Andrew Yaffe: Lessons from a new CEO on scaling Dude Perfect

0:00Bret McCormick: They brought me in and I brought in a team to really think about how do we ensure that this is a business that lasts for another 17 or 25 or 50 years, that it's sustainable and meaningful well beyond, you know, what it is today.

0:18Andrew Yaffe: Hello and welcome to this week's episode of SBJ's On Stage. I'm your host, Taylor Bloom. Today, we're taking you to SBJ's Brand Innovation Summit in Chicago, where Andrew Yaffe, CEO of Dude Perfect, sat down with sports business journal's Brett McCormick for a fascinating conversation in June 2026 about the future of sports culture. Dude Perfect began his five college friends filming trickshot videos in a backyard at Texas A &M. Today, it's one of the most influential creator brands in the world, reaching nearly 100 million followers while expanding into live events, merchandising, partnerships, and entirely new fan experiences.

0:56Andrew Yaffe: In this discussion, Yaffe shares how the company is building a business designed to last for decades, not just viral moments, and what sports organizations can learn from a brand that has grown by putting creativity, authenticity, and community first. Let's go on stage. So Dude Perfect is five guys that met at Texas A &M in 2009, became friends, started making trickshot videos. And in the 17 years since, they've compiled almost 100 million social media followers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. And as I checked this morning and shared with you, 3 ,000 on Pinterest. Let's give it up. $3 ,000 of Pinterest.

1:33Andrew Yaffe: That spun off sponsorship deals with major brands, live tours, the merch business, media deals, a new headquarters, as we saw, a nine-figure private equity investment a few years ago, and right around then, also the hiring of the first CEO, Andrew Yaffe. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So what did it say about where Dude Perfect was that they needed a CEO?

2:02Bret McCormick: I think it said more than anything that the guys understood that even though they've been doing this for these crazy things for 17 years, we're in the early innings. They are incredibly long-term focused and thoughtful about where the business is and where we want to take it. And there are lots of things that we can do in the short term. But they brought me in and I brought in a team to really think about how do we ensure that this is a business that lasts for another 17 or 25 or 50 years, that it's sustainable and meaningful well beyond what it is today. And so that's really where we are is as the creator business is shifting dramatically right now.

2:51Bret McCormick: We look at it as we're the starting pitchers. Yeah.

2:55Andrew Yaffe: What's it like to be the CEO of something where it began so organically and the founders are still so involved? It's almost like I was trying to think of comparisons, almost like you're like a band manager or something.

3:06Bret McCormick: Some days it feels like that. It is never boring, but it's amazing seeing how authentic it really is. I mean, the origin story of the business is five friends who were messing around in a backyard at Texas A &M in college like we all did. They happened to film it. It happened to be right when YouTube was starting and they posted it. And later that week, it went viral, which at the time was 50 ,000 views. And they got a call from Good Morning America who wanted to feature them for their crazy video. and that level of authenticity literally not two hours ago we had a creative call and the guys were on it and they said we want to do the things that we think we're gonna we're gonna make videos that we think are fun like that is literally the the creative guideline that we set two hours ago 17 years later and so it really is amazing to work with a group who is so passionate and authentic and focused on the mission and the opportunity in front of us, but really true to themselves.

4:17Bret McCormick: And so I'm very fortunate that I get to hang out and deal with all the chaos in our headquarters on a daily basis.

4:24Andrew Yaffe: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about, is Dude Perfect kind of undergoing a digital to physical transition to some degree? Like, not fully, but... Yeah.

4:36Bret McCormick: Well, and it's perfect for this audience. So just as background, I spent almost 15 years at the National Basketball Association. I was the head of strategy, and then I was the EVP and head of content most recently and oversaw our social and digital and our ratings and a bunch of other stuff. And I look at our business very similar to a sports franchise. Yes, you know, we're five guys doing ridiculous things, and now we have a bunch of other talents. We have 11 guys doing ridiculous things. but we sell content we have a live tour in a couple weeks we start our sixth live tour we're likely coming to a city near you, we're in NBA NHL sized arenas across the country last year we sold over 200 ,000 tickets in 19 or 20 venues across the country we have merchandise and consumer products and we sell sponsorships.

5:38Bret McCormick: And so when you look at the revenues and the operations of a major sports franchise, we do all the same things. And so in many ways, I look at the business as a modern version of that. And a lot of that expansion is physical. Our overarching mission, our mantra, we say is to inspire play. Our audience is certainly younger than our audience was at the NBA. and the vast majority of audiences out there, very family-friendly. And, you know, especially at a time where kids are spending a lot of time on device, on screen. I have a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, and I know how harrowing that can be for parents.

