How to be "on time" with your investments

I believe that sponsorships and being able to use someone else’s audience is perhaps one of the most effective ways of being able to grow.

I believe in it so much that I acquired Sponsorships.com and I’m building an entire education, media & software company behind it.

Here’s the thing and perhaps the biggest potential problem: I’m not certain people will “get” how big of an opportunity this is…

One of the things I’ve found in being an Entrepreneur for over 20 years? Society and your market will generally be slower to understand something than you are.

The result of this is quite simple: No one buys what you’re selling.

While I have a vision for what the future of media and advertising is, it doesn’t mean that my timing is the timing of the market. So, how do you change that? How do you ensure that you’re always at “the right time and place”?

In my experience it’s built by the following:

1. Building what you know the future is, while ensuring that you’re not over-investing into it thinking that the market will open in the short-term (it takes years for a market to understand something new).

2. Turning your marketing to be education and value-first focused where you're turning your leads into customers by educating them from the gap between their problem to your solution.

3. Finding something that is related to your vision that is closer to what your potential customer believes they need and selling that, first.

4. And finally… simply trusting that you ARE on perfect time.

In the case of Wisdom Media, we’ve spent the last 9 months building the infrastructure to be able to have 50+ media properties— it’s been costly, expensive and time consuming.

And… I truly don’t know if our timing is perfect…

So part of my strategy for Wisdom Media? Building an ecosystem to be able to support Wisdom Media.

Over the past 6 months we’ve acquired not just sponsorships.com but software, media and software companies that support our thesis that non-mass media will lead the future. In total, we’ve acquired 13 companies to help us with this.

See… my inner knowing is that we’re taking the right bet on Wisdom Media, however, in this case, I wanted to go a step further.

I wanted to own both sides of the marketplace with The Wisdom Group. I wanted to help create more media property producers (newsletters, podcasts, email lists, websites, etc) scale, while at the same time helping more businesses that are trying to scale using those properties to do so.

In total: this will help the market see the vision I have more quickly, securing the vision I have for Wisdom Media more quickly.

Thus, my belief is easy to see: If you want to be “right” on time, it’s about building as much of an ecosystem as possible and not “hoping” you’ll be at the right time and place.

By playing a leadership role in your market development — it’s the easiest way to actually build at the right time, and place.

Back in 2008, I owned a web agency, At the time, I was a teenager, and I understood the future of what would occur, which was mobile-first websites.

At the time, I played the same game, I would hold in-person trainings, I would give presentations, and I would show people just how important it was to be mobile first— and I was right in that prediction.

Being in the front of the market, while educating the market allows you to automatically become the leader of the market.

Again in 2016, when I was running a business teaching people how to use marketing funnels, in a world that used direct-response only, I started introducing a method that allowed people to easily understand how to talk to their leads based on their mindset.

Millions of business owners have seen it take off, and tens of thousands have used it. At the time, I knew that segmenting and building funnels that weren’t simply about selling upfront would be important.

Why? Because I knew that advertising would shift online, driving advertising costs up.

Now, I don’t believe I’m some wizard of oz. I simply saw a pattern, knew that others weren’t going to see it due to not being focused on it and then simply built a value-first approach to talk about it.

This is the easiest and most certain way to ensure that you are at the right time and place.

But the next question and the most logical is how can you ensure you don’t run out of money training the audience to buy from you?

How can you not starve while you wait for the gold miners..

I think that’s a true art and probably has to do more with being able to play the short and long term R.O.I windows.

In 2008, when I was talking about mobile-first, I was still doing the stuff that people wanted.

In 2016, when I was talking about long term ROI, I still helped people build high converting sales pages and webinars.

In general, your audience is going to be stubborn, and most of the time, unless they have a lot of free time or are naturally visionary, they won’t be part of the early adopter curve.

Thus, it’s important to be building the future, while you’re still in the present and, as the months go by, continue to move more and more in the direction that you know is the future.

In our own bet inside of the future of Media, we’ve allocated less than 25% of Wisdom Group’s resources to building Wisdom Media.

While, I believe it’s our most likely bet for the future and it has amazing promise so far, there’s one thing I don’t like doing.

Being at the right place, at the wrong time. By ensuring you aren’t highly leveraged in a specific niche, industry, or business. It protects you by allowing you to hold out until the market sediment shifts.

As a bonus for those who want to dive into Wisdom Media and how we’re building the media company of the future. I’ll leave this not-so-polished unlisted video for you.

- Scott