🗻 We Are RockWater 🌊

Hi readers,Chris, founder of RockWater here.First, a very happy new year to all of you. I hope you all had restful holdays. I spent the first part of my break in Savannah celebrating Christmas with my family, and also finalizing the make-ready for my new Airbnb investment. Good times...but not relaxing. So the lady and I went to Ensenada in Baja to celebrate NYE, which included the amazing 5-star view at Bura restaurant of Cuatro Cuatros winery, and a little uncrowded surf as well.  Feeling very refreshed and reinvigorated. But it feels good to be back and kick off 2023, a year of great potential. Our global economy faced serious challenges in 2022, and we're now in a much-needed correction. But while headwinds persist, our RockWater team is increasingly seeing great building and investing opportunities within media, tech, and commerce. We'll continue to write about those opportunities on our blog, in this newsletter, and on LinkedIn. And we have some 2023 predictions brewing. But for this first week back from break, we want to remind all of you our core client services, and some recent wins.We released a previous iteration of this email late in Q4, and we're very proud that we signed 3 new clients over our winter holiday (a new record!). A few highlights:💪🏼 1. Execution Support / Strategy Advisory: A celebrity-backed next-gen digital IP incubator, that is on a mission to become the "Supreme for Content". RockWater is serving as a hands-on advisor for operations, financial planning, marketing, and consumer research.🤝🏼 2. Business Development: A leading 3PL logistics agency that needs to revamp its sales funnel for 2023. RockWater is building new target customer pitch decks, and then identifying the target companies + key decision makers at those companies for direct outreach campaigns.📈 3. Revenue / Audience Growth: A boutique financial media brand seeking new ways to amplify its audience development. RockWater is performing an internal systems audit, conducting audience surveys, and benchmarking best-in-class tactics used by competitors to create a roadmap of near term priorities and work shoulder-to-shoulder with Client on implementation. We're big believers in doubling down on what's working...which explains some company changes I talk about here.... so check out our new service offerings below and DM me if you or someone you know is interested in collabing together 👇🏼👇🏼---  RockWater provides financial and strategy advisory for execs in media, tech, commerce. We are razor-sharp mercenaries who supercharge our clients to build both quickly and thoughtfully.We love getting in the trenches with business leaders to disrupt their competitors and build next-gen companies. We'll be your bolt-on strategy and execution partner -- creating your battle map in the war room, and then rolling up our sleeves to get it done. Who Hires Us:

• Founders with lots to do but have lean teams and budgets

• C Suites and VPs who seek data-based decisions and modernization

• Investors whose portfolio co's need experts to parachute in

And... we LOVE to pay referral fees (5-15% of engagement size). 

 Meme Cleanser 

👷‍♀️ What we do 👷‍♂️

⚙️ 

Strategy

is at the core of everything we do. We'll build a foundational understanding of your market, benchmark your competitors, assess your internal capabilities, and

find your edge

. We'll use these findings to create your unique go-to-market business plan, operating budget, and target milestones.

We advised one of the largest children’s toy retailers building direct-to-consumer content x commerce flywheels. We mapped their competitors in the space, analyzed their internal capabilities, and built a go-to-market strategy.

💲 Financial Planning & Analysis

is table stakes for any startup in 2023; investors need to see sustainable unit economics. With the current economic outlook, we recommend that clients have enough capital to survive for

at least 2.5 yrs

. We'll ensure that you are ready to weather the storm.

We formulated a bottoms-up 8 figure marketing budget for an OTT streaming service. Budget promptly approved by CEO and parent co owner.

📈

A structured 

Business Development

approach is critical for driving revenue. RockWater will give you an expansive hit list of target leads, create marketable pitch decks to get you meetings, and help you structure the economics when it's time to close.

We make deals happen.

We built a compensation structure for a new sales department of a large audio distributor, with incentive alignment for company-wide success.

🏢 Having a clean

Org Structure

will make you ready to hit the ground running in 2023. We'll deep dive with your team to figure out where improvement is needed and give you a clear plan to make it happen.

We sourced, assessed, and structured strategic acqui-hire for NASDAQ-traded video SaaS company to accelerate G2M for their new livestream shopping product.

🌎 Globalizing Your Product 

is tricky for any company. RockWater will identify where in the world you want to take your product first, who the right partners are to do it, who your target customer is, and how much it will cost to do it. We've helped scaled up regional operators into multinational icons.

We advised an international conglomerate on a 9-figure acquisition of an international digital media co. Determined financial viability, localization and integration needs, and product / market fit.

💲Help us help you💲

We've paid tens of thousands of dollars in referral fees

, including a sizeable check just this month.

We offer

5-15%

of gross revenue depending on project size and extent of referral support. 

If you know of a business leader in your network who could benefit from our help, reach out to me at

[email protected]

🤝 Our partners 🤝

We work with companies from the Fortune 50 to pre-seed startups. 

🔎 Focus Areas 🔍

We are experts who live at the intersection of Media x Tech x Commerce. 

🙏 Client Testimonials 🙏

“To plan FAO’s digital transformation, we needed an expert team who understood how parents and kids are spending their time and money online, which is powering new direct-to-consumer business models for toy retailers. RockWater was a great bolt-on partner to us and facilitated outlining an exciting new growth strategy for FAO Schwarz.”Jan-Eric Kloth President, International Sales, Retail & Corporate Strategy @ ThreeSixty Group

"Chris was a trusted personal advisor to me when I took my company, Midroll Media (now known as Stitcher), through a successful M&A process that ultimately ended in a sale to EW Scripps.

As the media landscape is quickly evolving, there are few companies in the world who share RockWater’s breadth of knowledge across new media, and its capital and macro market dynamics.

I would be excited to hire RockWater again and I am certain that I will."(...he did)Adam SachsPresident @ Team CocoAdvisor @ Higher GroundFmr. CEO @ Midroll Media

“RockWater delivers something few others can: unique perspective. Chris and his team analyze the complicated playing field and cut through the BS to deliver actionable insights that add immediate value. RockWater acts as an extension of my own team, adding a tool to our toolbox at the exact moment we need it.”

Christopher Balfe Founder & Partner @ Red Seat Ventures

📞 Want to learn more? 📞 Reach out to [email protected] to set a call with our founder.

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