Feel roped into it. There's free coffee somewhere out there. Thank you all for coming. I don't see familiar faces, so maybe this will be an interesting presentation then. I'll go back to square one of Dolphin. Appreciate you coming to learn a little bit more about our company. We'll take you through a couple of slides and the most exciting one.
There'll be a quiz on it. Dolphin, company I started in 1996. The first 20 years of our company, pretty easy to tell. I'll show it on a slide. We produced TV and film. That's what we did. Sold it around the world. Most known for almost a decade-long partnership with Nickelodeon. We made a lot of kid shows. If you have kids the right age, we were a big hit.
Shows like Zoey 101 and Ned's Declassified, et cetera. The reason why that's important is two reasons. One, we were very early in seeing digital. I remember when the three dads sold YouTube to Google. I was mentioning that to Gordon in a meeting earlier. We saw the rise of influencer marketing.
The second thing that happened was by the time we got to 2016, we put our first feature films in the market, all in the family YA space. We had a documentary with a concert movie with Justin Bieber, he was 18 at the time, and a co-production with Mattel. I always like to joke, I wish it was Barbie, but it was Max Steel.
It was in doing features. The biggest difference if you're not in that business between TV and features from a producer standpoint is that when you deliver a television series, in the U.S., the network markets it. Now we own the show internationally, so we were marketing it on YouTube and other things.
You don't have to worry about marketing it. Whereas with film, somebody's worrying about marketing it to get you to go to see the film. The idea that came in 2016 is what would happen, betting on what we now know has happened.
The streaming wars would happen. Disney had already announced they were going to pull their content off Netflix. You knew they were going to start their own streaming service, that there would be a lot of content made and somebody was going to have to promote it.
We had just hired our first PR firm and we thought, one of the things in entertainment is that these PR firms are siloed. There's PR firms for film and TV, separate PR firms for music, separate PR firms for celebrity chefs. What would happen if you could marry the PR firms with what's now called influencer marketing, which was growing very fast then and is still growing very fast today. We started out, bought 42West.
I'll go through it, but in March of 2017, we applied to uplist to Nasdaq, which we accomplished in December of that year, with an acquisition strategy to build a group. To what end? You're going to see this in the PowerPoint too. The idea was, could this be a better mousetrap?
Could we build a microcap company that would be cash flow positive because of the collective revenue and profits of these PR firms and influencer marketing firms, then use that group to take ownership stakes in some of the things we were marketing, which would give us the optionality or the big upside. Hopefully build a better mousetrap to get those big return potentials, without the cash burn.
Today, we've finished building the group. We talk about Dolphin in three pillars. You could argue it's just two, we have Dolphin Marketing, which is the collective of the group. Dolphin Entertainment, which is we can still make content. It's what we've known how to do for 30 years, we have a couple of things we can talk about.
Dolphin Ventures, that's what we call taking ownership stakes in certain companies or assets that we're marketing. Everyone you see here, by the way, throughout the whole thing will be clients. We shortened it for an investor presentation, if we had walked through on the entertainment side, this is how the company started, like I mentioned, TV, digital, feature films, documentaries, you'll see that coming.
The Dolphin Marketing, 42West does movie and TV marketing. Obviously, Tom's a client, he's pretty well-known, I understand. Acquired them for their best-in-class in the entertainment business for film and TV. Period, full stop. Eight Best Picture winners in 20 years, probably 50, 60 independent feature films a year. The dominant player in film festivals. We had just had 16 at Tribeca last week, South by, Cannes, Sundance, all range of content.
They promote White Lotus, a huge showrunner, director business with Scorsese, Aaron Sorkin, and David Kelley. That's 42West. Once we had them, we could build the group. Shore Fire Media, Marilyn Laverty started this. It's the world's biggest music PR firm. We have 600 acts, starting with Mr. Springsteen, across all genres.
The Door, celebrity chefs. Rachael Ray's up there, Jean-Georges, countless. It's with the chefs that you get the restaurants, you get the hotels, and you get consumer products. A lot of money in pasta sauce, I learned, that type of thing.
Elle Communications is an impact PR firm, nonprofit work with a lot of celebrities on their foundations, as well as large multinational nonprofits. The Digital Dept. is our influencer marketing agency. We bought one in L.A. called Be Social. We bought one on the East Coast called Socialite. We merged them in 2023.
