Stein Studios · Confidential Business Plan · July 2026
The Experience Dividend Engine
Episodes fund themselves through seats and sponsors. Every finished film manufactures licenses, format, library, and demand — compounding across LINX and AXIOM. The plan for the experiential media empire.
$0
paid by the owner of a ~$1M/week vessel — access traded for story
$0K
market-proven price of one brand license schedule — Damen, executed
0%
gross margin on substrate consulting vs 40.5% on production
0
aftermarket windows on every film the studio owns outright
The Plan▾
Svalbard · Ep.01 · Stein Studios
01 · The Audit
Where the business actually is
Built from the 2024–2025 returns, the reconciled Ep.01 ledger, and every executed contract. The honest baseline: 2025 looked like a $231K company — but two-thirds of it was the founder's face on a television show. The production line itself netted roughly $10–15K. That is the number this plan multiplies.
Revenue history — and what it was made of
$ thousands · 2026 = booked + committed as of July
Studio production & consultingFounder on-camera (GTGO)2026 projected remainder
Gross margin by line — every bar is a real, delivered engagement
% gross margin
*Carries reasonable-compensation and SSTB exposure and consumes 100% of founder time — capped at one engagement per year. The strategic read: migrate the mix toward licensing and consulting.
What the balance sheet doesn't show: an access network no competitor can buy — 100+ expeditions, 50+ owner and operator relationships, crews that vouch fleet-wide — an irreplaceable footage library, a written and falsifiable playbook, and LINX booking-attribution-memory rails no studio on earth has. Stated just as plainly: total founder dependency, n=1 evidence, no recurring revenue yet, rights closing in flight.
"Ninety-nine percent have no access to the archive. Institutional memory has a shelf life — there is a window, and it is open now."
Ben Lyons · CEO, EYOS Expeditions — the replication-cost thesis: ~$1.1M to reshoot one week of this library
Antarctica · M/Y Octopus · Stein Studios
02 · The Model
Five engines, one flywheel
Nobody commissions the film — participation in the making of it funds it. Then the finished film manufactures four high-margin assets, the premiere sells the next season's seats, and the flywheel closes. Touch the nodes.
Engine detail
Touch a node
Hover or tap any engine to see its economics, its proof, and its rule.
Episode unit economics — 4 seats × $50K, ratified calibration
$ thousands per episode · every Ep.01 leak priced in
Worst case — two seats — is breakeven: the episode never loses money again. Licensing sits on top. Episodes are the fuel and the factory; licensing is the profit engine.
03 · The Profit Engine
The licensing rate card
Four products, one Master Project License, every deal a schedule — signed at premieres off the emotion of the screening, never cold-pitched. Renewals create the company's first recurring revenue.
L1 · Brand Partner
$35K · $60K · $150K
Supporting · Lead · Season Partner (3 episodes) — the Damen ask at Monaco. Credit, excerpts and stills for the brand's own channels, premiere presence. 24-month term, no sublicense, category exclusivity +50%, license activates on payment. Renewal at 40%/yr.
L2 · Bespoke Library
$15–50K per campaign
Named brand, named campaign, scoped footage. Never per-clip, never stock — priced off replication cost (~$1.1M to reshoot one La Datcha week), not runtime.
L3 · ED Format License
$25–50K per production
Owners, operators, and builders run the playbook on their vessels — they fund it; Stein Studios keeps exec-producer credit, mandatory LINX rails, right of first refusal to produce. Two inbound signals already exist, unpitched.
L4 · Distribution
Reach now · MGs Year 2
Festival laurels feed sales-agent attention feed platforms. Streaming and broadcast rights stay reserved to Stein Productions in every brand schedule — the rule that keeps the streamer window alive.
Named targets, warm network only: Damen (Season, at Monaco) · Nova Yachts (live, in charter-account credit) · EYOS (Presenting — partnership agreement in progress) · After You (format license, Ep.01 as demo) · Ice Axe, Furtenbach, Coral Triangle · Carl Erik Hagen, Guy Hands, Octopus. Adjacent gear and watch brands: Year 2, inbound only.
Anyone can film a walkthrough. Nobody else can be here.