6:19Bret McCormick: We spend a lot of time thinking about how do we get kids out doing things. And I hear from parents in particular all the time that say they watched one of our videos where our guys were trying to do something ridiculous. Kids spent 15 minutes watching the video. They spent two hours in the driveway trying to recreate the shot. And nothing makes us prouder and more excited than that. And it's hard. It's hard to get kids, it's hard to get people off the couch doing things. And we think we are a unique brand that can achieve that. And so from a physical standpoint, we have our tour, but we're actually expanding that even further and now building both traveling and permanent physical experiences for families to come do the things inspired by our content.

7:05Bret McCormick: And we're really excited for that next step for our brand.

7:07Andrew Yaffe: Not burgers?

7:09Bret McCormick: No, no. I don't know that those would be play inspiring.

7:14Andrew Yaffe: Yeah, that was a Mr. Beast. Yeah, yeah. One of the most physical manifestations of this transition is the headquarters where you work. So tell us about that structure, that building, and what do you all do there?

7:31Bret McCormick: Yeah, we've got 80 ,000 square feet in Frisco, Texas. If anyone's in the neighborhood, come on by. It is part office, part studio, and part Barbie Dreamhouse is the only really way to describe it. We've got a full court basketball, NBA quality basketball court. The Dallas Mavericks actually came and hosted a practice there when their team was too stressed about the trade deadline and they needed to blow off some steam. We have a 50-yard football field where the Mavericks actually spent most of their time was on the football field with NFL-sized uprights. We've got a mini-golf course themed after Augusta National and TPC Sawgrass and a number of iconic holes throughout the country.

8:17Bret McCormick: We've got a climbing wall and a full workout facility and a golf simulator and a pickleball court. And so we shoot a lot of our content there. We've also got a world-class art studio and a world-class podcast studio. We've got our 80 employees based there. So it is a mix of just normal office with something chaotic and celebrity, athlete, movie star coming through on a very regular basis.

8:45Andrew Yaffe: Are there like public-facing aspects of it? Or would you do that in the future?

8:50Bret McCormick: Yeah. And it's especially true in the summer when school's out. We get dozens of kids knocking on our front door every day, which is a bit of a security risk. But we now have a space open that is available to the public. And it allows you to come in and see some iconic elements from our videos, some of the world's biggest rocket, and the desk from our variety show. And there you get some iconic sort of Instagram moments. and so that's something that we're building for the public now and we don't advertise it very much but when kids come by we can entertain them in our office.

9:31Andrew Yaffe: Yeah, I mean you probably should not advertise it.

9:33Bret McCormick: No, we can't handle the throughput.

9:36Andrew Yaffe: Right, right, right. Is there one of those newer business lines that this group should be watching to see how it does? One that you think could sort of do surprisingly well maybe?

9:46Bret McCormick: Yeah, I mean I'm very excited about experiential. Just to put a little bit more color on it, our founders have talked for years about their dreams to build a theme park. And that is still the North Star of what we want to build experientially. But where we're starting is something that, for those of you who have kids like I do and spend weekends at trampoline parks, imagine the most fun version of a trampoline park where you know in that video you saw a kid or you saw one of our guys throwing a baseball through a moving truck window trying to hit a target on the other side like we're going to enable people to be able to do that we're going to enable people to be able to recreate the world's highest basketball shot and throw a ball leaning off a tower into a into a basket and so that's something that we're incredibly excited to build and we believe is something that can scale quite widely and will be coming into the world hopefully very soon.

10:50Bret McCormick: That's cool.

10:51Andrew Yaffe: So you came from a position of influence at the NBA where you saw social digital and original content. If a legacy sports property asked you how to build a social first audience from scratch, what are some suggestions you would give them? What's the first suggestion you would give.

11:08Bret McCormick: Yeah, I get a lot of calls from team leadership and team owners on this topic. And I think now I'm free to say this, that I'm no longer employed by the NBA. And I apologize if I offend anyone in the audience. Teams do a really bad job on social and digital right now. When I left the NBA, the average team digital sponsorship was smaller than individual deals on an annual basis. It was smaller than several individual deals that I now have at Dude Perfect. And so to put it in sponsorship language. And that's because the strategy teams and leagues have taken for years has been take what works on linear and drop it on social and digital.

