Most 16-year-olds are just stressed about making it through high school. Not Zac Benalloul.
Just a year ago, at the age of 15, he started Benalloul Sports Management, a company that was not meant to be erected until 2022.
“A good friend of mine kind of pushed me to start doing it now,” Benalloul told Prime Time Sports Talk. “We went after guys in G-League because that was an easy way to bring in some clientele and then it all kind of went from there.”
Benalloul is from New York but most of his business is based in Los Angeles, where a majority of his staff resides.
It is a staff of all trades ranging from barbers to trainers and recruiters to lifestyle consultants. The 16-year-old seems to have all the immediate growing pains of starting a business out of the way.
To build up the number of employees, Benalloul relied on word of mouth as well as social media.
It eventually brought in a woman who had a FIBA certification which was huge in giving the young sports agent some skin in the game.
Though she was let go, the FIBA certification still paid dividends in adding employees and clients.
“We started getting some higher tier [employees]. Todd Mayo reached out to me as well,” Benalloul said. “If you include March, I’ve added seven former NBA players including Charlie Westbrook and Brian Cook.”
But why pick to be represented by a 16-year-old? Benalloul says the athletes do not focus on the age of who is involved, just the results.
“When players can connect with you and see your story and see everyone working with the management and how fast-moving it is, they get interested,” Benalloul said. “Because not everyone we talk to is in the best situations and we find them a way out of it. Over the last three months, I got 50 job offers and only took six of them because only six were good situations for the players.”
Benalloul started all alone. The high schooler claimed that no one believed in him and had no help from his parents, who are in real estate.
“No one believed I could do anything with this because the guys that were with me at the time were not well-known players,” Benalloul said. “Then there was a point where people started seeing it take off a little bit and now I’m talking to guys who were with other agencies that weren’t having the best time there.”
Two notable clients that Benalloul will be adding are Satnam Singh from the Netflix documentary One in a Billion and Glenn ‘Big Baby’ Davis.
“I shot him a couple of texts and he was excited about it and we got on a phone call and was like, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely interested,'” Benalloul said. “And he pretty much joined us from there.”
Benalloul has high expectations for where his agency can be in the next five years.
“It has only been four or five months and we already have exceptional clients,” Benalloul said. “I could see us being a top seven agency in the sports management world.”
