Elizabeth Henson
Marketing Strategist & Event Host
Let's get one thing out of the way first.
Elizabeth is not a big creator. She’s a business coach with ~4,000 Instagram followers on her largest platform (Instagram) who also hosts local events in Virginia Beach every year.
And in the two months after meeting Justin Moore from Creator Wizard, she closed almost $10,000 in sponsorships.
If you've ever thought your audience is "too small" to land brand deals, Elizabeth's story might change your mind. Despite having a platform that looks unremarkable on paper, she just had the most profitable year of sponsorships she's ever had…
…and it had nothing to do with follower count.
Three Years of Learning the Hard Way
Elizabeth hosts an annual in-person event every April as a part of her coaching business. These are full-day experiences for coaches, consultants, and creative business owners in Virginia Beach who want to build a business doing what they love (Elizabeth's own mission for her work). Around 60 to 65 people show up every year, and costs between $10,000 and $12,000 to produce.
For two years straight, the event barely broke even on the sponsorship side.
Year one, she landed two sponsors. One of which was essentially a gift from her network (the CEO of an SMS marketing company she had gotten in with early, back when they were a startup). Elizabeth knew they had a marketing budget, and she was brave enough to ask.
The company showed up and engaged genuinely with attendees, exactly as Elizabeth had hoped. By the end of the event, everyone in the room had organically decided they needed SMS marketing in their business.
The other sponsor took a different approach:
They negotiated an affiliate commission deal, rather than paying up front. Elizabeth got them nine one-on-one appointments, though the company wasn’t able to close any of them.
In hindsight, Elizabeth knew exactly what went wrong.
"I could have looked at [sponsorships] more like a marketing consultant," she said. "I know my people. I probably could have said, ‘hey, if you want to get the most out of it, sit with them and engage with them throughout the event. They're going to be more likely to want to work with you than just sitting down for a sales call’."
At the time, Elizabeth thought her sole job as a host was to provide her sponsors with leads. "My old mentality was, what do you mean? I'm getting them the people. They should be able to convert them. It's not my job to make the sale," she said.
For Elizabeth, whatever the brand did after the fact was their problem.
Year two was worse.
Elizabeth sent 30-35 cold pitches to brands and converted effectively zero. The only sponsors she did land were business friends.
"I had no idea what I was doing with the pitches," she said.
A Last-Minute Decision (That Changed The Course of Her Business)
In early February of 2025, Elizabeth was at a Mastermind event in Minneapolis when she met Justin Moore from Creator Wizard.
She got his book, heard about Sponsor Games (Justin's live event built around helping creators land brand deals) and made a last-minute decision to go.
Which was, of course, expensive.
"I'm a mom of three," she said. "I booked it last minute, so of course it was way more expensive than it needed to be."
Elizabeth went anyway.
She binged Justin's podcast on the way to the event, soaking up as much as she could before she'd even arrived, and came home with a completely different framework for thinking about sponsorships.
The old version of Elizabeth would walk into a pitch conversation and show her statistics:
Here's my audience
Here's my event
Here's your opportunity to meet 60 business owners
Take it or leave it
The new version of Elizabeth understood that brands care most about their own goals (conversions, awareness, etc). And your job, if you want to earn their money, is to understand those goals deeply enough to show them how working with you gets them there.
"Justin really taught me that it's not about my platform at all. It's about knowing and understanding what the brand needs and wants, and how can I help them get there, regardless of the size of my audience."
Elizabeth also left Sponsor Games with a deal already in hand. She pitched a sponsor while she was still there and closed it before flying home.
Year 3: The Massive Payoff
Back home and preparing for her April event, Elizabeth put the new framework she learned at Sponsor Games to work.
First, she created her sponsorship “packages”:
The top package included speaking time at the event
The middle tier included podcast episodes, a dedicated email blast, and swag bag placement
The entry-level option was a smaller contribution in exchange for logo visibility.
Structurally, these packages were pretty similar to what she'd already been offering in years one and two. The tiers themselves weren't new.
But instead of leading pitches with her platform, Elizabeth led with the brand's goals. She started researching what campaigns potential sponsors had been running, what their marketing objectives were, whether they needed awareness or retention or conversion.
She also learned to speak the language of "outcomes" (meaning, talking about retention and conversion campaigns, in addition to follower count and audience size).
And this year, the sponsors came.
More of them.
Better ones.
(One of the sponsors was Justin Moore himself, who provided every attendee with a copy of his book, Sponsor Magnet!)
For the first time in 3 years, Elizabeth’s event covered its own costs.
And because it covered its own costs, the $30,000 to $40,000 Elizabeth generates by selling her coaching program at the event (her main objective) came out the other side as profit.
"If we had not had the sponsors, we would have broken even again for the third year," she said. "Because the sponsors covered the expenses of the event, it was profitable for the first time."
Consider this:
Elizabeth’s event went from a $300 deficit to a $10,000 profit.
The attendee count stayed the same, and so did the ticket prices. The only real difference for Elizabeth was her approach to talking with brands.
A difference that turned out to be massive.
"There's no creator or business too small," she said. "I have 4,000 followers and I did $10,000 in sponsored deals in two months. There's no business that's too small."
Wanna see how Justin Moore and his team of expert Sponsorship Coaches can help you land sponsors like Elizabeth did, regardless of your audience size? See if you qualify for a free Sponsorship Strategy Session →
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