11:59Bret McCormick: Put highlights. And when those were engaging, put more highlights. And And I think there's a lot more that can be done if you start with what are the assets that a team has at its disposal? An arena, a locker room, staff, mascots. What are all, if you put a YouTube native creator in charge of those assets and said, hey, come back with 10 ideas that could generate millions of views on YouTube, they would look nothing like what teams and leagues and properties are currently putting on YouTube. There's great examples out there of we worked at the league with creators where we would say try to set the world record for most number of games attended in a 24-hour period.

12:49Bret McCormick: Let's see if we can get one creator to five games in 24 hours. And those videos would generate tens of millions of views. Or give a creator access to an arena for 48 hours and just see what happens. Like those are the sorts of concepts that in particular on YouTube, YouTube native creators will come up with. And there's a thousand more that people more creative than me will come up with. But if you look out, too much of what happens on social and digital is really just a recreated version of existing content elsewhere. And it doesn't work. And not only does that work broadly across social and digital, what you do on TikTok has to be TikTok native.

13:27Bret McCormick: What you do on Instagram has to be Instagram native. What you do on YouTube Shorts has to be YouTube Shorts native. What you do on YouTube Longform has to be YouTube native. Those are all fundamentally different platforms, and too often sports properties treat them as the same.

13:42Andrew Yaffe: Why do you think that is? It's hard.

13:45Bret McCormick: Like, it's not easy, and it requires a fundamentally different approach to content creation, to sales, to measurement. It is... Excuse me. It's easier for a league to say, I've got highlights. Highlights perform. Let me stick the highlights in the view generator. But those views don't convert to long-term adherence. They're actually not particularly sellable. You create all sorts of issues where teams can't sell the highlights because the league wants to sell the highlights, and so then teams are pumping out highlights but can't monetize them. So it creates really negative dynamics. And at this point, highlights are just completely commoditized.

14:35Bret McCormick: There's UGC versions, there's League, there's Team, they've been licensed to media partners, and it doesn't create any real connection or attention to an audience, which is ultimately what you can monetize in the long term.

14:48Andrew Yaffe: Yeah, I was going to ask you sort of the same question concerning younger fans. I think there's a lot of concern in the sports industry about what the next generation of fans looks like. They're a bit of a wild card, I think, for a lot of people. What would you suggest in terms of that? I mean, is it essentially kind of what you were just saying?

15:07Bret McCormick: Yeah. Seeking the stickiness? Yeah, and I think it's the good news, and I truly believe this, that there's no shortage of sports fandom. It's not... Kids are not any less interested or excited about competition and sports. The way they consume it is totally different. I grew up watching SportsCenter and I'm a Knicks fan and so I've been reminiscing a lot about 1994 and 1999 and the connection that gave me to the Knicks. Obviously, that's sort of an edge case but the way kids are consuming sports looks a lot more like Dude Perfect and Jesser and Mr. Beast than it does sitting down and watching a two-and-a-half-hour game.

16:01Bret McCormick: And similar to the last answer, just pumping out more of that is not going to change that. It's really on leagues and properties and teams and sports to figure out what are the connections we can make, what are the stories we can tell, what are the formats that work to fish where the fish are. How are kids, how are younger audiences consuming content? And therefore, how do we create connections in that world? Whether that's video games, whether that's on social platforms. And I don't think, I'm a strong believer it's not just highlights. Because we posted a four-hour video this weekend. The average watch time on it, the average viewer was spending over an hour watching that video.

16:48Bret McCormick: So it's not just about, and the average age on that is very, very young. It is not just about 30-second attention spans, 15-second attention spans. That's a complete misnomer. You see it in the most powerful person in sports right now is probably iShowSpeed, who is live streaming 30 days consecutively. And the watch times on that are crazy. So it's not about shorter. It's about finding the right format that audiences are actually consuming. Yeah.

17:14Andrew Yaffe: What did it mean for Dude Perfect to raise funds a few years ago? I don't know if you were involved in that decision, but was that a fraught one or easy?

17:23Bret McCormick: I was not involved in the decision, but I think really what it speaks to is the long-term focus of the guys. There were a lot of opportunities for them, and they evaluated many different scenarios. And the group that they chose to work with and then bringing me on board were really about how do we invest and build this business for the next 20 years, not how do we get the most cash in the short term, but it's how do we build something that really means something and matters. And so I assume for them it was a very difficult decision to think about, you know, hey, we've built something with no outside capital, with no outside kind of external leadership.

18:07Bret McCormick: How do we want to make this change? But I think, you know, it's been an amazing experience so far.

18:16Andrew Yaffe: Yeah, I keep kind of thinking about the band analogy. They sort of blew up, and then what next? Each of them has a distinct personality. Was that intentional to develop those, or did it just sort of develop on its own?

