Second-hand gold - Westfair Communications

Behind the glass-topped desk in his New Roc City office, Brandon Steiner was on the phone last week talking business, at times profanely, with a senior New York Yankee official. As he spoke, the 48-year-old founder and CEO of Steiner Sports Marketing in New Rochelle tapped out brief e-mail replies at his desktop computer.

An employee, one in a steady stream that passed through the shirtsleeved, open-collared boss”™s open office door, stood waiting to hear the outcome of his phone huddle. An action painting of Yankee reliever and Purchase resident Mariano Rivera, one of Steiner”™s hundreds of sports marketing clients and his partner in a restaurant that opened last year in New Rochelle, hung on a wall behind his desk.

Want an autographed baseball mitt worn by Rivera last season? For $20,000, it”™s yours from Steiner Sports.

Looking for the perfect gift for the managerial wannabe in your family? For $5,000, you can have from Steiner Sports a Yankee road jersey worn by Joe Torre in 2004.

For $2,499.99, you can lace up a pair of game-used, infield-soiled cleats signed by Yankee captain Derek Jeter, courtesy of Steiner Sports.

Alex Rodriguez and those valuable collectibles, the team equipment worn by and balls batted foul or handled by A-Rod, the American League MVP, were Steiner”™s phone subject. Team Steiner, a growing division of Steiner”™s 20-year-old, nearly $50-million-a-year company, has an exclusive partnership with the Yankees to sell player-used and Yankee Stadium-used collectibles, and the Brooklyn-bred entrepreneur wanted what was due him.

“Did they ever come clean on the A-Rod balls?” he asked the Yankee executive, referring to American League MVP Alex Rodriguez. “Just giving them back to you, or are we going to end up seeing them being sold?” And finally:

“I”™ll talk to Randy” ”“ New York Yankees President Randy Levine ”“ he said at the end of the call.

Since partnering with the Yankees in 2004 to form Yankees-Steiner Collectibles, Steiner has secured like partnerships with the New York Mets, Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers. Last year, he branched into college sports, partnering with Notre Dame University and Syracuse University, his alma mater. “The Islanders (hockey”™s New York Islanders) we just did a couple months ago,” he said.

“A pretty smart idea,” he said of the exclusive team partnerships. “That was an idea that I came up with.”

It was hardly his first profitable business idea. “Even as a kid, I was always entrepreneurial,” Steiner said.

In 1987, the newly married Steiner ”“ his wife, Mara, later served as the company”™s chief financial officer ”“ opened his one-man marketing and public relations business in shared office space in Manhattan with $4,000 in capital. His aim was “to connect companies with athletes” for business promotions, he said. If a company was interested, “Then I would go to the athletes” with his pitch.

“That”™s always been my strategy ”“ try to go to clients with ideas that will help them with their business. That seems to be a lost art,” Steiner said.

“I always looked at myself as being an ultimate fan,” he said. For two decades, the thrust of his business has been, “How do we get the fan, the collector, closer to the player, the team, almost as if they could touch it,” he said.

“That”™s my ultimate goal, to make collecting more fun for people, make it easier for the players to connect with their fans.” Big-name athletes “are concerned with their fan base more than you know,” he said.

In 1995, Steiner launched a related business venture, Steiner Sports Collectibles, with $10,000 in capital. Following on that success, his company this year started an online marketplace where sports collectors can buy and sell items for which the Steiner company receives a commission.

Some of the items sold online by collectors were bought from Steiner”™s company 10 to 15 years ago. “To me as a company, it was the first time we can sell an item twice,” he said.

Steiner Sports Marketing has grown from a one-man operation to include about 110 employees at its New Roc City office and warehouse and another 50 to 60 retail-store employees. It is now a subsidiary of Omnicom Group Inc., a diversified holding company based in Manhattan. “They”™ve helped us increase some of the services we offer the customers,” Steiner said.

Mindful that adult sports collectors are “a finite number,” Steiner in 2002 started a separate business entity in the metropolitan New York area, Last Licks Ice Cream Stores. “It”™s a sports bar for kids,” he said, where the 6- to 12-year-old set can meet and get autographs of athletes making public appearances and buy sports gifts and where Steiner can “maybe get a collectible in the hands of a kid for the first time,” he said.

Among several Last Licks stores in the region, Steiner has three in Westchester County and plans to open a fourth in Rye Ridge next spring along with new stores in Tenafly, N.J., and on Manhattan”™s Upper East Side. “Those are going to be the last company-owned stores,” he said. “Hopefully in ”™09 we”™ll be franchising them.”

To meet its changing operational needs, Steiner said the company plans to move from its 25,000-square-foot space at New Roc City, where its lease expires in 2008. A Scarsdale resident, Steiner said he hopes to keep the business in Westchester County.