Former WWE Executive Producer On Financial Struggles In Early 90s: ‘The Company Was Having A Hard Time Paying for Milk’

Former WWE co-executive producer Doug LeBow was recently interviewed on Tough Talk with AJ Kirsch, and one of the topics he discussed was WWE’s struggles financially coming off of the heels of the steroid trial in 1994.

When asked about the status of the company during that era, LeBow recalled initially landing a job as a production assistant in 1992 and WWE’s financial issues shortly after that (via Fightful):

“I drive up, [Sahadi] shows me around (the production studio) and he’s like, ‘Do you want the job?’ ‘Yeah, okay, this is pretty cool, how much does it pay?’ ‘Well, a PA gets $21,000.’ That wasn’t enough for me. Here was my pushback, there was no HR or anything at time. ‘I need to travel, can you make it $23,000?’ He’s like, ‘Sure,’ and I started the next day. I mean this in the greatest of all compliments, it was such the wild west. The company was in transition. Vince had just come out of the steroid scandal on the positive side and the company had to battle. We had to battle through a downtime. So much so that in my first couple of months, we had to kick in a dollar a week per person to pay for milk because the company was having a hard time paying for milk. It was an interesting culture when I first got there and from PA to producer in under two years and then the director of a division a year or two after that. By 1999, I was running their in-house production and marketing division and we were doing one-hundred million dollars of business out of the New York office, just following the lead of Vince (McMahon) and Kevin (Dunn).”

Speaking of the steroid trial, WWE and Blumhouse have announced a new scripted series, The United States of America vs. Vince McMahon, that will focus on that specific topic.