The library — irreplaceable, owned outright, licensed forever
Antarctica · Stein Studios library
04 · The Library Aftermarket
Six windows after we own the film
The pre-production strategy funds the shoot — so the studio owns the assets outright. Then the film earns six more times, in a deliberate order. Window order is law: exclusivity products never silently kill the streamer window.
The windowing model
Guardrails, absolute: never sell copyright · streaming rights reserved everywhere · no stock, ever · no AI-training sales without re-consent and a Tribunal gate · every grant carries term, territory, channels, renewal.
05 · The Owner Pitch
The Owner Story Engine
The pitch to owners is never "we'll sell you charters." It is: we build your vessel's story engine. The reference case is the expedition-charter icon that storytelling built — chartered relentlessly, operating costs materially offset, resold at roughly its purchase price, the owner crediting brand and story.
1
A story worth sharing
The film, the record, the legacy artifact. Guaranteed — it is the deliverable.
Instrumented and reported, never promised. The attribution rig is the proof engine.
4
Resale documentation value
The professional record travels with the vessel when it sells. Story sells boats.
M/Y Solace · Dominica · Stein Studios
The promise line, signed into every deal: deliverables are the film, campaign assets, and distribution activity — never charter revenue. Under-promise. Instrument. Over-deliver.
06 · The Economics
Three years, real numbers
Conservative case, tied to delivered engagements and market-proven prices. The mix shifts until the company is an IP business with a production arm — licensing and library carrying ~40% of gross profit by 2027.
Revenue by engine + net — conservative case
$ thousands · midpoints of modeled ranges · a streamer outcome sits on top, deliberately unmodeled
Net (after all costs, deputized lead, founder comp)
$55–95K
$430–580K
$850K–1.2M
2025 production-line net was ≈ $10–15K. The 2028 conservative target is a 60–90× multiple on that line.
07 · The 10x Architecture
From producer to format house
The conservative track scales at the speed of one calendar. The 10x track changes the production function: pods produce, franchisees license the format, verticals multiply the surface — while the founder shoots one flagship a year and guards taste. The Experience Dividend was never a yachting model — it is a model for every access-gated world.
Expedition Yachting
Proven · EYOS exclusive
Heli-Ski & Polar
Inbound demand · 2027
Lodges & Africa
Open operators · 2027–28
Private Aviation
Same physics · 2028
Ratified · The Camera
Hybrid: flagship only
One yachting flagship per year shot personally — where presence prices highest. Pods and franchisees run the rest. The first pod episode is the moat-transferability test.
Ratified · EYOS
Exclusive in yachting only
EYOS as exclusive expedition-ops partner in yachting — partnership agreement in progress, reciprocal media-exclusivity on the table. Every other vertical open. Vertical expansion is the concentration fix.
Ratified · Owner promise
Story engine only
Charter lift instrumented, never promised. The signed promise line ships in every format deal.
Ratified · Risk capital
≤ $100K personal through 2027
Legal and insurance infrastructure pre-Monaco; EP-lead #1 gates on Monaco revenue; pod one mid-2027; the AXIOM fund is the 2028 unlock.
2028 net income by track — and what each requires to be TRUE
$ millions, midpoints · no monkey, no track
Four scale monkeys, each with a pre-committed kill rule: a pod episode ships without the founder aboard · a non-yacht vertical works · a third party pays a format royalty · a factual sales agent signs the property.
When
Hire
Comp shape
Unlocks
Q4 2026
Head of Production / EP-lead #1 — from the Ep.01 audition bench
$25–40K/episode + 10–15% of episode net
Pods; the founder-dependency fix
Q1 2027
Head of Partnerships & Licensing
Base + 15–20% commission on schedules
Licensing sold year-round
2027
Post supervisor (vendor retainer) · EP-lead #2 · fractional CFO
Retainer / per-episode
Cadence to 5–6 productions
2028
EP-lead #3 · Format & franchise director
Mixed
10–15 productions incl. franchise
Headcount discipline: ≤ 8 full-time-equivalents, ever. The AI operating substrate carries contracts, covenants, ledgers, debriefs, and CRM — people are hired only for what machines cannot do: hold a relationship, run a deck at sea, close a sponsor at dinner.
