The Wisdom Group: Feb 2023 Update

As I continue to build a grow The Wisdom Group, it continues to amaze me each day, the opportunities and the thesis of investment that has been created after years of observation and experience helping online businesses.

To both document for myself in the future, along with the ability to help you as an Entrepreneur-focused investor, on top of the content I share with you and deep dives, I’m going to do a monthly update, with all that we’ve been working on and some lessons learned.

So, let’s start our first one.

1. In January, I decided I was going to raise money, February saw the legal along with the initial investment raise. My intention is to raise $5M for The Wisdom Group in this first stage, which I expect to be complete in the next few months.

2. This has created the space and time to be able to separate my mentorship business from The Wisdom Group, allowing for the expenses and cashflow to be completely separated, so that I’m not using my cashflow to solely fund The Wisdom Group.

3. We acquired (fully or part of) the following businesses:

   1. Email Deliverability Company that has SaaS, Consulting & Certification.

   2. Legal SaaS & Legal Coaching company.

   3. 2 Spiritual Based Websites that together have over 8 million yearly visitors.

   4. Architect B2C Education business helping home owners in building and redesigning their home.

   5. Increased our stake in a SaaS in the Education Sector

4. We launched The Wisdom Panel, which allows for experts and companies to be able to get access to over 600,000 Entrepreneurs (and soon to be 1M+). We’ve had 19 people join this program, in our trial, with more being added over the next 60 days.

5. We worked deeply on operations, being our second month that is focused on hiring and building the system backbone, at the moment, the burn rate for infrastructure is quite high and will continue to be high, until this Summer when the revenue catches up with the infrastructure.

6. We implemented cross-team shared resources allowing for resources such as financial management, operations, marketing, media buying, etc. to be shared across our platform.

7. For Wisdom Media, we’ve developed and realized our advertising network, allowing for us to start generating revenue on the 10+ media properties we own. So far, we’ve had great success and expect that in March, we will have at minimum 6 figures of revenue from this side of our business.

8. We’re currently in the process of hiring more team members for the backend infrastructure, which is going to take another 2-3 months, to ensure they are where they need to be for growth.

9. We’re in LOI (Letter-of-Intent) with 6 different businesses for purchasing their LLC or Assets (can’t speak on this, just at the moment), however, these are all in either SaaS, Education or Media space.

10. Going forward, we have decided that we wont’t be acquiring media companies and instead either The reasoning is quite simple: The ability to do actual due dilgance on a media company is very difficult and majority of those that are willing to sell in the current market environment is low.

    1. Buying a SaaS / Education Company with a large audience to “spin” off a media company

    2. or Partnering with SaaS / Education companies to the same.

11. We’re currently building our new Wisdom Group website, that is going to be a semi-advanced quiz funnel. The reasoning for doing this, versus a regular website is to be able to create a website that works for both investors, partners, team members and the general public. Considering my background in running multiple web and branding agencies, I feel like most websites fall flat when speaking to more than one avatar and we want to solve for that.

12. We’ve been building an entirely new financial management system, we’re almost into this for 4 months and we’re nearly done. With this new system, we will be able to track financials, goals, projections and everything required with beautiful dashboards, to be able to make choices quickly throughout all businesses on a daily basis.

13. I’ve decided to launch a new Podcast, which will be focused on investing, entrepreneurship and lifestyle— it’ll largely document the conversations I have with partners, friends and clients, allowing for a behind the scenes of building The Wisdom Group and 7-9 figure businesses.

14. I’ve decided to restart my social media and will be giving my current social media (@scottoldford) to one of our portfolio companies. You can read more here, on that.

15. I continue to learn the importance of building systems and structure and ensuring the right people and the right fits are in place. More than anything, as we go into the future, people will make things work. In order to help on this, we will be launching www.onlinebusinessjobs.com (to be part of our Online Business Owner portfolio) allowing us to be able to find amazing talent, while helping other online businesses fill their gaps inside of their business as well.

I could go on, however, I’m out of time and I need to get back to building the future of The Wisdom Group.

As always, thanks for reading and I’m glad we’re on this journey together!

- Scott Oldford