Pat Gallagher
President of Giants Enterprises
June 14, 2006 | by brett | Permalink
Pat Gallagher is the President of Giants Enterprises and has been with the team for over 30 years. He went to San Diego State University and Humboldt State where he was an art major. While in school he had the goal of becoming a professional artist at the commercial level. After three and a half years of college, he came to the realization that art would not financially support him so he dropped out of college and made a left turn.
Pat returned to San Diego to accept a position at Sea World. He eventually worked his way up to become the Director of Marketing. In that time he helped open up parks in Cleveland, Ohio, and Orlando, Florida where he made his new home.
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He then was sought out by Marine World in Vallejo, CA where he took a position as the Sales and Marketing Manager for the next two and half years.
Adimitting that he was not a big baseball fan and had, “only been to maybe three or four games in his life at the time,” he applied to the San Francisco Giants. They had an open Marketing Director position which Pat was told about by friend. He accepted the job in 1976 and has been with the team ever since.
He has held many positions in his 30+ years, including Director of Marketing of Business Affairs, Vice President of Business Operations, Senior Vice President, and he is now President of Giants Enterprises. He worked on the new ballpark plan for Pac Bell Park, developed the marketing plan, sold the naming rights to Pac Bell, and was able to successfully create a beautiful privately-funded baseball stadium.
He then came across an opportunity to develop Giants Enterprises, which focuses on different non-baseball uses for the park and other ways to leverage the reputation of the Giants in the community. It is going into its seventh year and up to date has brought about 110 corporate, private, and convention events to the park.
Pat is responsible for bringing college football bowl games to PacBell Park. He awoke with the idea in the middle of the night. He wondered whether or not a football field would even fit in the baseball park because of the unique design of the field. So he went to the architects and asked them if a football field would fit. They discovered that the end line of the field would end two and a half feet from the wall, making it a tight squeeze, but possible. Pat’s innovative nature is necessary to the objectives of Giants Enterprises.
Here are some pieces of insight provided by Pat during our interview:
“There are two types of people. People that create problems and that solve problems. It doesn’t matter how educated you are, how good looking you are, how smart you are, there are some people that tend to solve problems. And it’s the people that find the answers that have opportunities find them.”
“Having a great attitude is sometimes more important than having a MBA.”
“When you’re moving on to a career, don’t worry as much as what you’ll make as opposed to what you’ll be doing. Try to go work for smart people. Work where you’ll have a chance to grow and you’ll have people that you can learn from. Your first job won’t be your last job. You have to do things that you believe in, that you like doing. Sharpen your gut instincts. Life is short, do what you like.”
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