We had 80,000 fans, up from 20,000, less than a year later. That's when I made my pitch.
The real money was going to come from the website.
Imagine having 50 branded pages (branded meaning an oil change place, a tire center, a mechanic, whomever) each paying $1,000 a month to basically maintain their own pages content - but it's on your website.
That was the plan.
Our website had already broken from the amount of traffic going to it. We went from 10 or 15,000 hits a month to 300,000 on average and it was only going to grow from there.
$50,000 a month x 12 months = $600,000 -- and that's without opening the park. No expensive capital outlay. No liability. Nothing but a salesman going around and getting people to buy our advertising package.
If there was a subject that our customers cared about, wanted to know more about, there was a business out there somewhere that would pay to get in front of them. And we had a massive audience and the ability to drive traffic to their page.
$1,000 a month is less than a one week radio ad, a 20 spot TV commercial, etc.
$600,000 a year with 80% or more being profit was of course a better profit margin than opening. And we would make more money on the 4 events we did have (yes, cut back from 6 to 4).
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Then I got my own radio show. And things really started to click in my mind.
I was already voicing all their radio commercials. Had been doing that for about a year. I was on stage and on the TV. It made perfect sense to continue.
"Let me do this show - grow this show, and when the ratings book comes in, if it's good enough, we can take this show to small market America and have them pay us for it. They can keep and sell their own ads, but the show is one large ad for us that we get paid for."
It was a syndication play.
Outside Dothan, Alabama. Outside Peoria, Illinois. Small places need content too. We could sell it.
$1000 a show, $4,000 a month, maybe, maybe not - maybe $1000 a month for 4 shows - it was worth it to try because even if it was $500 a week to start, we could still make some good money.
If it were $4,000 a month, and we had 20 radio stations all over the country, we'd be bringing in $80,000 a month, $960,000 a year + 600,000 from the website and now you're cooking.
You don't have to spend a lot of money upfront to open. You don't have to have liability. You don't have to have more events and even more events. You just need to let me do the radio show. Do the internet stuff. And our sales guy can go sell this stuff.
But wait, there's more!
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We used to pay a guy to come to the park as an entertainer. $20,000 each time.
The reason we paid him was because he had built a brand, a good brand (we helped grow his brand tremendously), around our sport. He went to 20 other places throughout the year. That's pretty good.
What if we could do the same thing?
People were already asking, "when are you coming to x"?
Well, we can't move. We're 800 acres of dirt. But our brand, which was now an online powerhouse with nearly 160,000 fans and a radio show that was blasted all over the world on streaming radio and video, that could go.
We could host our own branded events, just like the guy we paid to come to us, at all the places he went.
He goes, 2 months later, we go. They pay us.
I asked the guy about that and he thought it was a great idea. It wouldn't hurt his brand because we were still going to host him at our park.
So in theory you get $600,000 a year from the website, $900,000 from the radio, and $400,000 from traveling. You don't have to open. You don't assume no liability.
You don't trap schoolkids in their bus on the way home.
You're a full fledged media company and you're making hand over fist because those things don't even scratch the surface of what you can do. What they could do.
Bada-bing.
After over 2 years of building and growing and moving in the right direction, they rejected it all and went back to only having events.
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