08 · Position
SWOT
The sharpest read: our strengths and our threats share one root — everything runs through relationships held personally, with entities we don't control. The scale architecture exists to institutionalize that root without killing it.
Strengths
The EYOS operations partnership — the only operator that can take productions where these stories live
Genuine storytelling taste + talent bench — what "anyone with a camera on a boat" cannot copy
The access network: 100+ expeditions, crews that vouch fleet-wide
Market-proven prices: $35K brand schedule, $20K seat sold sight-unseen, a $1M/wk vessel for $0
LINX rails — no other studio has its own booking, attribution, and memory infrastructure
A written, falsifiable playbook + an AI back office at a fraction of competitor opex
Weaknesses
Founder dependency: every 2024–26 dollar needed Stein's hands, face, or relationships
Evidence base of one production; patterns not yet proven portable
No recurring revenue yet; project cash only
Rights closing in flight; Ep.01 sailed uninsured; seat structure not yet legally classified
EYOS-adjacent concentration in the current pipeline
Opportunities
The Owner Story Engine — a product owners demonstrably want and nobody sells
An unclaimed category: no incumbent owns expedition-yacht storytelling
Damen season partnership + every new-build launch re-buying the library
Streamers hungry for authentic access-driven factual series
Multi-vertical format: heli-ski, aviation, lodges, islands — same physics
The AXIOM slate fund + library as appraisable IP — the liquidity path
Threats
Synthetic AI content deflating footage scarcity within 12–24 months
Subject-reputation tails: the library's value is hostage to who is on screen
Luxury-marketing downturn; charter market cyclicality
A funded clone with the distribution relationships we don't yet have
Champion churn at partner companies; partners building media in-house
09 · Risk Sensing
The unknown-unknowns radar
Unknown unknowns can't be listed — but the surface they breed on can be shrunk, and sensors can catch them early. Fourteen assumption-debt entries, re-scored quarterly under an adversarial red team. Touch a signal. The fire zone — fast-killing and currently blind — is what the next 100 days drags left.
Signal detail
Touch a signal
Each dot is an assumption the model currently holds — with its falsifier, its sensor, and its kill velocity.
One evening in Monaco is the revenue event for everything.
Ep.01 world premiere · Monaco Yacht Show · end September 2026
Monaco Yacht Show · Stein Studios
10 · Execution
The 100-day plan
July 14 → October 22, 2026. One constraint governs the calendar: the film must be finished, the rights closed, and the paper ready before the premiere.
Days 1–14
Collect + Close
Damen $50K lands · scoped talent release unblocks · Nova priced counter — the first licensing monkey · EYOS terms + title + reciprocal exclusivity · Master Project License drafted · seat-classification memo + insurance quote commissioned.
Days 15–45
Manufacture the Assets
The cut lands · Licensing Rate Card v1.0 · three Monaco one-pagers: tropics for Damen, heli-ski for UHNW seats, Antarctica for the owner · Guest Covenant + seat contracts · EP-lead shortlist · consulting #2 at 2.5×.
Days 46–75
Monaco — the Revenue Event
Premiere end-September · four seats at one price · Damen Season Partner $150K · first schedules signed off the screening · format-license conversations open · every seat booked through LINX.
Days 76–100
Lock the Winter Episode
Winning lane gets the T-14 legal lock · crew compact + gratuity budgeted · Tribunal gate on this model · fund go/no-go · scorecard against this page.
Standing kill rules: receivables escalate Jul 25 · the licensing monkey verdict lands Aug 1 · title clean by Sep 1 or the premiere is showcase-only · fewer than 2 seats by Oct 15 → re-price before any episode commitment.
11 · The Thesis
Really hard to get. Owned outright. Licensed forever.
Anyone can film a walkthrough. The edge is threefold and genuine: operations that reach places nobody else can run, storytelling with taste and talent, and the relationships that open the gangway. The Experience Dividend turns that edge into a self-funding production engine, a compounding library, and a licensable format — the experiential media empire, built one episode, one schedule, one window at a time.
Pending gates: Titan Council Tribunal · reference-case verification before external use · counsel memo on seat structure. This plan supersedes prior pricing-tier framing and is superseded only by its own next version.
