Okay, we are ready to begin our next presentation. Let's please give a warm welcome to the CEO of Dolphin Entertainment, Bill O'Dowd.
All right. Thank you. I've been tethered to the podium, so I'll be good and not wander around. Pleasure to see everybody, and thank you for coming here to learn more about Dolphin. Although I see some familiar faces that I know know Dolphin, it's always nice to be introduced to some new ones through LD Micro, so thank you, LD. All right, here we go. Obviously we have a cautionary note on forward-looking statements that I'm sure you're riveted by and want to read every word. Then Dolphin. Just to kind of give a quick overview of Dolphin and our history, it's a company I founded in 1996, and the first 20 years are easy. We were a private company that produced television, and then we expanded into features and digital.
It was in doing some of the features that we realized that we could make a play to go public by an acquisition strategy to buy entertainment marketing companies. We uplisted in 2017 after 42West came into the family, and I can talk about each of these companies a little bit, with the strategy that we would build this group of elite entertainment marketing companies, and we bought a company a year, as you can see. We finished the group now, and I'll be happy to talk about it. As we think about Dolphin and how we earn money, we think of ourselves in three main divisions. We have Dolphin Entertainment, which is the legacy production studio. We have Dolphin Marketing, which is the group of the marketing companies that I'll talk about next. Of course, why did we put this group together?
That is for the third bucket, which is Dolphin Ventures, as we start to take ownership stakes in some of the things that we market. That gives us optionality, to use the business school term or upside or whatever word you like. First, the legacy, Dolphin Entertainment. We started by making television. You can see we're probably most known for our ten-year partnership or so with Nickelodeon. If you're the right age, we made some shows that you'll remember, like Zoey 101 or Ned's Declassified. We expanded into digital. Kids were online first, watching video, and then we started doing feature films. That is an image from a Mattel co-production we did, one of the ones that led us into thinking about buying PR firms and influencer marketing firms. We are back in this space with documentaries as well.
We entered into a 50/50 partnership with IMAX to do documentaries for theaters. We put our first one in last year called Blue Angels on the Flying Squadron from the US Navy, and it did extremely well for us, both from a profit perspective and then also just an awareness in the market perspective. We premiered it on Amazon after it was in theaters, over Memorial Day weekend. It was the number one movie on Amazon for weeks, which was great. We just finished shooting. We went back into scripted. Again, this is our legacy. We just finished shooting the remake of Youngblood up in Toronto. Youngblood, if you remember it, was a, well, in the movie, he's a hockey prodigy, teen prodigy played by Rob Lowe. His best friend was Patrick Swayze in the original. Keanu Reeves was the goalie. We thought it was due for a remake.
The basic storyline in the original was that Youngblood had to learn how to fight to be a man. That may not have aged as well. We flipped it, and he's a hothead on the ice, and he's always in the penalty box. We thought if he could learn to control his temper, he could be the best player and man he can be. We are excited about that. We hope to premiere it at the Toronto Film Festival, and we will be rolling that out in the second half of the year. We have more projects, both features, documentaries, and television shows in development. Dolphin Marketing, this is where the bulk of the company is today.
The core thesis of when we set out to build this group was that earned media would become more and more important in the new world by the time that we hit where we are today. For those who don't do marketing every day, let me break marketing into two buckets for you. There's paid marketing and earned marketing. Paid is your TV commercials, your billboards, your radio ads, things you spend money to get somebody to play your advertisement. Earned media, you hire a PR firm, and increasingly you hire an influencer marketing firm to create word of mouth. One of our shows, for example, would be White Lotus. I don't know if any of you saw that recently, but if you wanted the creator of White Lotus to have a profile in The New York Times, you're hiring a PR firm.
If you want your lead actors to be on Jimmy Fallon, you're hiring a PR firm. Influencer marketing, we'll get to in a second. The group started with 42West. Tom Cruise, obviously, he's pretty big. We promote movies and TV shows as well, a few dozen a year, and from major franchises to leading independents. I think the firm has been behind eight Best Picture winners at the Oscars since its inception. It is a pretty powerful firm. Once we had that on the film and TV side, we've complemented it with a few others. Shore Fire is an industry-leading music PR firm. Bruce Springsteen's a client, of course, as you see up there. So would be Dave Matthews or Chance the Rapper or Steve Aoki, whatever type of music you like.
