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SENTRY TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONSDecember 31, 2019Pete McPartlandAndy PazderKapalua, Maui, Hawaii RACHEL NOBLE: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you all for coming here. I want to welcome to the media center Pete McPartland, chairman, CEO and president of Sentry Insurance, and Andy Pazder, EVP and chief tournaments and competitions officer for the PGA TOUR. We have an exciting announcement this afternoon, and with that, I'm going to flip it over to Pete. PETE McPARTLAND: Thank you, Rachel. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. So there's a cheering section here, by the way, today from Sentry Insurance in the form of about three board members. All of the senior leadership team that is taking part as hosts this week and their spouses and my spouse is here, so they're here for a very important reason, and I will get right to it. So today, Andy Pazder and I are announcing that Sentry in its third year of the sponsorship of what is now the Sentry Tournament of Champions is extending that agreement 10 years through, I believe, the 2030 tournament. (Applause.) What I'm officially declaring to Mayor Mike Victorino, the PGA TOUR officials and the island of Maui itself is that you guys are stuck with Sentry Insurance for another 10 years, okay, whether you like it or not. Let me tell you, this was a real easy kind of conclusion from our end, that we were just so sure and feeling so good about the decision that we made a few years ago and how everything is trending, that we wanted to make sure everyone knew how badly we intended to continue with this and an expectation really that that kind of stability going forward will kind of help everyone coalesce even further around this tournament, and we feel, by the way, tremendously supported in the three years now almost that we've been very involved. I talked a little bit about this last year, but for those that don't remember or were not in attendance last time, let me just say kind of how this whole thing came about. So Sentry Insurance had always been very oriented toward the game of golf. We have a golf course in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, which is central Wisconsin, called Sentry World. We believe it was the first destination golf course actually in the state of Wisconsin. Over the years, Sentry has used the golf course, the game of golf and the very unique campus that we have as a means of engaging with our business insurance customers and insurance agents and brokers that we've had. So we've long understood how the game of golf benefits us from a business standpoint and a customer relationship building standpoint. In 2015, we decided to revamp our brand, which had been frankly a quiet brand for a number of years. We decided to put a facelift on it and kind of reintroduce our brand message, and the research, by the way, confirmed that our business insurance customers felt with us exactly the way we hoped they would feel about us, that we're a very high-touch, engaged, high-service customer with long-term relationships. So we reintroduced that brand. The logo you see behind me was the new logo that was introduced in August of 2016, and we knew that in some way we wanted to kind of more powerfully introduce that brand to the business insurance buying public. That would be risk managers, business owners that buy business insurance, property casualty as well as 401K. So we knew we wanted to do that. A year later, I'll call that July of 2017, Stephanie Smith who's here and a fellow named Mike James who runs Sentry World quietly approached me and said, there's this opportunity that may avail itself involving sponsorship of the Tournament of Champions in Maui, and we talked about it and said, well, okay, let's talk again. And things kind of quickly fell together. We announced some maybe month and a half, two months later, more than that, that we would be taking over the sponsorship role for what would then be the Sentry Tournament of Champions beginning in January 2018. We did that largely because of the power that we felt this tournament would have in projecting our brand, and indeed it has. So it's been everything that we had hoped from a brand-building standpoint with the tournament being at the end of the holidays, being a unique venue, very unique format itself. What we didn't fully realize is how beneficial it would be to us from a customer relationship building standpoint and how, if we can spend the better part of a week with some 35 or 40 of our customers and their spouses and then what turned out to be their kids and their kids and their grandkids, spending time with our kids and grandkids and spouses, that what a kind of family environment could be created and how beneficial that was to Sentry, as well. That became very, very apparent, and so we realized this was a very good thing. This golf tournament has such a happy vibe to it. There can't be a happier place in the world than Kapalua, Maui, in the beginning of January, Andy, with this tournament. I just was driving around on the other golf course today and just everyone is just happy here this time of year, and how that radiates into the Tournament of Champions itself with the players, their families mingling with our guest families and all the spectator families. Intense competition with one another but also a very friendly, happy vibe. So the other thing that has really struck us over the last few years has to do with the question of who creates that happiness that we benefit from and all the guests -- our guests and spectators benefit from as well as the players. Well, it's the people who work on the island of Maui who support the economy in Maui, largely through the agricultural industry, the hospitality industry. They're the people that create this happiness for us. And as being a tournament sponsor, as we kind of grew to understand better how the charity