18:33Bret McCormick: Honestly, I think it's one of the reasons it works is because, again, they are who they are. Like they will spend three hours in the office arguing like you do with your best friends about sports and creative ideas and fast food flavors and whatever you want, they will argue about. and the dynamics of having, you know, there's kind of a laid-back one and we have a pair of twins who are not laid-back and different dynamics between each of the five of them that really naturally complement each other. It works because they are who they are. They're super authentic to their friendship and that plate, when we create content that is authentic to who they are, they are super competitive with each other.

19:22Bret McCormick: We had a video format called mini games where you compete in kind of really silly things really quickly. We did employee mini games at our office yesterday where all 80 employees, the guys kind of drafted teams and all 80 employees competed. There were a few injuries. It was very intense. Like competition is taken very seriously at our office. And that comes through. And when that naturally comes through, our content performs well. And so, you know, do we ensure that we try to find the right sort of moments to highlight that? Yes. But it only works because the guys are authentic to who they are.

19:58Andrew Yaffe: Yeah, it's annoying. It's just probably part of the organic nature of it. Yeah. It's not easy to replicate.

20:03Bret McCormick: And when we force it, honestly, the viewers can tell.

20:06Andrew Yaffe: Right. So how do you all work with brands? Like, what's your MO? You mentioned that, you know, kind of like family first and like kids safe is like the main thing. But what else goes into if you guys decide to work with a brand or not?

20:18Bret McCormick: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because, again, coming from the NBA, looking at because brand partnerships is the biggest is the biggest revenue stream for us. And I got to do perfect and looked at my my categories and alcohol was out. sports betting was out and you know I we are the biggest sports media company that has not taken in a dollar from alcohol or sports betting ever created and but the brand partnerships that really work for us are ones that naturally make sense a with our brand and that's really important to us and and the guys and there's a lot of things that we've said no to just because they don't feel right, they don't look right, they wouldn't be authentic.

21:08Bret McCormick: B, ones that understand the best way to work with creators. It is very different than a traditional 30-second spot or logo slaps in a league partnership or courtside signage. Part of what we look for is that authentic connection and if a integration is too forced or too inauthentic it does a disservice to both sides the best examples are ones where the brand actually reinforces each other there's real authenticity to it and the brand amplifies or improves the content so as an example on saturday we launched a video uh alongside mcdonald's mcdonald's is a world cup partner and in this video we wanted to find out if our five guys could beat a pro soccer team and how many guys could be left on a pro soccer team for us to score a goal was essentially the premise.

22:11Bret McCormick: It started with we had to beat 50 8-year-olds in a soccer game and work our way up from there to get to beat a pro team. At the end of the video, if we beat the pro team, McDonald's gave all 50 of those kids tickets to a World Cup match. That's not something that we could do on our own, right? McDonald's, as a FIFA sponsor, can bring in assets and access and tickets and things of that sort that make that content pay off. And that's an amazing connection for a brand and us to work together that makes 1 plus 1 equal 5. And those are the opportunities where, and that came about because McDonald's had a lot of foresight around, we don't want to be overly prescriptive.

22:59Bret McCormick: We don't want a 30-second ad read in the middle of this content because that would be inauthentic. We want you guys to create a video. The prompt was create a video about soccer. That was the extent of the prompt. And we worked together with them to figure out something that would be really compelling and exciting. And it worked great. So those are the real partnerships where there's an understanding of what it is that we do great and what it is that a brand can bring to the table to find common ground that makes the content really work.

23:32Andrew Yaffe: Did you get those sweet kids to the World Cup? We did. We did.

23:35Bret McCormick: Yes.

23:35Andrew Yaffe: That's excellent. I thought you were going to say no. No, they got there. Yeah. That's cool. I wanted to ask you something maybe slightly outside the box. Would Dude Perfect ever go for or try to buy sports media rights, like broadcast rights?

23:50Bret McCormick: I used to sell them, and they're expensive.

23:56Bret McCormick: I don't think that's the best use of our resources or the right fit for us. I think we work a lot better alongside broadcasters and properties to help reach new audiences and communicate about what the games are or events are in a different way. And that's, I think, more of a focus for us. We did a Thursday night NFL broadcast with Amazon. We have worked very closely with ESPN on a number of events. We somewhat notoriously worked with Augusta National at the Masters to help promote that. I think that's a really valuable format to bring awareness, especially among demographics who aren't consuming as much live content, where we can be more valuable to promote than it would be for us to buy and rebroadcast sports media rights.

24:52Andrew Yaffe: Yeah. What would you say are the biggest headwinds facing Dude Perfect and then the creator economy more broadly?

