THE PLAY

We all know how important wellness is today. Now that college athletes can earn money with NIL, it makes wellness even more important.

This would be a wellness brand that's specifically for the college athletes. It's about the wholeness of being well, not just working out, not just eating better. It's about getting more rest and taking care of your mental health.

There are several brands available now that will help players get in better shape, and there are consumer products that sell them on getting a ton of protein in their body. I would focus on helping them be the best version of themselves completely. This means meal plans, sleep plans, workouts, and even some kind of mental health focus.

This brand can target college athletes. This is clearly a great market. There are millions and millions of aspiring college athletes across the United States. The brand could even focus more on college athletes for one particular sport.

A smart play with a product like this is to focus on one specific target market to get started. You create what's called a beachhead. What I would do here is, instead of targeting all college players to start, I would only target college athletes from very active sports where I have experience or connections. For me personally, that would be basketball. I've played basketball, I've coached, I've played professionally. That will make it really, really easy to get my foot in the door and have the right conversations because I know the terminology and I easily build relationships based on my past experiences.

To grow this brand, I would focus on local colleges. I will put my focus into local schools that I had contacts with. If I didn't have contacts, I would build those contacts. You can easily connect with coaches through platforms like Instagram and definitely on LinkedIn. Build relationships with them and show them that your product or service is extremely valuable. Building the foundation by providing value to the schools is important because those are going to be the first testimonials. Once you can have three, four, or five local institutions talk about your product in a positive way, that becomes extremely valuable.

For this brand, content is obviously going to be super important, but you don't want to be generic. I wouldn't create the typical social media content we see from trainers. They love to post non-stop about workouts and things like that. I'm taking a different path.

My content would really focus on the wholistic aspect of what a college athlete needs. My positioning would be all about how they need to take care of their mind, body, and classes so they can lay a great foundation for long-term success in life.

My platform of choice would be a newsletter to really focus on the written aspect, and then I would do Instagram for my social platform and long-form videos on YouTube. most of the other brands in this space avoid long-form content because it requires research, planning, strategy, tactics, and a lot more. I would take that route because I'd have way less competition

Now, monetizing this brand would happen in a few ways. First of all, I'd have a one-on-one session available. If athletes wanted to pay me directly, they could. This would be for a consulting plan that's personalized to them. It would come with a workout plan, meal plan, and then focus on their mental health aspect as well. I'm not a mental health expert, so I would literally bring those people in to be a part of my team, and we will work together on that part.

`then I monetize through the schools. A lot of schools spend money on different partnerships. If you can prove yourself to be a valuable brand partner, that's a way to make some really good money. This is why doing the work for free with several schools to start is a great way to lay the foundation for your brand. It works in a few different ways:

It all just feeds itself. You create your own ecosystem. When working with the universities and colleges, I would charge them a flat fee to work with all of their students from a particular sports program.

being that you could work with individual athletes and partner with universities and colleges, this brand could be extremely valuable. for some napkin math, if you charge universities $20,000 for each semester that you work with their athletes for their full season and you partner with three universities, that's $60,000. Obviously, you would have to have a team and hire help in terms of the mental health aspect and maybe even some other gaps you have to fill. You can still charge athletes individually. That could range anywhere from a $200 consulting session to a $5000 program.

This is an extremely valuable brand. The NIL market has completely changed how college athletes operate. The investment going into travel sports and youth sports is incredible. Parents are spending thousands on their children to reach the next level. Someone could build this brand and create something will into six figures overnight.