By Aaron Carpenter, Founder, ACV Consulting

Published: 7/1/2026

Building Strategic Planning Infrastructure for Thirty Ink: Stephen Curry's Purpose-Driven Business Collective

How Three Years of Planning Partnership Helped a Celebrity-Led Enterprise Move from Entrepreneurial Energy to Operational Discipline.

The Challenge

Thirty Ink, Stephen Curry's purpose-driven business collective, had built something remarkable: a portfolio of for-profit businesses, a nonprofit foundation, and a creative agency all organized around a unified mission to create equity, access, and opportunity for underrepresented communities. Gentleman's Cut bourbon, Underrated Golf and Basketball, Unanimous Media, SC30, 7K, Curry Academy, and Eat. Learn. Play. were each real businesses with real traction.

But rapid expansion had outpaced the infrastructure to support it. Business units were operating with limited coordination across the collective. Financial planning was improving but not yet rigorous enough to connect current-year decisions to long-range valuation targets. New opportunities were being pursued before core businesses had been fully optimized. And the one asset every business unit shared, Stephen's time, presence, and brand equity, was being managed reactively rather than strategically.

Leadership recognized the pattern and brought in support to help build the structures the enterprise needed. ACV was invited to work on this project in partnership with one of the Bay Area’s most prominent executive coaching and brand strategy experts.

The Approach

The engagement unfolded over three years, with each phase building on the last.

In year one, the focus was on establishing a common planning infrastructure across a genuinely diverse portfolio. Each business unit (consumer goods, media and entertainment, youth sports, nonprofit programming, athlete management, and creative services) needed its own plan built around goals and metrics appropriate to its specific model. The strategic consultants facilitated work sessions with each team, developed business-unit planning templates, and began surfacing cross-functional interdependencies that individual teams couldn't see from their own vantage points.

Year two introduced greater financial rigor and quarterly review processes. Teams developed multi-year revenue projections connected to 2030 valuation targets. Appearance and calendar planning for Stephen became a formal, cross-collective process rather than an ad hoc negotiation between competing business units. Resource allocation decisions that had previously been made implicitly became explicit, visible to leadership, and tied to strategic priorities.

Year three shifted focus to sustainability and depth. The planning frameworks were internalized by business unit leaders, who arrived at annual planning sessions with genuine ownership of their strategies and the financial data to support them. Multi-year planning connected current initiatives to the collective's long-range goals. The planning process itself had become a competitive advantage and an organizational asset.

Throughout the process, Eat. Learn. Play. received distinct attention as a nonprofit operating within, but independently from, the commercial collective. Strategic, programmatic, and financial planning for the foundation was developed in parallel with the commercial planning work, with careful attention to the legal and governance requirements that protect nonprofit integrity.

The Results

Over three years, Thirty Ink moved from operating primarily on entrepreneurial instinct to operating with genuine strategic discipline. Outcomes included:

• Development of business unit strategic plans with clear goals, defined accountability, and financially grounded projections across all major entities.

• Establishment of quarterly leadership review processes that connected performance to the plan.

• Improved management of Stephen's appearance calendar and time allocation across the collective.

• Multi-year revenue and valuation planning connecting 2025 business targets to the collective's 2030 goals.

• Meaningful growth in Eat. Learn. Play's programmatic investment alongside strengthened measurement and evaluation practices.

The planning work also contributed to the organizational readiness that has supported Thirty Ink's continued growth, demonstrating to investors and partners not just the power of the Curry brand but the operational credibility of the enterprise behind it.

The Insight

For celebrity-associated enterprises, strategic planning is not primarily a financial exercise. It is an organizational development challenge. The goal is building shared language, decision-making frameworks, and accountability structures that allow a diverse collection of teams — each with its own model, mission, and relationship to a central brand asset — to operate with coherence and discipline.

When that infrastructure exists, the enterprise can do something that celebrity brands rarely achieve: grow and evolve independently of any single moment in the spotlight. The brand becomes something the organization earns every day, not something it merely inherits. That is the real return on committing to actionable strategic planning work.

At ACV Consulting, we apply this same strategic planning discipline to consumer brands navigating growth, organizational complexity, and leadership transitions through our Fractional CMO services.

Ready for more Thirty Ink insight? View the Case Study.