25:02Bret McCormick: honestly the biggest one is scalability that um we've got we make 18 videos a year we have to be really selective about what those videos are what the opportunities are what we say no to because we have you know for now five main guys whose time is limited who have families who are real people. 17 kids across the five guys as of this week. One just had his third child. So there's a lot of asks on their time. Their time is incredibly valuable. And so understanding where we want to use that time, how we want to best take advantage of that, that's the biggest headwind. And I think we're fortunate that we've got five, if you look at other creators, where there's an individual, they're incredibly limited in what events they can show up at or how they can work with brands, what they can speak to, because they're bound by 2 ,000 hours a year.

26:06Bret McCormick: We at least have 10 ,000. Yeah.

26:08Andrew Yaffe: I am curious about how I've seen this with the Savannah Bananas, which have added teams. You guys have, I think, hired some additional dudes. How far can you take that before it gets kind of lost? You end up like Lynyrd Skynyrd where there's nobody that was in the original game.

26:29Bret McCormick: I don't think we'll ever mess with the Five Guys. The Five Guys are authentic. It is so core to who they are that it is their friendship that started this. We will certainly supplement their ecosystem. A couple of the ways we've done that to date. We launched a podcast, Almost Athletes, that is co-hosted by a newer talent, and that could spin off additional talents and opportunities. We launched an outdoors channel. We hired two new talents who were native outdoorsmen. We just posted a video on Saturday of them relocating pythons in the Everglades. One of them was deathly afraid of snakes before he did it.

27:11Bret McCormick: It's really out there. I loved it. I highly recommend it. It's way better than going to the Everglades and relocating snakes. Just watch the video. But that's two new talents that we can then scale that channel with. And probably the most exciting, we, again, totally organically, we had two interns. Actually, Chad, who's over here somewhere, Chad, who's the CMO at the LPGA, hired our interns when he was with us. And they started as one was 20 and one was 19. and they came to me and said, we want to start an Instagram call, Dude Perfect Interns. And I was like, I don't know how I feel about that.

27:53Bret McCormick: Will you guys post anything stupid? And they said, absolutely. And I was like, all right, well, if I understand it, the thesis of it is, it's our Gen Z native language. They are posting memes and they are posting gimmicks and they are posting reactions and language that is all family friendly. but it is very different than our core voice, and it has found a totally new audience for us. It has been something very different, and it has resonated like crazy. We're in the middle of, so they started this Instagram account, just the two of them and their phones, within three months had 300 ,000 followers.

28:35Bret McCormick: They've had multiple videos with 10 million plus views. There was one, we were at a Make-A-Wish event at Disney, and this is going to sound ridiculous saying it out loud, but there's the scuba dance that is inspired by a meme. They found the character that did that and did it to him and that video is approaching 100 million views. We sent it to the CMO of Disney who loved it. Those sorts of things happen organically and the fact that we had built the infrastructure and those talents, we've now integrated them much more into our broader content. So that's how we plan to build is really authentically and organically with people coming up.

29:17Bret McCormick: It doesn't make sense for us to slap our name on existing content or existing talents. We really want to naturally integrate people into the Dude Perfect world and people who really reinforce what our brand means.

29:29Andrew Yaffe: Yeah, and we've got about 40 seconds left, but I just wanted to ask you, the dudes are getting older. I mean, this is 17 years in. how do you think Dude Perfect might change as its audience gets older? I wrote down readers.

29:44Bret McCormick: It's funny because when the guys started it, their main audience was fellow college kids, right? They were college kids and other college kids watched. As they've gotten older, our audience has actually gotten younger. And we're actually at the point now where a lot of those original fans 17 years ago, their kids are watching. and so we're actually seeing our audience basically every year gets younger and younger and what we are putting out as young as six and seven year olds and up through teenagers are our biggest growth demographic and so we have a lot of concerns but the aging of our audience is not one of them we are really focused on really six to 16 year olds who play youth sports is our core demographic There are a lot of those.

30:33Bret McCormick: They are regenerating. And thankfully, they love us.

30:37Andrew Yaffe: Thanks for listening to this episode of On Stage. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, leave us a review, and share with colleagues interested in sports marketing, creator businesses, and the future of fan engagement. Here's a thought to take with you. As younger audiences redefine how they discover and engage with sports, what can established brands learn from creator-led businesses that were built around community from day one? I'd love to hear your perspective. Send me a note at tbloom at sportsbusinessjournal.com. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation from the stage featuring leaders shaping the future of sports business.

31:13Andrew Yaffe: Until next time, stay tuned and stay ahead. This is On Stage.