Speaking Services
Background
Steven Fantetti is a corporate lawyer, specializing in drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts; mergers and acquisitions; employment law; and sports and entertainment law. He is a professor of law at the Western Michigan Cooley School of Law, lecturing for the past 9-years teaching the course of Corporate Business Planning with a focus on structuring business entities, and working with collegiate and professional athletes on the business of sports.
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When AEA travels to lecture and give information sessions to the athletic departments and teams at institutions across the country, the requests for topics are centralized on the empowering collegiate athletes with information that they can use immediately in the ever-changing landscape of college sports intersecting with business.
Education: understanding business, the use of business entities in NIL, the application of taxes in their business, classifying themselves under the law to pay themselves and have tax savings, and strategic planning the use of NIL funds.
NIL: Understanding what comes with Name, Image, and Likeness and how it can be monetized. What the contracts look like from Collectives and what you can and should be negotiating with the Collectives to protect your future prospects and opportunities while maximizing every dollar you can get.
Transfer Portal: Navigating, managing, and facilitating the process for student athletes seeking to transfer between institutions inside or outside of their conference. Information about he challenges and negotiations that take place.
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We speak with collegiate athletes of all sports, and any athletic department that wants us to visit with athletes of all sports in all programs. It is never too early to learn skills that student athletes have never heard of or learned about before. Learning how to start a business, what is needed to start a business, how to set up a tax plan for the business, how to classify yourself and use NIL funds accordingly in that business to maximize savings and compliance with the law. Moreover, understanding what is in the contracts with Collectives that each student athlete has to sign is even more vital because no one should sign a contract they don’t personally understand, even if they have representatives. Overall, it is a springboard for education, and it provides a basic understanding and foundation for these business and legal principles that the student athletes would otherwise not receive or have to learn on their own, most of the time, the hard way. We want to empower and educate.
Since our speakers are experts in their particular fields and industries, it lends credibility to the information being conveyed. Our speakers have worked with NCAA and NFL Athletes, and have actually performed all of the information being spoken about – giving real world examples and being able to show visual support to the contractual and legal issues discussed.
Our goal is always to empower, but we share the goals of any institution for higher learning: teach new skills, encourage understanding with more efficiency in the learning process, and understanding real skills and practices that will set new standards for the collegiate athletes to aim for with their business skills and business acumen.
Service Offerings
AEA is available To Offer Several Different Options For Speaking Engagements:
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We will lecture on the selected topics the institution requests from us. We allow for breakout sessions, Question and Answer Periods, and what we call ‘Story Telling’ (where we use real case studies of comparable situations we have seen student athletes get into and how we assisted those athletes with those situations).
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Motivational events employ the talents of our speakers, who are business professionals and have experience overcoming challenges, explaining the challenges of others that we assisted with, real-world problem solving, and inspiring people to learn that they can set their own course for achievement, including details on how to put a plan together.
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We enjoy the opportunity to connect with students in the classroom, showcasing how we can add value to a college classroom. Athletic Departments and College Institutions have professors that invite us to spend an hour or more in a classroom to supplement the learning process in their classes. We generally help to reinforce concepts, provide real world examples of how problems can be solved using the material learned in those classes in order for students to visualize and see that what they are learning can be applied in the real world. Process and application are important for development in the learning process.
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Although we enjoy and prefer the intimate setting of speaking in person on campus, we offer our services online. Speakers can address the audience virtually in any location without a geographical barrier. Webinars are versatile and allow for any content we can deliver in person to be delivered in a virtual experience.
