The Story

I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. For most of it, my identity was wrapped up in that. The wins, the visible ones, the kind you could point to. They started to appear, and then COVID erased them. My business. And then me.

What followed was about three years of hard days. Depression. Withdrawal from the belief that it was ever going to get better.

Life happens for us, not to us. I didn't believe that during those years. I believe it now. And the difference between those two versions of me is the only thing this story is actually about.

Life happens for us, not to us.

I've had the privilege of losing what feels like everything, and in it, found that what once felt like everything was actually nothing at all, and what remained turned out to be everything.

What remained was my family. And in the middle of that spiral, my son, who was 13, asked to start kart racing.

It was money we didn't have. It was time I couldn't justify. It was every reason a responsible person would say no. I said yes because I couldn't bear the idea that my failure was going to leak into his life directly. Whatever I'd lost, he wasn't going to lose with me.

At first, I prayed for wins. Not for him, for me. Everything in my world felt like a losing proposition, and I wanted the track to be the one place the math worked out. It didn't. The wins didn't come. He didn't take his first checkered flag until halfway through his second season.

But about halfway through year one, something shifted. Not on the scoreboard, in him. He started to improve. Not in the way that shows up in lap times first, but in the way that shows up in how a kid carries himself between sessions. The fight was there. The will to learn was there. And I started to notice that the win I'd been praying for had already arrived. It just wasn't the one I'd been keeping score of.

Motorsport is competitive suffering. You can get everything right, pace dialed in, machine running perfectly, and one mistake from yourself or a driver near you ends the day with nothing to show for it but broken parts and a sad story. That's the sport. That's also the lesson. You keep going anyway, because progression is what keeps us alive, and progression is what kept Motorsport alive for us.

The frustration turned into obsession. Reading, watching, listening to anything karting related. Scrapping together money, time, energy to race a little more. Growing together as a team of two at every step.

And somewhere in there, the scorecard rebalanced. I hadn't lost everything, or even anything. I had been given the time to share my energy with my son. The thing I'd been chasing as an entrepreneur, visible wins, proof of self, had pulled me away from my family for years. If I'd gotten what I was after back then, karting wouldn't have happened. The van rides wouldn't have happened. None of this would have happened. The collapse was the gift. I just couldn't read the card.

The collapse was the gift. I just couldn't read the card.

The van rides home are where this story lives. Even the worst weekends came with one guaranteed win. Hours in the front seats, just the two of us. That's the place where a teenager who won't talk about anything at the dinner table will talk about everything. Friends. Social pressure. Girls. Politics. Religion. School. The big questions. We weren't father and son in the van. We were two guys who'd just been through the same day, talking about life as peers.

That's the power of Motorsport when you're on the inside. Win or lose, it's distributed equally to the team. We were a team of two, and all of it, the blame, the victory, the long quiet stretches of highway, rested on the two dudes in the front seats.

It was on one of those drives, somewhere on a long stretch of highway, that I brought up something he'd said to me when he was ten. I was trying to pry information out of him the way fathers do. I'd asked what kind of work adults did that seemed interesting. He said, “I'm not sure, Dad.” So I tried it inverted. What kind of work looked uninteresting? He paused, looking defeated that he didn't have a quick answer. Then he said, “I'm not sure, Dad. I just know that I don't want to be forgotten.”

I went silent. I wasn't expecting philosophical depth from a ten year old. I told him, “then let's make it our goal to ensure that doesn't happen.”

That line became a north star in my parenting. When he needed a nudge, about a friend, a decision, a habit, I'd ask him, “is that something someone who isn't going to be forgotten would do?” Big goals and a big life come from staying on course with the right discipline, the right people, the right determination. He's heard it for years now. He hasn't forgotten.

So in the van that day, I asked him about it again. We agreed the most important part of “not being forgotten” wasn't celebrity. It was by whom. Family was the answer. The question that remained was: what could we do that would make our lives so unforgettable to our future family members that they'd carry our names for generations?

