'Hiring is the most important and underrated executive skill that there is' McDonough tells business group

Blackhawks President and CEO John McDonough, who has also served as president of the Chicago Cubs, doesn't take credit for the stellar successes of either team.

"The impact I've had on each one of these franchises has been microfractional," he told a crowd gathered at a luncheon in Aurora. "This was never supposed to be in the cards."

McDonough answered a series of questions from Aurora Area Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Cort Carlson during the organization's annual meeting Friday at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Aurora.

As the keynote speaker for the event, McDonough was a model of humility, telling the audience he finished 311th out of 356 in his graduating class at Notre Dame High School in Niles.

"In college it got marginally better, but it was a combination of bad student/bad athlete that met the right person at the right time. And this gentleman said to me, 'You love to lead, you love to speak, you love to take the ball, you love to run with it, you love to manage people. And I used that going forward. I've been very, very fortunate in my career. I've had great support from my family. You need those pillars and that foundation in your life.

Hiring is key

"As I reflect on the time with the Cubs or I reflect on the time with the Chicago Blackhawks, so much of it is hiring. Hiring is the most important and underrated executive skill that there is. If you hire well, you have a chance for really good things to happen."

McDonough did hire well. Under his guidance, in what Forbes Magazine called "The Greatest Sports-Business Turnaround Ever," the Blackhawks won Stanley Cup titles in 2010, 2013 and 2015.

The Blackhawks organization doesn't take any of it for granted, he said. "We're not caught up in rings and Stanley Cups; we want to be a good partner to Chicago and the surrounding areas."

With McDonough's leadership, the Blackhawks have become one of professional sports' biggest success stories. The team has grown a season ticketholder base from 3,400 to more than 14,000 and has led the NHL in attendance for eight consecutive seasons.

"We talk about being humble and hungry, and when you weren't a good athlete and you weren't a good student, humility came easy to you," he said, adding that humility showed him he needed to surround himself with good people.

"If I was going to have any degree of success, it was going to be as the ultimate underdog," he said. "It was going to be, 'You're not necessarily going to get where you want to go with your academic prowess or your background, so you have to find another way.' So it was my responsibility to out-hustle, outwork, out-dress; be prepared. I believe in the Woody Allen axiom that 80 percent of success is just showing up. I do that a lot.

Just show up

"I go to a lot of events; it's important to me. We are first and foremost in the people business and I've just had some breaks along the way. Maybe the biggest break I ever had was to meet a gentleman by the name of Jim Finks who was with the Bears for a number of years. He recruited me to come from my original team, the Chicago Sting, to the Cubs in 1983."

McDonough said the Cubs franchise was a "mature business" when he became president in 1984, but that didn't mean fans were filling seats.

"The upper deck was closed during the week," he said, "and we put together a business model that we wanted to market Wrigley Field and Wrigleyville as a destination and we did that, with a lot of hard work from Harry Caray. We wound up winning the division in 1984 which catapulted the Cubs to a completely different level. It was attendance record after attendance record and that area really became a destination."

With the Blackhawks, McDonough said, it was a little bit different. Before he was offered a position with the team, McDonough said, he remembers saying, "Someone is going to have a chance to play a role in helping that franchise turn around."

When McDonough became president of the Blackhawks in 2007, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane had just been drafted, but Chicago had not reached the Stanley Cup Finals since 1992 and had not won a championship since 1961. The team had fewer than 13,000 fans in attendance per game in 2006-07.

"(Blackhawks games at the United Center) weren't a destination, so it had to be a new way and a new day and a new approach," McDonough said, "and our games had to be on television.

Key trait

"I do have one skill and I think it would be equal to anybody in this room. I'm not sure there's anybody in this room who can grovel as well as I can. I went to friends at WGN TV and WGN Radio and begged their indulgence to see if they would take the Blackhawks."

This thing is "going to come back and it's going to come back strong," he told them.

"It eventually worked well for all of us."

Putting aside everything else, he said, "The epicenter of all of this is what happens on the ice. The greatest marketing idea ever is winning. We made the playoffs 8 years in a row and won the Stanley Cup three times, but we don't take any of that for granted."

What the Blackhawks have now is a "young, dynamic enthusiastic group of overachievers," McDonough said. "I wasn't going to set up shop on the East Coast and hire a bunch of Ivy Leaguers. That wasn't the approach that fit for me. I wanted to hire some really hungry walk-ons that really recognized that personality and relationships are going to take you further than anything else."

And it doesn't hurt that McDonough believes that Rocky Wirtz is the best owner in professional sports.

"The highest compliment you can give anybody is that they 'get it.' So when Rocky and I sat down, he talked about autonomy and independence and the ability to hire and to make changes and to make unpopular decisions on popular people. He gave me the autonomy to make those decisions."

Leadership

"If you're a proficient leader you've got to realize a couple things," McDonough said. "First of all, the toughest thing you ever have to do is to step back. Step back and allow these brilliant people that you've hired do their jobs. Ask really good questions, make sure they know you're supporting them, and let them do their thing. And the other thing that has happened just recently … is that at some point, whether you own the business, you're the president of the business or you're the CEO of the business, the students lap the teacher. I'm seeing people right now that I've hired, three for sure, that are going to the Hall of Fame. The reward for that is incalculable. I can't put in words how proud I am. But you've got to have the ability to say, OK, I played a role in putting these people in the spotlight, they have exceeded every expectation I could have possibly had. They're even better than I thought. And you kind of hear that motor on the outside where they're starting to pass you, and for me it's with great pride I see all of them succeeding."

McDonough said a minor league team could become a unifier in Aurora, much like the Paramount Theatre has succeeded in reinvigorating downtown Aurora with its Broadway shows.

"When you have a team in a local area it creates an esprit de corps that everyone rallies around that team. When you sit at this beautiful (Paramount) theater here, for Aurora, this has to be such a tremendous sense of deep, deep pride. It's absolutely beautiful. It's the exclamation point I think on this wonderful, wonderful city. A minor league team that could come here would unify it. It brings people together like nothing else."

Greatest accomplishment

Asked to name his greatest professional accomplishment, McDonough said, "It hasn't happened yet. I'm not a big rearview mirror guy. I don't really get caught up with what we've done as an organization, be it the Cubs or the Blackhawks. I'm really excited about the future of our franchise. We have six rookies on our roster right now … and we have these players that have three Stanley Cup rings, but then we have three suburban Chicago players on our team.

In order to win, and we just witnessed this with the Cubs, a lot of things have to go your way. Sometimes, supernatural things have to go your way. There might have been divine intervention on that rain delay. But I have seen through our Stanley Cups, in order to win one, two and three, some very unusual things have to happen … you need a lot of breaks. It's not just about talent. It's about talent combined with timing, combined with breaks combined with being healthy.

McDonough's words followed Carlson's report of "rebuilding and refocusing" priorities for the Aurora Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, which experienced a healthy 2016.

"We have brought on a new director of sales with significant sports sales experience, and a new director of marketing, bringing 21st century digital marketing know-how to the organization," Carlson said.

The Aurora Area Sports Alliance was launched in the past year, "which elevates our sports marketing efforts and provides greater awareness and exposure in the field," he added.

Carlson reported that Aurora area hotels saw increases in occupancy, average daily rate and revenue in the past year, and that more people are visiting the "Enjoy Aurora" website and social media sites.

Hospitality jobs, tourism expenditures and local tax receipts all are up, and in Illinois, more than 109 million visitors spent more than $36 billion in the state in 2015.

"There are challenges still ahead, but we look forward to celebrating 30 years of the AACVB next year, and to continue to drive economic development through tourism to the Aurora area," Carlson said.