dollars that are produced for this tournament, how they find their way to charitable organizations on the island, we sat down and got to know the leaders of those organizations, Stephanie Smith, who's here today, our foundation executive director, Ann Lucas and myself. Stephanie and Ann have been back on a few more occasions and have gotten to know all of the charitable entities and have grown to understand how those charitable dollars go directly to human needs in the island of Maui. Mayor Mike Victorino has gone out of his way to help us understand the needs of people in Maui and understand some of the nuances of the island of Maui. So along the way, we kind of got swept into the tide, no pun intended, and really grew to identify with the island of Maui, the people who live here. We saw a lot of similarities to Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and how Sentry engages with the community in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. So that became, frankly, a meaningful part of our commitment is to play a role, to the extent we can. And I think this tournament can play a pretty significant role, frankly, in improving the lives, frankly, of people on the island of Maui. So we want to be a part of that. A year ago, we began to contribute some of our own dollars outside even the -- kind of the formula that creates charitable funding through the tournament, some of our own dollars through the Maui United Way and through the creation of scholarships. We're going to meet a few scholarship recipients after this press conference, by the way. And wanted frankly to make sure we continue that and continue to be able to influence it on into the future. That's a little bit of why we did it. As I say again, very easy decision. Happy to continue as part of the PGA TOUR family, Andy, and look forward, Mr. Mayor and everyone here from Maui that has done so much to create such a wonderful tournament that we now benefit from. Let me tell you, we are here to continue it, to help make it better, and appreciate the opportunity to be here today. ANDY PAZDER: Thank you, Pete. First, I have to say I am incredibly impressed that the chairman, president and CEO of Sentry has to wear a name tag. PETE McPARTLAND: For the benefit of our own people, by the way. (Laugher.) ANDY PAZDER: I've known you to be a humble person, but that's a great comment. It's my honor to represent the PGA TOUR on stage today, Pete, with you and a few of your board members in the audience and some of your senior leadership team. I'll start with first an enormous thank you to you for your belief in the PGA TOUR, your belief in the Sentry Tournament of Champions, your incredible support of the Maui community. Stephanie Smith, who's hiding way in the back there, thank you for your great support, chief marketing officer and chief brand officer. Thank you for your guidance and wisdom over the last three years. You've got a bunch of employees back in Stevens Point who I know are hugely proud of your company's role in the tournament, so I send a big thank you back to them for their support from thousands of miles away. I know every single one of them I'm sure wishes they could be here and maybe some day all of them -- not all at once but maybe will get a chance to be with us. And then most importantly, on behalf of the PGA TOUR players, we have 34 here who are obviously extremely thankful to be in the happy place, as you called it, but on behalf of all of our players, over 200 exempt members, they know that this field is the most elite field. You only get your invitation here one way, and that's by winning a tournament. It's been fun for me, Pete. I've been at the PGA TOUR for over 30 years. It's been fun for me to see how quickly our players have adopted your company's role in this tournament. So when a player wins, they don't say, I'm excited because I get to go to Maui. Or I'm going to the T of C. They're saying, I just qualified for the Sentry. And that's a credit to you, to Stephanie, to your entire team for how quickly you've become part of the fabric of this event. I do want to also say a quick thank you to a young man on the PGA TOUR staff, Alex Urban, who's standing in the back. Alex is the executive director. His energy over the last couple years, his enthusiasm, his out-of-the-box thinking, the way he has become engrained in the Maui community, I think, Alex, you deserve a lot of credit, as well. So thanks for all of your hard work. And then, of course, Mayor Victorino, thank you for your time coming to support today's announcement. It's a milestone, Pete. This puts you in a position of being one of our two longest running sponsors into the future, through 2030. To think that we're tearing up the last two years of our original five-year agreement and signing a 10-year extension is something that we're extremely proud of. We sincerely appreciate your belief in our organization, our players, and importantly, what you're doing for the Maui community through your scholarship program, through your support of the United Way and other charities on the island. You truly are a part of the community. Thank you again on behalf of 200 plus PGA TOUR players, a few hundred PGA TOUR employees, by the way, who all want to be here like those on your staff in Stevens Point. But great day for the PGA TOUR and for the game of golf. RACHEL NOBLE: Thank you both. With that we'll open it up to questions. Q. Pete, we've talked before, but did you ever imagine back when you first started this deal that we would be here so quickly like we are today? PETE McPARTLAND: No. Frankly, when we first started, we were looking out maybe the four or five months that we had to prepare for the first tournament, and our thinking was, Let's not screw it up. We don't know what we're doing yet. And relied entirely on the experts and the PGA TOUR -- the fellow I have not singled out yet, Mark Rolfing, Mr. Maui Golf, has been helping us every step of the way. So we were