We sat with the question for a while. What could “it” actually be? The accomplishment had to be real, not a fantasy, not a lottery ticket, not something that required the universe to bend in our favor. It had to be a goal with a straight line.

Formula One was out. Too many uncontrollable variables, too much politics, too much luck disguised as merit. We'd never been interested in oval racing, so Indy was out, and anything dirt related was out with it. What we kept coming back to was sports car racing. The discipline rewards exactly what we were already learning to do. Show up, suffer well, get a little better, drive a long stint, hand the car off in working order or at least one piece. It's a sport that respects the team in the front seats.

It was early June. June produces some of the most prolific Motorsport events of the year, and the one that sits at the top of the calendar is Le Mans. He said it before I did. “What about Le Mans?”

What about Le Mans?

My heart sank as I let myself imagine it. Le Mans is the kind of goal that's achievable. Not easily. Not practically. But possible, for the right driver, with the right team, on the right path. It's a straight line. Long, but straight.

Le Mans could be described in a million words, but in that moment all I could think was: it ends on Father's Day. There is no higher accomplishment I can imagine than standing in pit lane, watching my son race and win at Le Mans, on Father's Day.

From that day forward, there has only been one plan.

PMG is the first big step. I told him I'd match energy to energy. And after watching him push harder, train harder, run more sim laps, log more gym reps, become a more complete driver, I matched it with the formation of this company. Every sponsor puts us one step closer. Every lap, every rep, every conversation. It's a goal of a million small steps. He's moving every day. We both are.

Make it come true, and accept the journey as it happens for you.

Forming PMG was the first step. Naming a goal isn't the same as building toward it, and the day after the van ride home, the question stopped being “what do we want?” and started being “how do we actually get there without it becoming another sob story with stickers on a car?”

That's where I have to stop being a father for a minute and tell you what I actually do for a living.

I've spent most of my career in marketing, advertising, and technology. I've built businesses, run campaigns, scaled platforms, and watched what works and what doesn't across more industries than I can list cleanly. Somewhere in those years I picked up a line I keep coming back to. What is repeatable becomes recurring. What is bespoke keeps you broke.

What is repeatable becomes recurring. What is bespoke keeps you broke.

That line is the entire reason PMG exists in the form it does, and it's the reason most amateur racing teams will never fund themselves the way they hope to.

Sponsorship in amateur Motorsport is broken. Not because the people in it are doing it wrong, but because the model they're trying to copy isn't theirs to copy. At the professional level, sponsorship works. A logo on a car that runs in a nationally televised series is at least somewhat measurable. There's an audience. There's reach. There's a quantifiable case. More than that, the major programs aren't really selling logos. They're selling access. Access to executive suites, hospitality, networks, and rooms that money alone can't open. That's a real product, and it commands real prices.

That product doesn't exist at the amateur level. There are no executive suites at most regional tracks. There is no national broadcast. The audience at the fence line is mostly other competitors and their families. So when an amateur team sells “sponsorship” using the pro model, what they're actually selling is a sticker that gets seen by a few hundred people who aren't anyone's customer. The sponsor knows it. The team knows it. Nobody says it out loud. It's a donation without the tax deduction.

The drivers and teams that have managed to attract sponsorship pay for it in a different currency. Time. I've talked to dozens of operators about sponsorship over the last few years, and the same complaint comes up over and over. They don't feel like drivers anymore. They don't feel like coaches or managers or supporting parents. They feel like marketing managers running an unpaid second job.

One team owner told me he had thirteen sponsors and thirteen unique marketing contracts to manage. He said it the way you'd describe a slow-motion car wreck. That conversation is the one that finally cemented it for me. The system isn't just inefficient. It's punishing the wrong people for the wrong work.

He described it the way you'd describe a slow-motion car wreck.

The deeper issue is a misunderstanding about what marketing actually is. Most teams approach sponsorship as: build an audience, then leverage it. Get fans, get followers, get attention, then sell access to that attention. It's not wrong, exactly. It works for the small handful of drivers who become genuine personalities. It also creates a bottleneck that almost no one clears, and it leaves everyone else either grinding for an audience that won't come or apologizing to sponsors for the size of the one they have.

