The call

Doc McGhee called. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, the bands do — over the years he’s managed and produced Kiss, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Hootie & the Blowfish, and dozens more, with a film about his own life now in production. Kiss had already sold its music rights to Universal Music. Now the band wanted to sell the brand itself, and Doc asked me to take the lead: build out the intellectual property and create new monetization opportunities that would make Kiss worth more to a prospective buyer.

I asked how long we had. “How’s thirty days?” he said. We took a little under two months.

What we did

My small team and I generated dozens of fully vetted ideas and organized them into six categories, each with its own set of winners. We narrowed the field to twelve monetization opportunities worth building — from a KISS-branded delivery burger concept and a digital collectibles platform to a new arena pyrotechnic show in the style of Cirque du Soleil — and packaged the whole program into a single board-ready presentation and film that reframed Kiss not as a catalog, but as a platform.

In the program

Thirty days to make a legend worth more. We took forty-five — and built twelve companies to do it.

Outcome

Less than a year later, Kiss was acquired for more than $320 million by Pop House Entertainment — itself the focus of one of our ideas — with a new Las Vegas venue now in development. The program helped raise the value of the brand by more than 50%, and the monetization roadmap continues with the new owners.