessman five years from now. Eric Bischoff looked like a genius in 1996-98, but then when the money stopped coming in in 1999 and the expenses were still there it ended up a disaster.

Thanks for making it all the way through.