Good marketing doesn't work like that. Good marketing is the inverse. Design the audience, then speak to it.

Design the audience, then speak to it.

That's the move. You don't sell what you have. You build what the buyer needs and you put it in front of the people who are already their customers. The audience doesn't have to be ours. It has to be theirs.

That's the model Prospect Motorsports Group is built on. The name isn't an accident. We prospect for our sponsors. Every sponsor we onboard designs their target audience with us. We define exactly who their buyers are, what they look like, where they spend time online, and how to reach them. Then we produce co-branded Motorsport content as the creative wrapper and distribute it programmatically into that audience. Display ads, streaming TV, connected audio, the channels their actual buyers are already in. The Motorsport content is the differentiator. The targeting is the product. Their audience hears their message, wrapped in a story most ads can't tell.

The result is something that looks nothing like traditional sponsorship. The sponsor's success isn't tied to where we finish on Sunday. It isn't tied to how many people are at the track or how many follow our team online. A B2B company doesn't need a large Instagram audience of 18-to-30-year-old race fans. They need their actual buyers to see them, remember them, and choose them. That's what the campaigns deliver.

And that's where the line comes back. What is repeatable becomes recurring. The PMG model is repeatable because every sponsor goes through the same architecture. Audience definition, asset production, content library, programmatic deployment, optimization. The work is the same. The output is custom to them. The sponsor's spend correlates directly to the results we produce, which means the better we get at this, the more they invest, and the longer they stay.

The architecture, every sponsor

When we first started selling this model, the response surprised me. It landed hardest with entrepreneurs and operators. People who run businesses and know what marketing actually costs and what it actually returns. The conversation stopped feeling like a sponsorship pitch and started feeling like a marketing conversation, because that's what it is. The donation framing disappears when the buyer can see the math. Curiosity replaces obligation.

That curiosity is what we've been building on. PMG isn't asking sponsors to believe in our racing. We're asking them to believe in the model, and we're proving the model with their own results. The racing is the why. The campaigns are the how. The proof is in their pipeline.

Which brings us back to the line my son gave me when he was ten. I don't want to be forgotten.

That sentence shaped a parenting decision, and then a racing goal, and then a company. It turns out it also describes what every business is actually trying to buy when they spend on advertising. They don't want to be forgotten by the people who could become their customers. The visuals fade. The audience moves on. The brands that win are the ones that stay in front of the right buyers long enough to be remembered when the buying decision happens.

That's not just a parenting principle. That's the marketing principle. And it's the seam that runs through everything we're building next, starting with the Wisconsin companies ready to build something different alongside us.

The word “legacy” is dangerous when you use it about yourself. It assumes a future you haven't earned and skips the part where you have to actually build it. So I'm not going to use it.

What I'll talk about instead is the work. The day-in, day-out, repeatable, unglamorous work that either compounds into something worth remembering or doesn't. We don't get to decide which one. We only get to decide whether we keep showing up.

Here's the question I keep returning to. What kind of life can be lived when suffering stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like purpose? What becomes possible when you stop asking why is this happening to me and start asking what is this making me capable of? What can you actually accomplish when you fully commit, accept that the journey has its own pace, and decide that it isn't over until you win?

That last part matters. It isn't over until we win. That's not bravado. It's a definition. We don't measure this project by quarters or seasons or whether a particular race went our way. We measure it by whether we got up the next day and kept going. As long as that's true, we haven't lost. We're just not done yet.

It isn't over until we win.

Which brings me to how we actually manage a goal this size, because “compete and win the 24 Hours of Le Mans” is the kind of statement that needs serious internal infrastructure or it collapses under its own weight. We use two frameworks.

The first is inevitability. Every action we take is chosen because it makes the next step inevitable. The goal itself has a sequence baked into it. Compete comes first. Win comes second. One can't happen without the other. So we work backward from each step and ask the same question every time: what can we do that makes the next step inevitable? Then we get to work on that. Not the win at Le Mans. The next step. The one we can actually move today.

