The Structure Guy: Interview With Adam Grayson

This article originally ran in the April 2018 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the digital edition. VAN NUYS, Calif.—A quick glance at the news emanating from Evil Angel’s Van Nuys headquarters reveals that this 29-year-old adult brand has been quietly reinventing itself over the past year or so. Not by sweeping proclamations or catastrophic reorganizations, but slowly, steadily, one headline at a time. And after the last two bits of news—bringing on mega-star Lisa Ann as a director, and signing Aubrey Kate as porn’s first TS contract star—it was high time to sit down with Adam Grayson, the company’s chief financial officer, and talk about all the changes. An energetic, no-nonsense “structure guy,” Grayson asserts, “I have zero creative in me.” Yet with his quiet hand on the financial rudder and an alert eye focused on the fickle desires of porn consumers, Grayson has created a safe playground for Evil Angel’s directors to exercise their own creativity. Not even 40 yet, Grayson got into the adult business in high school, starting his own company with his partner, an expert in search engine optimization. “It was a good experience,” Grayson says. “I mean, we did that for eight years. We made plenty of money, but all good things come to an end before you expect it.” Then, trouble set in. “Google did an algorithm change—I don’t remember, maybe in the summer of ’06—and we lost maybe half of our traffic overnight. You spend a while trying to rejigger it and then you realize, ‘OK, we can get some of it back, but it’s never going to be where it was again.’ That’s when we looked at each other and thought, ‘Maybe it’s time for new adventures.’” That new adventure began in 2009, when Grayson joined Evil Angel. Though that was a tough time for many in the adult industry, Grayson says it was less so for Evil Angel. His own experience, however, left him primed for the down market that plagued porn after the 2008 recession. “I had already been humbled by something imploding,” he said. “So I didn’t have a light-cigars-with-hundred-dollar-bills mindset when I got here. John all the time tells me how cheap I am: ‘Why won’t you let me spend my money?’ … I’m here to be financially responsible and make sure we stay in business and continue to be profitable.” Grayson sheds some light on how Evil Angel has managed to stay in the black. For one thing, the company was so successful before 2008 that it was insulated from some of the pain that hit some of the studios that either went under or stopped producing new content. “Other people were jumping out of windows, but when I got here there was still a lot of money being made,” he says. But Grayson and former General Manager Christian Mann, who passed away in 2014, knew that the adult industry was changing. “We could see certain macro things happening. So Christian Mann and I were able to say, ‘Let’s figure out what’s going to happen in eight years, really plan for the long haul.’ So there was a lot of painful stuff we did early that we did way before we had to do it. … ‘Let’s do hard stuff now, so it’ll be softer later.’” The bottom line on the bottom line? Grayson says, “I’ve been here a little over nine years and I’ve been personally responsible for the P&L about half that time, since 2013, and we’ve never lost money in a quarter. I’ve never seen a red number at the bottom of the statement. … The variance in revenue is less that 10 percent.” Not Your Father’s Porn But Grayson doesn’t just go by the numbers. He’s also deeply concerned about one thing: staying relevant in the marketplace. “If you were to make a list of companies that were genuinely relevant to consumers in 1989 and in 2018, I think we’re probably the only name you’d come up with. … That being said, we have to understand that not only is this a business that has always changed really quickly—with consumer tastes, with technologies, with the structure of the business as a whole—but it’s accelerating, like technology as a whole. So I would say one quarter to the next is probably analogous to, 15 years ago, one year to the next. … “For a long time, I think we were laggards to change because we had such a reverence or commitment to the company,” Grayson said. But tastes do change, so one could argue—as Grayson convincingly does—that it’s important to also to change what’s being offered to consumers. “You’re trying to connect with people on a carnal level when you make these movies. The past couple of years we’ve gotten more open-minded about what next quarter or next month holds for us. And we’re less married to the boilerplate of what an Evil Angel schedule looks like. We’re trying to be more experimental with directors. Because historically once you became a director here, unless you were a massive fuckup, it was like a lifetime gig. Until you quit, or died, or something. Which is not necessarily a good long-term plan. It shouldn’t be like having kids—like you’re stuck with them once you have them.” Grayson is quick to firmly point out the debt of gratitude owned to Evil Angel’s core of longtime directors: “This company was totally built on their backs—and John [Stagliano], if he were sitting here, would be talking about that.” Yet he also knows that porn fans skew young (“our biggest demographic is 18 to 25”), which is why Evil Angel has brought in some new directors to complement the brand’s stable of shooters in their fifties and sixties. “I think of porn like pop music. It’s always going to have a young crowd just because of testosterone: A 20-year-old has more than a 60-year-old. That’s just science, right? So I think you need people producing the pop music, the porn, that connects with that demographic. That’s important. … Because for us the scariest thing to be, the last thing I would want, would be my father’s porn brand. That’s poison.” He succinctly sums up the balancing act that an established company like Evil Angel must master: “Trying to chase the guy who’s pulling out his credit card for the first time but at the same time not alienating the older guys who’ve paid for this for so long and made us a viable company.” In With the New