just kind of thinking very short-term initially. But then, as I say, as we got to know kind of the whole cause, so to speak, in addition to fully realizing how beneficial this would be to us, then we just kind of assumed that this is going to keep going. We're going to just make sure we keep it going. Q. Pete, I'm curious, you mentioned a quiet brand when you started. Is there a metric to use how much louder it's gotten? PETE McPARTLAND: Well, we knew we were a quiet brand quite frankly because we just did not spend a lot of energy on national advertising of the Sentry brand over the years. Our advertising was focused on industries, specific industries that we focused on, so we knew that we wanted to change that. This was a part of that. A lot of it is subjective feedback. There are measurables that we receive through The Golf Channel and other agencies that tell us how well the viewership -- how strong the viewership is and how they respond to the name recognition of Sentry, questions like if they watch the tournament, how many people subsequently click on our website, how many of the people who click on our website feel favorably toward the company. Those things are all fully measurable. And we've been tuned in to those results. MAYOR MIKE VICTORINO: I will address all of you as well as the PGA and Sentry. On behalf of the people of Maui, we want to thank you for becoming a part of our 'ohana, and for those who don't understand what 'ohana, 'ohana is family in Hawaiian. I know when Pete and I first met, I felt just really at home. I felt comfortable. I wasn't dealing -- let me say this: I've been helping this tournament since 1988. Some of you weren't even born back then. Don't raise your hands all at once now. And so I seen the variables come in, the different majors, sponsors that have come and gone. And they were always good to the islands and good to the people and good to our charitable organizations. But it was a different feeling. When I met Pete and his organization, I felt like they were a family that was going to want to be here, and I treated them like a family member that wanted them to stay here. And so this culminates my biggest wish, and we have talked about it, another five-year extension, and instead of five years we're talking 10 years. 2030, I mean, there's not many companies that would commit for 10 years, and I want to thank you, Pete, very, very much, and thanks to the PGA for continuously bringing top-notch golf to the island of Maui. When I started in '88 we also used to have the senior golf tournament down on Ka'anapali, and that has gone away. And other things have changed. We didn't even play here. We played down at the Old Bay course and the other course, and this is how things have evolved through the years. I will cut it short because as a politician once you get on the mic you don't want to give it up, but I will say this: I am so thankful today for this announcement, where it'll take us for golf in the future, and what else is really impressive is my son will actually play tomorrow in the pro-am here in Maui for the first time, and he is excited. He's flying overnight from Vegas to be here, and I think it's because it's real family oriented, and my wife and your lovely wife have met, and they've gotten to like each other so much. Again, that's what the relationships in golf should be about. It's the bucks, it's the money, I understand that. But really it's the relationships you build through the years, and I know I can count on you being here, and you're always welcome. So long as I'm mayor, there's nothing I will not do to try to make this tournament a better place not only here in Maui but for the PGA in general. God bless you all. ANDY PAZDER: Rachel, if I may, I left out a very important thank you, and that is to Mr. Yanai, who owns the golf course, the club, for a very significant investment in the property. We're playing on basically a brand new golf course this week. We're thankful for -- I see Alex Nakajima in the back of the room, the general manager at Kapalua, for his work and his team's hard work in getting ready for unveiling the golf course again to our players, lots of great comments, so a big thank you to Mr. Yanai for his ongoing support of the tournament, the investment, particularly in the Plantation course, between that plus a 10-year commitment, the sky's the limit. So thank you to Mr. Yanai and Troon Golf, as well. Q. Mr. Pazder, how impressive and unprecedented is a 10-year deal for a PGA TOUR tournament? ANDY PAZDER: Yeah, that's a great question. So we do have a few 10-year sponsorship exemptions, Waste Management in Phoenix, the Travelers in Hartford, Valero in San Antonio, none of which -- well, with the exception of Waste Management, run through 2030, so as I commented earlier, Sentry is now tied for being the furthest out into the future. It's something that I think is a commentary about the strength of our sport, that companies like Sentry and the other ones I named are comfortable enough that where we are today and where we're headed is something that they want to be a part of, and we're very, very proud of that. PETE McPARTLAND: I would add also to that that working with the PGA TOUR leadership has always been a real pleasure, and we've always felt, Andy, that PGA TOUR leadership, including Jay Monahan, yourself, Austin Palmer who's here and others, and Brian Goin, who retired recently, who was kind of our seeing-eye dog through the PGA TOUR environment for a few years, had always been thinking on our behalf and seeing things that would benefit Sentry that we couldn't see because we were not experienced enough with navigating our way through professional golf. That comfort has contributed significantly to our desire to move forward the way we did this week. RACHEL NOBLE: With that, thank you, everyone, for your time. We appreciate it. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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