The Door is a leading culinary PR firm, again, with celebrity chefs like Rachael Ray that you see pictured there, but also Jean-Georges or consumer products companies led by chefs like Carbone in New York. I think about restaurants you might have heard of, right? Or the Tao Group. We're going to come back to Elle because you'll see them in a couple of slides. We complemented the PR firms with, second from the right is the digital department. This was an influencer marketing. It is an influencer marketing agency. We acquired Be Social in Los Angeles, and we acquired Socialyte in New York, and we've merged them. We believe we're building in the influencer marketing space, which is still very new, the market leader like we believe we have in those three PR firms I just mentioned with the signature clients.
PR and influencer marketing kind of go hand in hand, a little peanut butter and jelly. It would be extremely difficult today to open a restaurant, open a hotel, launch a movie, drop an album if you don't have influencer marketing. While PR will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, you need the influencers to spread the word. That's why it was strategic for us. Special Projects, that company does celebrity booking and events, and you'll see why that's important to us in a second. They'll do everything from organizing the room at the Motion Picture Academy Gala to handling celebrities at Fashion Week in New York to coming up with the idea and executing the Wall Street Journal Innovator Awards and the celebrities that are there and then serve on the cover of Wall Street Journal Magazine.
Big month for us last month. We finished the group, and the group was named the Agency of the Year in the one power ranking of PR firms in the industry. I realized that this is something that Wall Street wouldn't know about typically, but I played college basketball. I'm aware of top 25 rankings, and they exist in. Put 42West, with Shore Fire, with The Door, with Elle, you've got something special in that somebody doesn't have that breadth of the ability to market using pop culture. That's our core strength. We're very proud of that in the people you see in those pictures right there. Also, as you can see, we were invited to ring the bell at NASDAQ on International Women's Day and Women in Sport Day, and we're heavily female.
We're proud of the fact that 78% of our company is female, and every one of our eight operating subsidiaries has at least one female CEO. That's pretty cool. Since we were here last year at LD Micro New York, some things that have happened. We made our final acquisition into our group is this PR firm that you see in front of you. It's a nonprofit PR that overlaps with entertainment. Danielle Fink on the left, Silvie Snow on the right. Back to the female leadership of the company. They are just incredible at what they do, like our other firms. They understand the nonprofit space as well as anybody I know. It's a personal passion point for mine because, as many of you know that know me, I'm proud to serve on the board of United Way Worldwide.
Just the connections to Elevate, worthy causes and worthy nonprofit groups is just, I think it's very impactful. Very proud to have them in the group, and we will grow them. The cross-selling of services into entertainment and the use of entertainment to bring awareness to nonprofit causes is as old as entertainment and nonprofits, I think. Highly strategic for us. October, we launched the first-ever women's sports management firm called Always Alpha, dedicated to female athletes in partnership with Allyson Felix, the woman on the left, who is the woman, male or female, the American who's won the most Olympic medals in track and field history. She's won 11. She's also, I think, won 20 world championships. She's pretty darn impressive. She's as humble as they come.
She was with us at the ringing of the bell because International Women's Day was also Women in Sport Day. Cosette on the right, Cosette Chaput, she is our CEO for Always Alpha and has been 12 years now in this business. We are building a roster of many Olympians, female athletes, and we are going to expand it this year to include the major sports in the U.S., which would be obviously soccer and basketball. We are very proud of the growth of this company. It is very much similar to our influencer marketing business, where we get paid a commission on all the brand deals we bring the athletes, just like we would with influencers. There is a Venn diagram here where there is a tremendous amount of overlap, especially on the college athlete front.
Many of you are aware that college athletes can be paid after the Supreme Court ruling three years ago. How are college athletes paid? They're paid as influencers. Female athletes often make, I would say, almost always make more money off the court than they do on the court. Famously, with Caitlin Clark last year or others, you know that the rookie contract was, I think, $74,000 to play in the WNBA and then how much she can make off the court. Almost all athletes could. That's true of our roster as well. To be able to bring these dedicated female athletes and sportscasters meaningful money, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is our mission. We're doing it with the initial athletes we've signed. We've probably got a couple of dozen under management already. We launched that in October.
It's fast growing for us. This probably is the most exciting thing we've done that is the most misunderstood or not understood, I should say, by Wall. We launched an affiliate division of the digital department, an influencer marketing. What does affiliate mean? Any quarter's revenue of last year. We think that's a sign of potentially an opportunity. Even if you look at our estimated operating income for this year, the current year, not 2026, you can see our enterprise to value divided by that. We think we're at an attractive multiple too. It's nice to be a microcap that can talk about a multiple of adjusted operating income. That led us to, first of all, we have a lot of our CEOs' own equity in our company. Most of our acquisitions were made with a 50/50 cash and stock.
