Investor Update: Summer 2023

It’s been a minute, friend. It’s been a wild August for Wisdom Group. If you don’t remember, I’m Scott Oldford, the CEO of The Wisdom Group. I share insights on building, scaling, acquiring and selling Online Businesses. The Wisdom Group is a collection of dozens of businesses.

While I’m not a public company, my company has dozens of investors and partners and I’ve gotten into the habit of writing about what’s happening to keep them updated.

In building The Wisdom Group, my portfolio company, it’s taking a lot of focus and a lot of brilliant people to ensure the right things happen at the right time.

The following is an update, I shared with many of those people a few weeks ago, that I thought might be valuable to you to see a little behind the scenes.

I hope you enjoy 🙂 

Wisdom Group Update - Summer 2023

When my son was born on June 8th, 2022 my life changed forever, about a week later on my Birthday on June 16th I had some time to reflect.

For most of my life, I’ve played just a little better than my version of average.

I’ve rarely played “all out” simply because the comforts of doing so are massive.

My Son changed that for me– and in speaking with many other Dad’s, the same occurred for them.

In the background of this moment of realizing it was time to play “all out” I was investing in companies and taking equity for my help in growing and scaling the business. June 2022 saw the shift of this being the foreground to the forefront.

In just over a year, we’ve created something of massive momentum.

Today, we have dozens of partnerships, have acquired dozens of assets and have over 30 businesses that are operating.

Being in the driver seat at this level of scale drives adrenaline through my veins each and every day– the anxiety I once had of knowing I was supposed to do this and not doing it has left.

Instead? I’m left with excitement for the future.

As you know, I’ve helped scale 100’s of businesses past 7+ figures and my range with these businesses? Massive.

From those who started at $10K/mo and scaled to $500K in 18 months to those that were at $250K/mo and I helped scale to $1M/mo.

The vision of The Wisdom Group is to scale at scale businesses that are redefining education, allowing humans to build a better reality, allowing ownership of thought and information and ensuring optimization of all we each day.

In the past year, we’ve had massive momentum and growth, and on a personal level, it’s been one of the most transformative experiences of my entire life.

At scale, we’re building the systems and infrastructure that will support the future of hundreds of businesses that serve tens of millions of people around the world.

My original plan and vision for this is coming to fruition and in many ways much more quickly than I expected.

In 2022, I had no idea I would take investors for The Wisdom Group, as of right now, we’ve raised over $4 million dollars.

I knew we would do acquisitions, I didn’t know that we would be acquiring so many amazing businesses at incredible valuations such as www.onlinebusinessowner.com or www.neonpulse.ai or www.thegrowthmemo.com 

I knew we would build new businesses, but I had no idea we would building platforms that will change the way people obtain new customers such as www.sponsorships.com or to help Entrepreneurs achieve

I knew we would be working to optimize human potential through software, however, I didn’t know we would be part of businesses like www.cohere.live, http://roezan.com, www.heroicnow.com.

I knew we would be focused on media, however, I didn’t know we would be defining the entire industry owning over 20 media properties and building our media moat through businesses like www.duuce.com, www.newsletters.co, www.lettergrowth.com and www.audienceswaps.com 

I knew we would be focused on helping people in a variety of things in their life, however, I didn’t know we’d be running one of the largest sites on spirituality like www.alittlesparksofjoy.com or helping hundreds of thousands of people looking to enjoy the outdoors at www.campnative.

I knew we would be focused on partnerships, however, I didn’t know we would be scaling certifications in over 9 different niches.

I knew we would need a kick-ass team, operations and infrastructure, however, I had no idea the world-class humans from over a dozen countries would be working to make this vision become a reality.

Since embarking on this journey and adventure, I’ve continued each day to pinch myself. To see the syngerices that continue to occur each day.

For the vision to become more cemented and for the vision to become reality.

And… there’s a lot of lessons.

In the past, I learnt a few lessons each month when scaling.

Today, I learn lessons every single day.

When I decided to go beyond just a single business and take my expertise and bring it into something new, it was me giving up my mastery and allowing myself to be humbled.

Each day, my ego continues to dissolve as my confidence continues to grow.

That’s a beautiful experience.

As it stands at the moment, those lessons have resulted in us understanding the business that we’re in and what’s a fit and what’s not

We’re clear that our job is to build an ecosystem that allows for business growth to be easier and we’re seeing this occur across the board.

From our ability to cross sell products, or upsell.

From our ability to turn one subscriber into a subscriber of multiple media properties.