We represent over 300 influencers as a manager. We also do influencer marketing campaigns for brands separately. Lastly, Special Projects, which is a celebrity event company. We Design, curate, and get there the celebrities for major events. Like what? Academy Museum Gala, six events every New York Fashion Week, probably two to three dozen movie premieres or high-end TV series premieres a year.
You get the idea. We can book celebrities for commercial endorsement. Collectively, the combination of PR and influencer, general experiential, that is called, in marketing, earned media. You guys probably know that all of marketing can be divided in two, paid media or earned media. Paid is the province of ad agencies. You pay for placement, commercials, billboards, radio ads, whatever.
Earned media, back in the old days of 10 years ago, just meant PR, but influencers bucket it with earned because when influencer marketing started, you didn't pay the influencers. Now you most assuredly do pay the influencers. The combination of PR and influencer in today's world can launch consumer products.
Matter of fact, that could be the entirety of the marketing campaign. That's how the world's changed since I started in this business in 1996, any business. If you wanted to launch a laundry detergent in 1996, you better be P&G because it took a lot of paid advertising dollars to buy ads on daytime TV or wherever you wanted to put your money. There's no internet, there's no influencers.
Today, you can launch product on the internet, I've got multiple examples of this, some of it on our roster, and sell the company you started that product with. Susan Yara did it for $325 million in three years on a skincare line, only with influencer marketing and PR, as I'm sure many in the room know.
That was the bet of building this group. Pretty proud of the group since I did nothing to earn this except collect them. Last year, we were named Agency of the Year, and you can see why. The supergroup idea, those are all the CEOs. You can see we're heavily female. Probably more than two-thirds of our company are female, and those women have built just drop-dead gorgeous companies.
If we had the whole long PowerPoint that it would've had two slides on each company, you would've seen the sample clients of each company, and they're all elite. Yep. They're on the website. Because most of the time people know Dolphin, so I go through that very quickly.
That's the Dolphin that you're going to see our revenue and our profit coming in a couple slides, that builds the better mouse trap we hope, this solid growth and those metrics. Why did we put the group together? At LD Micro, heaven forbid if I'm allowed to mention a different conference, or in 2017, 2018, and 2019, I'd be in a room like this. We would've just bought the company for that year.
We're only halfway through building the group, and I would point to the vision of guys, if you had these elite companies, elite marketing companies, what would you do with it? Well, we knew the answer from when we started putting it together, which is if you have that group, you can take ownership stakes in your selection of things you want to market. Dolphin Ventures.
Now, that begs the question, what types of assets do you want to own? The types of assets that our form of marketing will most likely influence success. That's the North Star. We're not going to take ownership stakes in semiconductor chips or energy companies or things we don't know anything about. We're going to take ownership stakes in one of three buckets almost all the time. Content, we think we're the best in the world at marketing that.
2, live events. Many live events are either music-based or food-based or both. We have the largest roster of celebrities in both those categories. 3, consumer products. Many consumer products sell off the marketing and not the quality of the product. I'm sorry, it's true. Think skincare, think cosmetics, think liquor.
If I blind taste tested this entire room with five tequilas, who's picking out Casamigos? I would argue one-fifth. That's part of the idea. There are certain categories that entertainment's always influenced, too, and quality matters too, like fashion. That's what we'd be looking to do. On the content side, we are pretty well known after 31 years, I hope. We struck up a 50/50 joint venture with IMAX to put documentaries in theaters.
We did this one, this was our first one a couple of years ago, on the Blue Angels. We had just finished promoting "Top Gun." Obviously, Blue Angels are the Navy pilots that inspired "Top Gun." This did very well for us. We put in $2 million, IMAX put in $2 million. We sold it to Amazon for $10.5 million.
That's the first one up. We're negotiating now for the second one, and we're excited about that. We put a movie in theaters earlier this year. This is a remake for those old enough in the room to remember the original "Youngblood." I should ask for a show of hands how many remember, but it had Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. We partnered. Again, we have the relationships.
When you have the elite marketing, your partners tend to be the elite distribution companies or production companies in whatever field. We were blessed to create a partnership with the NHL and the L.A. Kings. Spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the movie, Youngblood makes it to the NHL in the last scene of the movie, and he's playing for the L.A. Kings.