We've turned that question into a tagline we use internally: Make the Impossible Inevitable. It isn't a slogan. It's a daily filter. Every decision, every spend, every conversation gets weighed against whether it moves the next step from “maybe” to “obviously going to happen.”

Make the Impossible Inevitable.

The second framework is the discipline that keeps the first one honest. We use a known-unknown matrix. There are known-knowns, the things we know we know about this project. There are known-unknowns, the things we know we don't know enough about and have to learn. There are unknown-knowns, the things we already know but haven't yet recognized why they'll matter. And there are unknown-unknowns, the things we can't see at all yet, the variables that will only reveal themselves through the work. That last category is the one that connects directly to what I wrote in Genesis. Accept the journey as it happens for you. Most of what shapes a life this ambitious lives in that fourth quadrant. You can't plan for it. You can only stay ready for it.

The matrix we run on

Inevitability gives us forward motion. The matrix keeps us humble about what we don't see yet. Together, they keep the work honest.

This is also where I have to say something out loud that's easier to leave unsaid. Le Mans is not guaranteed. We are not entitled to it. My son is not entitled to the seat. He has to consistently be one of the three fastest drivers on the team to keep it. That standard isn't softened because he's my kid. If anything, it's the opposite. The whole point is that we're building a real racing program, not a hobby with sponsors stapled to it. Real programs have performance standards. Ours does too, and they apply to him first.

The timeline is the same kind of honest. Five to seven years is the window we're aiming at. It's a real target with real urgency, and the faster the right partners join us, the faster the whole program moves. But the commitment isn't conditional on hitting that window. The results aren't tied to speed. They're tied to the relentless pursuit of what's possible when you don't stop.

The commitment isn't conditional on hitting that window. The results aren't tied to speed. They're tied to the relentless pursuit of what's possible when you don't stop.

That's the part that matters most. We can't promise we'll be the family that started at zero and won at Le Mans. Nobody can promise that. What we can promise is that we'll be the family that woke up every day and pushed to find out. That we kept building, kept improving, kept earning the next step. And along the way, we helped the right people and companies build something better than they could have on their own.

That last part is where this becomes a Wisconsin story.

Every great Wisconsin company was built the same way. Inevitable steps, taken in sequence, by founders who decided their enterprise was going to be built in this state and not somewhere else. Nobody built a real business in Wisconsin by accident. They picked the harder, slower, more grounded path because they believed the work was more important than the shortcut. That's the same instinct we're running on. We could chase this goal louder, faster, in places with more money and more attention. We're not going to. We're going to build it here, with the businesses that already understand how this kind of work compounds, because they've done it themselves.

The PMG model exists because we believe Wisconsin companies are exactly the kind of partners this project needs. Disciplined operators with real budgets, real customers, real things to grow. The campaigns we run for them won't depend on race results or follower counts or hype. They'll depend on whether we put their message in front of their actual buyers, consistently, long enough to be remembered. That's a job we know how to do, and it's a job that gets better the more partners we do it with.

Which brings the whole thing back to where it started. I don't want to be forgotten.

That's the line my son gave me when he was ten. It became a parenting principle, then a racing goal, then a company. And the longer I sit with it, the more I think it's actually not about fame at all. It never was. The way you don't get forgotten isn't by becoming famous. It's by being useful to people who outlast you. By building something that helps the next person remember themselves through what you made possible for them.

The way you don't get forgotten isn't by becoming famous. It's by being useful to people who outlast you.

That's the real legacy, if I'm allowed to use the word at the end. Not the trophy. Not the photograph in pit lane on Father's Day, even though I want it more than I can say. The legacy is whether the work was worth doing for the people who were touched by it along the way. The sponsors whose businesses grew. The families who watched and decided their own goal was possible. The drivers who saw a different model and built their version of it.

We don't know if we'll win at Le Mans. We do know we'll keep going until we either do, or until the work itself becomes the answer to the question that started this.

Make the impossible inevitable.

One day at a time.