The recent past saw the departure of some big names from the Evil Angel roster when Grayson began to enforce Evil Angel’s policies on not shooting with other studios. “Historically, if somebody shot for us, they shot for us. Unbroken rule. But there was a lot of money in it. So nobody messed around. And then it got to the point where suddenly some of our directors were shooting for other companies under other names. And then they started pushing it where they were doing it under their own name. … About a year and a half ago, we finally said, ‘Enough is enough. You’ve got to pick your team.’” Grayson elaborates, “So much of what we promote here is premium product, premium price, a premium experience, so if suddenly you’re doing the same thing with the guy next door at a lower price, it loses some of the charm.” It’s all part of protecting the brand, which is another key part of Grayson’s job. “I’ve always looked at my role here as more of a consultant. There’s this thing with brand capital, with revenue, with a strategy and a vision, and I’m just here to nip and tuck and shape and polish and all these modifiers—how do we make this thing better and more stable, connect with customers better, [be] more profitable—all these things. For me it’s always about how to make it more this and less that.” And just as he’s proud of the P&L, he’s also happy about staff retention. “We haven’t had anybody quit in five years. It’s a place where people are really invested in the company, where people work harder than they might be expected to. People really own this thing. There’s a sense of ownership of the company, and the brand and everything we do here, that’s hard to find. … The team here is really good.” Team Players One key player is Chris Gentile, also known as Evil Chris for his directing credits. “Chris was a grunt here; I hired him off Craigslist because he was clearly a porno fan and had a vision,” Grayson says. “Years later it was clear that he had a lot of interesting ideas that came from a younger mindset. So we put him in a position to succeed. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? He’s not going to burn the building down. So he shot the I Am Katrina movie last year. Which was clearly a win for us. Not only on paper—it made a bunch of money for us—but in terms of brand. It was a really strong thing. A lot of good things happened around him.” In fact, Gentile has been flying around the country getting footage for an Evil Angel Films movie that is “very under wraps,” Grayson says. The project has involved Jonni Darkko and a couple of other people, and it will probably be online in May and out on DVD in June. Despite his talk about needing to bring on younger directors, Grayson definitely sees the value of shooters who have been with the company for more than a decade. “Guys like [Jonni] Darkko and Jay [Sin], I genuinely think they’re among the best in the world at what they do.” And he’s particularly fond of Joey Silvera, who is “semi-retired at this point; when he’s got the inspiration to shoot, he does. When he doesn’t, he doesn’t.” And Silvera has earned that privilege: “He’s made this company a lot of money. No director has put up numbers like he has for all those years. He’s 22 years here, I think. I mean, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars that he’s brought into this place. He’s definitely one of the founding fathers, in that sense.” Other key players he mentions are Rocco Siffredi, Jonni Darkko and Jay Sin. On the flip side, “There’s definitely a push here to embrace a next generation of content creators: Proxy Paige, Jessy Jones, people like this. They’re not that young—they’re probably closer to my age than a teenager—but they at least have a youthful perspective on things. They come from a different place, different cultural influences, different ideas, and hopefully that clicks.” In a word, the changes are about experimentation. “There are all these times when people come to us with interesting things or interesting people and we say, ‘Well, we sort of have this rigid structure where you have to put out movies this often and you have to put in this much money.’ So we’ve tried to be a little more creative with making things happen. Proxy Paige is a good example. Proxy’s somebody who shot for a competitor, Legal Porno, for a long time. She was very good friends with John so she was kind of extended Evil Angel family. We’d just never figured out a way to work together, and I think last summer we started talking and we’re like, ‘What the hell do we have to lose here? She’s clearly talented, she clearly makes content that our core customers like because they’ve mentioned it from other sites it’s been on, so, why not?’” As a female director, Paige “sort of breaks the mold” in a company that has “historically been driven by male performers who are currently or previously male talent,” Grayson says. But she’s hardly the first. Aside from the now-retired Belladonna, there is Aiden Starr, who is “becoming central to a lot of what we’re doing here,” Grayson says. “I look at her as one of our big success stories over the past few years.” In the beginning Starr was shooting content that didn’t seem to be connecting with consumers. “It was right when we were building our business intelligence stack and gathering data, and I went to her and said, we need to break this down,” he recalls. Since then, Starr has diversified, which has led to commercial success. “She’s shooting the family stuff and the TS stuff and the IR stuff, and I look at her numbers and she’s really successful. It’s really worked. She is great to work with. She really wants to know what’s happening. She’s not afraid of criticism or suggestions. She’s really on our team. She wants us to succeed so that she succeeds.” Aside from that, he also gets a kick out of Starr personally. “She’s got a different kind of mind. I introduced somebody to her in Vegas [at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo]: ‘This is Aiden. She’s awesome, you should meet her, but you can’t unhear the things she might say.’ She said that was a pretty good summary of her.” Finally, there’s the newest female director in the Evil Angel stable. The deal with Lisa Ann “landed in our lap, frankly,” Grayson says. “I wish everybody who worked with us was quite as deadline-driven and organized as she. But that’s not reality. I think of myself as extremely disciplined—she’s way more disciplined than I am. She’ll text me, ‘I just did this, this, this and this.’ And my response is usually, ‘Do you sleep? There’s no way you can do all this stuff.’ In between running her site and blogging and doing her Sirius show and doing all these radio pickups—multiple radio interviews every day with all these local stations—she’s traveling and she’s gonna feature, and she’s doing this, and then she tells me, ‘Anytime you want me to do a store signing, you’ve got it.’” Consumers vs. Customers Grayson identifies two factors that are key to Evil Angel’s commercial success: content and user experience. “More than ever, people are judging EvilAngel.com against Netflix,” he says, laughing about the inequity of comparing a multibillion-dollar mainstream brand to any adult company. “But we’ve accepted the fact—that’s the yardstick. I think the industry in terms of content and UX is better than ever. I think it still has a ways to go. I think it’s a pretty good time to be a porn fan.” But, of course, many of those fans don’t actually part with any money to watch porn. “We started partitioning this idea of consumers and customers a few years ago. It used to be a perfect one-to-one in our business, right? If somebody consumed your stuff, they paid for it. But now it’s probably 10,000 to one, or something.” Operating on the theory that everyone has a tipping point at which they tire of wasting time on subpar free content, Grayson says his goal is to “be in their consciousness for those first few websites that they go to and say, ‘Maybe I’ll pay for porn this month.’” Toward that end, Evil Angel sinks considerable resources into social media, and has amassed some 235,000 followers “How many of those guys are Evil Angel members? Fewer than I’d like,” he muses. But it’s still a positive change that “being a fan is less in the shadows than it was.” Those fans who do make the leap to become paying customers are willing to pony up for one of the most expensive sites in the adult industry. Grayson says they believe it’s a fair price, given the quantity and quality of the content. And there’s always room for improvement, of course. “The sleight of hand for me is when you can get a guy who’s not planning on playing with his dick to log into the site to see what’s going on, what are the new updates, what happened in the forum—that’s amazing if it can function even for five minutes like Reddit or another community like that. Let’s call it a stretch goal … creating longtime stickiness in the member area.” Profitability, content production and providing a good user experience all seem to rate much higher than tech bells and whistles to Grayson. “A lot of what we do is figuring out how to exploit our existing content on as many platforms as possible. That’s really why we have a TV division. … The whole purpose of this is to monetize Evil Angel content, and to make Evil Angel and our directors more money. I don’t think we’re ever chasing the tech trend. … I mean, we don’t have a Roku channel. And I have Rokus all over my house. I love Roku. I’m just not sure it’s in the long run going to be a significant profitable opportunity for us. That could change tomorrow. “But when we sit around and evaluate these things, it’s always about revenue around here, because the directors get a share of revenue, so I need to make them enough money to keep them wanting to make movies for us. But it’s also a profit argument. There are a lot of things we could do that would generate revenue for them but wouldn’t necessarily generate a profit for us after operating expenses. So it’s balancing those two needs.” Plus, before the company jumps into something like virtual reality or other new tech, the quality needs to be there. “If we’re going to put our name on it and expect people to pay for it, it better be really good. It better not just be OK.” No matter what he thinks today, though, Grayson reserves the right to keep an open mind. “I definitely come into everything assuming I know nothing, I have no expertise, and I have no insight. And I really think that’s how everybody should come to work every day. It’s like you’re constantly running a treadmill to catch up with something, and you’re not even sure what you’re chasing. If you sit there and assume you know everything, before you know it, everything’s going to pass you by because things change too quickly.” Asked about what things about the industry irk him the most, Grayson says, “I would have said probably a few years ago that people think in terms of the wrong time horizons and make decisions that are too aligned with short-term goals. I think it’s getting better. I think there are more people thinking in terms of years and decades, and not weeks and months. … “A lot of this business was built on get-rich-quick mentalities. But I think it’s less now than it’s ever been before,” he adds. “Honestly, on the whole I think I like it more than I did 15 years ago. I think there’s a different caliber of people running it, especially on the video side. … Now I’m surrounded by people I really enjoy sitting down with and talking shop. Jon Blitt’s a great example. … I think we’re going in the right direction in terms of how companies and executives attack problems and try to solve them and provide customer value. I mean, look at Gamma Films and what’s happening with Bree Mills and all that. It’s a total step forward. And Greg Lansky—that’s about delivering customer value that people want to pay for in the long term. That’s what we should all be doing. “I think if more people do good work that customers like, it helps us all. It raises the water level, if you will. I very much believe that. So I think that Bree and Greg and Angela [White], through what they do, in a way make Evil Angel better. Because not only does it force us to be better, to compete, it also trains customers to pay for good stuff. And to look down their nose at stuff that sucks.”