We had that in theaters in March. It's not a content play. I'm just telling you straight up. We're very much the consumer product live event venture play. We're slate. We want to build the slate of these types of ventures like that. This was our test case. That's a gin in market now in New York, with Rachael Ray I told the story earlier today.
This was an insight from one of our clients in that space who's the 800-pound gorilla in that world, Southern. Happens to be out of Miami too, where I'm from, but hey. They're a client of The Door, that culinary PR firm. Insight that gin was going to have a moment, that there's room in the market for gin.
We could get Southern to agree to distribute the gin. That gives you a huge head start when you're launching a consumer product. We went to Rachael, because as I learned, which I did not know, gin is the only liquor that's based off a recipe. Fun fact. We went to, who we think is the biggest chef in the world, certainly in the U.S., we feel.
Somebody that Southern already loved because she's a big ambassador for their two big promotional events of the year, South Beach Wine & Food Festival, New York City Wine & Food Festival. If you've ever gone, we do those promotions. We launched the gin in New York. It's working.
Southern's expanding it to New England this summer, hopefully it works out. We own a meaningful stake of that gin. Let's see how it goes. It's built to exit in the next two or three years. Now, imagine if we had six or seven of those in market. That's what we're shooting for in the next couple of years. Not all liquor, by the way.
When we think about that's why with that as a test case, we went in search of the ability to scale, because these consumer products, I don't care if it's a liquor, a sport drink, a skincare line, they need half a million dollars to put a sample product to market. They need a couple of million dollars to test it in a state or two, or in a regional market.
Then in failure, you're done. In success, you need $5 million and grow it. Within, maybe you do another round after that at the $15 million level, then you're trying to flip it with sales momentum to a strategic that sees the sales momentum and then is going to put it everywhere. It's the same old story.
We went, our biggest headline this year was February, with Rachael Ray as a good example, made a partnership with DealMaker. Some in the room I know who this is, DealMaker is the Southern of Reg A and Reg CF raises. As we said, the number 1 problem for growing or launching a celebrity brand, an influencer brand, a sports brand, an IP brand is, who's putting up the capital?
The second one is, who's marketing it? If you can get the product made. DealMaker, as you can see, the top three lines probably say it all. We introduced, thank you, James Carbonara from Hayden IR, our IR firm. They sense quick. I'm a failed attorney. I'll give it to you in two minutes. I was lucky enough to go to Harvard Law.
When I was there studying corporate law, this didn't exist. It's part of the JOBS Act under the Obama administration to make America more competitive in startups. If you don't know Reg CF and Reg A, allows you to raise up to $5 million in Reg CF online without verifying accredited investors, and up to $75 million in Reg A.
We are for those consumer products, we partner with DealMaker. They're very successful, as you can see, that 39% market share was 2025, they're doing it, I think over half their raises are New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq companies, but they're doing it. They had a motorcycle raise. They had an energy raise. We're not raising money. The ventures we do will raise directly into the venture.
Where Rebecca Kacaba, who started this company as a lawyer from Dentons, she and a partner left to build the legal compliance necessary for this. They did. Three years later, when they realized they were dependent on the investment banks for the business, they bought a broker-dealer. About four years ago, they bought a performance ad marketing company, which we know that world really well, so they could actually be the engine that drives.
Where this was such a great strategic partnership with the market leader in that space, well, we have all this earned media marketing, and then our products, when you're trying to get people to invest $1,000 for a share, and you're raising $2 million by getting 2,000 people around the country to do it, which one's easier to do it for? Rachael Ray's gin, or insert other company here?
When the consumer knows what you're marketing, a gin, and/or it's got a celebrity or influencer attached, it's very powerful. This is the same company, if you guys remember, when the Green Bay Packers sold, what? $69 million of their team to their fans, they used DealMaker.
We bonded after I flew to Toronto and met with Rebecca at the Toronto International Film Festival. She invited me in October of last year to their first conference in partnership or in conjunction with the New York Stock Exchange, which was about sports, investing in sports, and having a retail play in sports. We're very excited about that. We have a lot of connections in sports ourselves.
