For my first entry, I an going to start by revealing how I would start a wrestling promotion if I had a billion dollars. Why? It just came to me as i was listening to some wrestling podcasts the other day.
First I would offer a consultants fee of a million dollars to James E Cornette, Eric Bischoff, or other folks who have had the experience of starting, booking, evaluating talent, etc for established wrestling promotions. I am a fan of professional wrestling. I have no knowledge of the day to day runnings of a promotion. The consultants fee would allow me to pick the brains of successful individuals from the business. They would be my architects of the promotion.
Next would be hiring a capable booker. Again, I have never worked in the industry so how could I effectively book a program. With recommendations from my consultants I would hire an individual with the knowledge of the inner workings of the business. Someone with in ring experience and also behind the curtain experience. along with the Booker, I would hire producers for backstage to help with the layout of the matches. I am not talking about move for move for move. Someone to give direction to the in ring talent of what they are looking for from the match. Let the match be called in the ring.
Now I would need in ring talent. As a collective group, the consultants, booker and I would look at established free agent veterans that we can use for a launching pad. Of course out of those veterans, we would need to decide whowe want to establish as our Champion to build the promotion around. While we are looking at these, our producers would be scouting for talent that has not been discovered on a national level. Young fresh talent that is teachable and willing to learn. This is the recruitment phase. Just like pro and college teams have scouts, at first the producers would do this and train associate producers for what they are looking for from the talent. Once the promotion gets up and running, the producers would need to be working with the signed talent at shows while the associate producers are out scouting. You need that infusion of talent to keep building. There is no off season in professional wrestling. I would also hire technical, production, referee, etc crews to round out our list of talent.
I would book smaller venues at first. Definitely way more cost effective. i woulc air matches on YouTube, X, FaceBook, and whatever social media platform is up and running at that time. As our metrics grow on social media, we would then look for a streaming partner. Broadcast tv is definitely not as big as it once was. Digital platforms would be the way to go. As we hopefelly gain popularity, we would then also move to venues with more seating. 2500 seats to 6500 seats to 10000 seats to 16000 seats etc.
Hopefully this would be a plan to start a viable wrestling promotion. There definitely would not be any grandiose plans of overtaking market share from WWE. Being the RC Cola to their Coca-Cola is fine. Maybe some day way way way down the line we could compete with them. Our main competiton would be TNA, NWA, AEW, etc. In college sports terms we need to from Division III to the FCS to the FBS.