From our ability to see the cost savings of having a team dedicated not to just a single resource.

From our ability to scale marketing and sales in a way that could never be possible any other way.

From our ability to acquire businesses and assets for 1/10th of what they are worth.

From our ability to recruit talent at a level never seen.

Seeing the pieces come together is truly amazing.

We’re excited about a lot of what we’ve seen with early success, however, here’s a few key things we’re extra excited about.

→ In September we’re launching The Wisdom Collective, a Mastermind specifically designed for the founders, operators and those involved in Wisdom (including you).

→ We’re about to launch The Wisdom Agency, an internal agency for companies we’re partnered with to be able to provide help on the actual tactical and done-for-you elements of marketing. This will allow for our partners and internal businesses to grow much more quickly.

→ We’ve had a very successful initial launch of our Sponsorships.com property and will be launching a software platform behind this platform. We expect this property to easily do over $3M in 2024 by itself.

→ Our OnlineBusinessOwner.com property was acquired less than a year ago and in September we are on pace to have a summit with tens of thousands of Entrepreneurs registered.

→ Our internal media platforms are booked for sponsorships for the next 2 months and we are launching a new product designed to help those with influence build their own owned media platforms.

This will allow us to easily and effectively increase the number of platforms we have access to display advertising and generate revenue from. Internally we have capacity handle 50 media properties with our current infrastructure.

→ Our Wisdom Panel product has been deemed a success so far and it’s only in it’s early days. We now have over 40 customers in the Wisdom Panel and after rebuilding the infrastructure to allow for more scale, we’re confident in it’s growth path to be a $5M+ revenue line item by 2025 and allow us to produce expert-driven content.

I could keep going with win after win… But you get it, things are heading in the right direction.

Which is a perfect time to talk about the risks as we continue into the future:

Our first major risk: Economy

We believe that the economy is going to shift over the next number of years. With this there will be many changes that we believe we will be ready to utilize inside of our model.

So far, we’ve seen increased uptake in our specific businesses, however, things are different than the past and more effort is required for closing sales. The upside of the current economic condition is that paid advertising and partnership advertising has steeply trended downwards.

Currently we’re generating subscribers to some of our newsletters for less than $0.40 in America.

While we are building our entire model to benefit from a downturn that is deeper than it is at the moment, that downturn can also affect our business deeply, however, considered our diversification across countries, business models and business avatars– we believe we have an economic moat secured in this regard and will benefit from a deeper downturn if it occurs.

Our second biggest risk: Money

This is actually less tied to the above point, due to the fact that I believe by Q2 of next year we will be in an incredible spot on financials, to be able to lever profit or growth whichever way we want due to the momentum of the business.

We’ve been red-ling the business investing in team, operations, and acquisitions, and due to that our float and cash flow is weaker than we’d like it to be. At no point have we taken a large amount of investment up to this point, but rather having the investment spread evenly, monthly.

To mitigate this risk, we’re raising additional capital to allow us to continue building for the mid-long term and not hurt our model by making short-term cash oriented decisions.  

Our third biggest risk: Timing

We believe many of our bets in the industry are based on the right time and place.

All of our bets are based on us building the infrastructure before a trend is on the complete upswing. The upside of this strategy is massive, however, the downside is that making the right bet is one thing, being able to get the bet with the right timing is a much more difficult thing.

Our focus on breaking even and then being profit, while having an ecosystem that can be easily expanded, allows us to mitigate this risk.

Our fourth biggest risk: Infrastructure, Team & Partners

Our model relies heavily on infrastructure, team and partnerships.

This isn’t always easy or simple and their is inherit risk with key C-level team, company reputation, infrastructure reliability and partnership performance.

We believe we have the right steps in place to ensure that this risk is mitigated, however, it’s still a risk.

We’re super excited for the journey ahead… and we’re excited that you’re part of it.

And… we’d love to continue to have your support as we continue down the road of our growth.

At the moment, we could use help with the following:

#1. Investment

We’re raising an additional $10 million on a fixed return investment, alongside of the ability to invest in specific businesses in our portfolio.

#2. Partners and Audiences

We’re looking for amazing partners for promoting our media assets, education and software properties. This is going to be more and more important as we focus more on the generation of revenue, going into Q4.

#3. Introductions

We want to be around more and more amazing people and would love relevant introductions that you feel will be valuable as we build into the future.

I’ll see you in the next update, along with details for the first investor in-person hangout hosted in Napa Valley.

Talk soon,

- Scott Oldford