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Ozone #10: Big Teach

Big Teach

What is your job title?

Big Mouth Marketing and Promotions is my company. I’ve been self-employed for about six years now. I’m the fusion between the record labels and the corporations and the streets. I understand my market, so I’m able to pull the trigger on projects and help corporations connect the dots. Basically, I sell street credibility.

And you also manage Pitbull, right?

I guess my title is manager, yeah, but we’ve also got Team Pitbull, Pitbull Productions, which is another company within itself. I’m just a team player. “Manager” is just a title. I play my position, like, whatever I need to do so we can win as a team. Me and Pit are here to win. I just want to see homie go over the top. I’m tryin’ to get Pit that other money – that money outside of the music.

Did you go to school for marketing?

I went to school for business administration, marketing, and advertising, but I never really finished. Actually, first I went to school for culinary arts. I love cooking, but when I started doing it as a career, it took the love out of it for me. I was working in a restaurant, but I was also doing security with my dude Duberry at this club. They’d let me set up a picture booth, do promotions, whatever. I was just hustling, trying to get in where I fit in. When I walked away from my job with the restaurant, they just saw that I had charisma and was willing to work. I was in the streets, dealing with people. I loved it and I went hard with it. It was like a crash course in promotions. I learned the market real quick. There’s a difference between record label promotions and club promotions. If you’ve got a club night every week, you gotta go hard every day all day. You’re pretty much working 18 hour days, 7 days a week. It ain’t no rest, but you learn your market. He did the straight hood parties, so I learned quick. He took me through Carol City, Liberty City, and I just built good relationships with people. I’d see the dudes out there with the record label promos, the wrapped trucks. These dudes were getting big accounts, but I’m in the hood, everywhere, all day, and I ain’t seen these dudes. Me and my team were like, hold up, we need to get that money. I started trying to make relationships in the music industry. I’ve never been, like, a dick-riding type of dude. I’m not star struck or anything. If I see an artist somewhere, I ain’t tryin’ to get an autograph, I’m tryin’ to tell the nigga, “Dawg, I could help you out here.” I just needed the right person to see what I was doing and from there it would pop.

What was your breakthrough?

It was actually some karma shit. Jeff Sanchez, who was working for Luke Records, was in Opium and he lost his 2way. That’s when 2ways had first popped off and everybody in the industry had one. Jeff kept paging the 2way, and my man had found it and didn’t know how to use it so he brought it to me. I returned Jeff’s call and of course, he was really happy to get the 2way back. He started seeing me everywhere doing promo. A few months after that, he was moving back to New York and trying to find somebody to fill his shoes at Luke’s label. He asked me if I wanted to work a 9 to 5 with Luke. A lot of people say Luke be fuckin’ people and stuff like that, but I just saw that shit as an opportunity. Dude has been in the game for twenty years strong, so I figure this nigga got to have something to teach me. I wasn’t planning on making a mil off Luke, I just wanted to learn something in the school of hard knocks. Luke basically taught me everything I know as far as working records and thinking outside the box. Luke’s been through a lot of challenges in his career, so if you can pass six months with Luke, he’s a good dude. Once he sees that you want to learn, he’ll show you. Luke taught me the importance of relationships. I went on tour with Luke; we did like 35 cities. It was different than working for a big label like Def Jam. We had seven people on staff doing everything. And that’s how I met Pit, working with Luke. Me and Pit was on tour together, so we have the same mentality, the same grind, the same hunger. We understood each other. When Pit’s contract was up, he started doing his own thing. After 9/11, everything got crazy across the board, and everything slowed down. Luke shut down the promotions department at the label for a few months so I started doing my own thing. I wanted to start a promotions company to get some corporate accounts. I started working with Akademics and getting on people’s radar.

What did you do for Akademiks?

I played a big role in helping to brand them out here. When Clue was endorsing Akademics, niggas were confused. They thought it was his record label. I helped them develop an identity. Everybody was trying to go after the same label accounts, so I decided to go left with it. I started getting jobs from the University of Miami, Jackson Memorial Hospital – we did a safe sex campaign – stuff like that.

Who are some of your other clients?

Bad Boy, TVT, CRUNK!!! Energy Drink, Sony Ericsson, Cingular Wireless, Verizon Wireless, Guiness Extra Stout, Hennessy, New Balance, Reebok, Alize, and Seagram’s Gin, to name a few. The music game has always been consistent, but the corporate shit keeps my lights on. The labels ain’t gonna pay you shit, and you’re waiting three months for a check. If you know how to hustle, you can make side money. With most of the labels I work with, I have personal relationships with the artists and their management. If Lil Scrappy’s on a promo tour, for example, you can leverage things out for yourself. These labels be tryin’ to pimp niggas, and they’ve got a hundred interns working for them for free. They want you to be on call 24/7. I don’t regret working at a label, though, because all this stuff helped open up the doors for me.

Big Mouth seems to be extremely organized. How did you develop your business structure?

I pay attention. I sit back and watch the labels and corporations. I look at their structure and watch what works and what doesn’t work. Not having a structure at all just doesn’t work. If you’re trying to win, you’ve got to have some kind of structure. We just have a good team. I’ve got so much shit going on that if I’m all over the place with it, it’s not gonna work. Pit had a big year last year, and Pit’s work ethic is just crazy. You can ask anybody and they’ll tell you, a lot of success comes to his team too. If he has an idea, we pull the trigger on that shit. We appreciate TVT and everything they do, but we do our own shit too. We don’t just sit back and wait for things to happen, we go look for opportunities.

As Pitbull’s manager, do you have to play the bad guy sometimes?

Well, we deal with a lot of people, and you have to separate the personal from the business. We take care of our people, but we’ve got bills to take care of too. When people deal with Pitbull directly, because of certain relationships, sometimes I have to be the asshole and put my foot down just to make sure niggas ain’t tryin’ to take advantage of the relationships. We’ve got roles to play. I’m Pit’s manager and Purple is his road manager, and we have our own system. We go to the club, we have fun, but at the same time we have somebody posted up by the DJ booth making sure our records is getting played. We have our fun but at the end of the day everybody on our team realizes we’ve got to make sure our work is good too.

How did Pit’s new situation with Puff and Bad Boy Latino come about?

Bad Boy Latino is still in the real early phases, but we made the announcement because of the Latin Billboard Awards. It was a good time to let people know. Pit is gonna be playing an executive role in Bad Boy Latino. He’s the perfect person for that, because he is the link. He has records playing on mainstream radio, but he also has records playing on official Spanish stations and it doesn’t sound corny. It doesn’t sound forced when he spits in Spanish because it’s authentic. The first time Puff seen him perform was at Khaled’s birthday party. Khaled pulled me to the side like, “Yo, Puff was askin’ about your man,” so when Pit came off stage they started choppin’ it up or whatever. Puff told me to holla at his man about some Sean John shit, and 8 in the morning the next day dude is paging me. Next thing you know, we in Atlanta for the Sean John photo shoot.

Anything else you want to say?

To contact me, visit www.bigmouthpromo.com or www.pitbullmusic.com. Frans, Bogart, and C-Eye, keep ya head up. Demi, see you when you get home.

Message James Cruz and Julia Beverly and tell them what you think

By Julia Beverly on 8/9/2005[read on] [5 comments]

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