New Format | Porter Wills

The idea has lived too long in the wrong shape.

A concept in the right shape takes weeks to build. A concept in the wrong shape can sit for years. Most new sports formats never make it into a real investor conversation because the work that comes before the conversation never gets done properly.

This is how Porter Wills takes a new sports format from concept to investor ready. A worked example of the method, applied to a horse racing world championship built from scratch in 2 months.

One Story. Three Audiences.

A new format has 3 readers.
Most foundations are built for 1.

A new sports format has to land with 3 different audiences before it has a business. Participants have to understand why it is for them. Sponsors and media partners have to understand why it is commercial. Investors have to understand why it returns capital.

Most foundations are built for 1 of those 3 and retrofitted for the other 2. The retrofit is where new formats die. The 3 audiences end up reading 3 different businesses.

Porter Wills builds all 3 from the same thesis. 1 story. 3 readers. 3 surfaces. The same commercial truth running through every one of them.

The Foundation

1 thesis. 3 surfaces. Built together.

01 | Participants
The Brand
A name, a positioning platform and a visual system built for the audience that will actually watch, play and show up. Participants do not read a pitch deck. They read a logo, a homepage and a story. That layer has to be finished before the others get written, because the brand is the root the other 2 grow from.
02 | Sponsors & Media
The Commercial Narrative
The version of the story that runs in front of sponsors, broadcasters, host venues and media partners. A market sized in hard numbers. A competitive position that names what is missing from the category and why this format fills the gap. A revenue architecture that makes sense before a single deal is signed.
03 | Capital
The Investor Deck
A 40 page investor dossier and a 12 page summary. Built around the same thesis as the brand and the commercial narrative. The numbers match. The positioning matches. The market sizing matches. Nothing in the deck contradicts anything in the other 2 surfaces.
The Build

2 months.
4 phases.
The slow part was not the work.

A horse racing world championship concept had been sitting for 2 years with a stale name, a generic positioning and a deck that had never landed an investor. Porter Wills was brought in to rebuild everything a participant, a sponsor or an investor actually sees. Brand. Narrative. Deck. Website. Built from the ground up against a single commercial thesis.

Here is how it ran.

Delivered
Phase 01
Foundation
Brand
2 days from idea to approved brand.
Name, positioning, tone of voice and visual direction. Built against the thesis that a global sport with hundreds of billions in annual economic activity and no world championship is a gap, not a market to be studied. The brand is what turns a market observation into a property an investor can picture.
Why it was fast
The thesis was clear before the brand got drawn.
Most brand builds are slow because the thinking is unfinished. When the thinking is done, the brand is a week at most and a weekend if the founder is responsive.
Phase 02
Story
Commercial Narrative
1 week from approved brand to finished story.
The market sized. The category mapped. The competitive position named. The commercial model structured. Every sentence a sponsor, broadcaster or host venue would read before deciding whether to take a meeting.
The missing layer
Most new formats skip this phase.
The founder has the concept. The brand gets built. The deck gets written. The layer in between, the one that makes the commercial logic hold together across every audience, gets implied rather than written.
When the commercial narrative is missing, the deck sounds like a dream and the brand sounds like a campaign. They read as 2 different businesses.
Phase 03
Dossier
Investor Deck
1 week from finished story to investor ready dossier.
A 40 page dossier. A 12 page summary. Narrative flow. Storyboarded sections. Video script. AI generated imagery across the property's 10 host nations. Style guide. Every asset an investor sees, in 1 coherent system, written against the same thesis as the brand and the commercial narrative.
Coherence
Every surface says the same thing.
The founder walks into every conversation already knowing the answer to the question before it is asked.
Phase 04
Distribution
Website
1 hour and 10 minutes from domain access to live site.
The website is the last surface, not the first. It exists to hold the story the other 3 phases have already written. When the thinking is done and the assets are finished, a website is an afternoon.
The inversion
A website built before the thesis is decided becomes the thing the thesis has to work around.
A website built after the thesis is decided is a distribution layer, not a design project. This is the inversion most founders do not see.
What Was Slow

The work moved at the speed of decisions, not the speed of production.

2 months from engagement to investor ready. Porter Wills compresses the production. The decisions still belong to the founder.

Most of the timeline on a new format foundation is not the build. It is the thinking. What remains is the founder's own time, which is the only timeline the founder should actually be spending.

The Next Move

If the concept is ready, the foundation is a matter of weeks.

If the concept is still in a deck or a conversation, the foundation is the bridge that turns it into an investment case. Porter Wills runs a Brand Relevance Audit. 1 call. 1 page. 48 hours. It names what the foundation is missing and what it would take to close the gap.

If the concept is still early and the reader is not yet ready for an Audit, that is fine. The Audit is the entry point, not the first step. New format founders typically take a few conversations before they are ready to build.

Book the Audit
porterwills.co | confidential April 2026