Lesson
Early Entrepreneurship
Starting, owning, and sustaining a venture for roughly six years — the unglamorous discipline of keeping something running.
Case Study — Historical
The Sports Jury
Before his hospitality leadership career became the center of his professional path, William founded and operated TheSportsJury.com, an early independent sports-media platform. The venture gave him hands-on experience in website administration, writer coordination, publishing workflows, traffic growth, and online audience development.
- 2008–2014
- Founder & Operator
- Contributor Model
- ~100k Monthly Uniques at Peak
The Venture
An independent sports-media site, built before the model was obvious
The Sports Jury was an independent sports-media website operated from approximately 2008 to 2014 — a contributor-driven publication where writers covered the games, storylines, and debates of the era for a growing online audience.
William describes it as “Bleacher Report before Bleacher Report” — an open platform where sports writers could publish, build a byline, and reach readers without waiting for a traditional media gatekeeper. The contributor model was the core of the site: recruit capable writers, give them a clear editorial lane, and keep the publishing engine running on a steady cadence.
The venture was an early, hands-on education in what it takes to run an online publication end to end — the site itself, the people writing for it, and the audience reading it.
As founder and operator, William owned every layer: site administration and publishing infrastructure, editorial coordination across a roster of contributors, content scheduling, and the steady work of growing traffic month over month. None of it was outsourced; the platform ran because its operator understood each moving part.
That end-to-end ownership — systems, people, and audience together — is the through-line connecting The Sports Jury to the ventures and operating roles that followed it.
Operating the Platform
Writers, workflow, and audience growth
Running The Sports Jury meant managing a full publishing operation: finding and recruiting writers, coordinating who covered what, keeping an editorial workflow moving, holding a publishing cadence readers could rely on, and administering the site itself — all while growing the audience to roughly 100,000 unique monthly visitors at its peak.
- Writer recruitment and coordination across a distributed contributor roster.
- Editorial workflow — assignments, review, and scheduling from pitch to publish.
- A consistent publishing cadence that kept the site fresh and readers returning.
- Site administration: platform upkeep, publishing tools, and day-to-day operations.
- Audience development — steady traffic growth measured month over month.
~100k
Unique monthly visitors
At the site's peak.
6 yrs
Founded and operated
Approximately 2008 through 2014.
Contributor
Driven publishing model
A roster of writers coordinated by a single operator.
Writers & Reach
A platform writers used to get somewhere
The clearest measure of a contributor platform is what it does for its contributors. Several writers connected to The Sports Jury went on to wider visibility in sports media.
In the early 2010s, several writers connected to the project made appearances or had work featured through SportsIllustrated.com — a meaningful marker for an independent site operating outside the established sports-media ecosystem. For the writers, The Sports Jury was a working byline and a proving ground; for William, their reach validated the model: recruit well, edit consistently, publish reliably, and the platform lifts the people on it.
What It Taught
A supporting chapter — and a durable foundation
The Sports Jury was an early chapter, not the headline of William's career. Its value is what it established: working fluency in building and operating things online, earned years before that skill set became relevant to his later work.
Lesson
Web Publishing
Hands-on site administration, publishing workflows, and content operations learned by doing rather than delegating.
Lesson
Audience Development
Growing traffic deliberately — understanding what readers return for and building a cadence that earns the habit.
Lesson
Managing Contributors
Coordinating creative people toward a shared standard — recruiting, editing, and keeping a distributed roster productive.
Those lessons carried forward in proportion. The systems thinking and operational ownership reappeared in William’s hospitality work — PMS-based systems, revenue discipline, team coordination — and the instinct for organizing information into usable online products now informs his current web ventures in civic transparency and hospitality revenue intelligence.
Professional inquiries
William is available for professional inquiries related to hospitality revenue strategy, open-records research, civic-transparency tools, web ventures, and business-development concepts.