No, it isn't to transition strictly to that, but it's to leverage this group, and I have a couple more slides to show you, but to leverage this, and you got the short shrift because you didn't see slides on each one. It's the power of this group, which won that, and use that group to market either startup or growth opportunities for existing brands that are clients of ours, and take 10%, 15%, 20% of those.
That if you Let's hypothetically say that's exactly the type of range we have on that. Everyone knows Casamigos, or everyone knows The Rock's Teremana, which is going to shatter Casamigos' record. We're not saying, "Oh, wow, we can do that." What I do think, though, is we give the product categories we're already marketing a much better chance of success. Why?
We have the marketing, look, we made the deal with Southern at launch. That doesn't happen. I don't know that our gin's going to work, but I know if it does work and we sell it for $100 million, we have 10%, 15%, 20% of it on a market cap today of $13 million. What I don't think is being valued about our group yet, one of the things that's not being valued about, is that idea to be able to do this slate.
Now it's not, "Oh, it needs half a million to start a gin or $2 million a year later" which was self-funded by Rachael. It's that in success and we need $5 million, we have the way to do it. In success after that, we need $15 million, we have a way to do it.
Of course, you're only doing 15 if this thing's already at nine figures. That's very exciting for us. Here's Dolphin. Again, I sat in rooms like this since December of 2016 when I went to LD Micro and I said, "This is the idea I have." We hadn't bought the first company yet. It was buy a company, buy a company, buy a company, be patient.
Nine years later, right? Here's the growth of what we've done on the revenue. Last two years, of course, being we only have one analyst covering us for maximum what they project. Feel pretty good about beating it on 2026. Here's our adjusted operating, which is EBITDA. The reason we report that way is because when we buy these companies, they don't have capital expense. They're not CapEx heavy.
We incur a boatload of intangible assets that we have to amortize. Excuse me. We have heavy amortization costs, non-cash of course. If you back out the amortization on our operating level, the cash we're generating, you can see what we've done. We turned adjusted operating income or EBITDA, if you will, positive in 2024.
We tripled it last year. We expect to keep growing, or certainly our analyst does this year and next year. That's the better mousetrap. That's what we've built. This. You get the upside of the DealMaker. No debt.
These ventures, again, they don't hit our balance sheet. We own a piece of them. They're a separate company. We're a minority shareholder in it. The equity that gets raised into it to fund Rachael Ray's gin is equity only in that gin or only in that venture.
It's beautiful for us. Sorry, just a couple slides because I know I'm down to the last two minutes. Any questions? You can see why I say all this, just to put it in real stark economic terms. I'll just show slowly these slides. If you think we're a good investment at this stage because we've stopped buying the companies.
We were buying these companies half stock, half cash. There's no more dilution with the stock for any acquisitions. You can see where we are this year on this. You can see on this last slide all the CEOs, nobody sold to sell out. They wanted to be part of the group. The growth of their companies could come with the group. Me, you can see I started my 10B5-1 plan last April 1st. We had stopped the acquisitions.
I publicly declared I'm buying $5,000 stock every Monday. Two years later, well, now I'm a year and three months into what? Through December this year, I'll bought $500,000 of our stock. Somehow this has already wound up over 3% of the company. Probably be over 4% by the time I hit December.
This followed $100,000 I did after the last acquisition, which was July of 2024. I bought $100,000 of stock at the end of 2024. Done this. Probably do this again in 2027. Probably do it in 2028. You want a CEO that is buying his own story? That's where I am on a company that an entire market cap of $13 million, $14 million. Yeah, enterprise value plus debt minus cash. Because the end of last year, we had a little over $9 million of cash on the books. All right.
Any question in the last minute? Trying to be efficient with it. Do I know who the next James Bond is? I don't. James? I think we're going to have our first deal under DealMaker announced in the next two to three months. I hope to have, one minute left, two announced before the end of the year.
Those will all be Again, we only go into that if an exit gives us $10 million-plus at Dolphin. By the way, that's the low. We would hope that a successful exit is double, triple that. I would also stay tuned for another catalyst this summer that's not related to DealMaker. We're done acquiring. Every year we were talking about what's the next company. Now we get to play with that group, and it's a unique group. Appreciate your time today.
If you're just hearing our story for the first time nine years in, hopefully it's a good time to hear about us. Hopefully one or more of you will be buying alongside me on a weekly basis. Thank you, guys.