🪨 More Than Great Content: The RockWater TLDR 🌊

Hi readers,

Chris, founder of RockWater here.

Our team publishes a lot of industry news and analysis via our newsletters, LinkedIn, podcast, and blog. All the time and resources to generate that content is funded by our core advisory business. And my hunch is that many of you don’t know the extent of all we do…

So, since we’ve recently launched some new service offerings, today we want to reintroduce ourselves 👇👇

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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).

👷‍♀️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 chris@wearerockwater.com

🤝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

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“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 Sachs
President @ Team Coco
Advisor @ Higher Ground
Fmr. CEO @ Midroll Media

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“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?📞

Ping us here to set a call with our founder.