That led to, well, I'll start buying our stock back. I bought $50,000 in September. I bought $50,000 in December. I entered into a 10b5, and we just finished. We passed the 90-day hold period. Two weeks ago, announced I would be buying $5,000 a week indefinitely. Now we just finished the second week, and that will be obviously $260,000 a year in 52 weeks until we feel that we can be fairly valued. Lastly, free cash flow. This is the Keith Goodman special of a major thought to leave you with. As we sit here and think about, okay, we're turning adjusted operating income positive, we think we can get to a very clear point of free cash flow because for two reasons. One, when we acquired all the companies, they came with office space.
We have three offices today in New York, two in LA. We will consolidate in the next the leases run out, thankfully, in 2026 and then 2027. That'll save us probably in the neighborhood of $1.250 million or $1.5 million a year. Lastly, we have the term loan with Bank United. We pay 7.5% interest on it, pay principal and interest every month. Last payment is September of 2028. That'll save us about $2.25 million a year. Between the leases and the bank loan being paid off, that's $3.5 million.
If we don't grow the company at all, if that chart that you saw us going up stops today, $3.5 million of free cash flow in less than three and a half years on a company that has a market cap of $11 million. If I'm buying back the stock during that process, you can imagine it'd certainly be a topic of conversation with myself and the board: do we start a corporate buyback if the price doesn't move back to some type of fair value? It is discouraging, of course, to see a stock price after you've built this group and you've done the revenue growth and you've done the adjusted operating income improvement to see a price that actually went down last year. It is comforting to know that we are liquid and we can consider buying back our stock.
That's the story of Dolphin. Bam, baby. Ended it with four minutes, and I'll take any questions you have, if there are any. Anybody in here want to be an influencer? Just kidding. Yes.
If you're doing with equity acquisitions, you're going to continue probably to keep doing acquisitions. That means you're diluting shareholders?
Nope. We stopped with the acquisitions. We bought the group that we set out. I was at LD Micro in Los Angeles in 2016 when James Carbonara from Hayden [Hey Now Hire] was there, and we had already hired him that we set out to buy specific sets of skills. Not to quote Liam Neeson in Taken. We wanted film PR, music PR, culinary PR, influencer marketing. We needed celebrity booking. Now the group's done. I think that will also help us because people will see that there's not the next acquisition on the horizon and what will we pay for it. We hope we're sending a clearer message by filing a Form 4 every week. It shouldn't be additional dilution. Yes.
For your film development, do you have a slate of films that you guys develop specifically, or do you outsource those projects?
No, we develop internally. We have a woman named Emerson Davis who's been with us 18 years. She's here in New York, and we have team members also in Los Angeles led by Allison Sokol. We develop our own shows and TV movies. We option books. We pay for scripts. That's always been a secret superpower of Dolphin, if you will, that we're a production company that can actually we don't need to go get someone else to fund our ability to bring in projects.
Do you raise third-party capital, or do you source your own participation there? They're both?
We pay for the development, but then we typically. Sometimes we put in some of the capital, like in Blue Angels, which obviously worked very well for us. You're always trying to make the best educated decision of trading off. If you put in your own money, then you own more of it. Sometimes it's nice to still own 20% of something and put up no capital.
Do you typically utilize presales when you're?
Yes. Yes. I remember when we did Max Steel, we presold over 2/3 of that budget, I think, or about 2/3 of that budget. There's a great example of how you can really deleverage yourself. Back in the days when we were "just" a production company for those first 20 years, that's what we built up the practice to do. We could presell, which gave us power in the market. You can make a $10 million movie with $2 million of equity.
Do you act as your own sales agent, or do you?
We did. Nowadays, we tend to partner with—we sold Blue Angels with CAA, which is a, if you know it, it's a big talent agency in Los Angeles. We do a lot with CAA, actually, across all of our divisions. Many of our top talent are often represented there. We work with all the agencies, and it's been good for us. Of course. Yes, Jennifer.
Can you talk a little bit about how we should think about revenue and what portion might be sort of recurring, maybe have good visibility on versus Special Projects?
Others.
More of the long-haul kind of.
Yeah. The nice part about the PR business is it's heavily retainer. You have a lot of visibility. You tend to have a tremendous amount of repeat clients or continuing clients, quite frankly. I think what Wall Street may not appreciate sometimes is just both how diversified our revenue is and how forecastable it is. You do have the occasional individual projects that'll come in and jolt you, but we have a good visibility months ahead of what our revenue is.
Any other questions?
I hit red. Perfect. Thank you, guys.