Just gonna dump my latest TEW ongoings here.
I tend to gravitate to smaller companies - easier to manager a smaller roster, growing a company is more exciting than maintaining a company, etc - so nine times out of ten I'll go for a ZEN run, see if I can get it to top promotion in the country. Granted, that doesn't mean much when there's only four promotions in the country, but don't pop my bubble. Plus the slightly Chikara-esque arrangement without the internal baggage appeals to me.
I usually follow a good routine - Sign Black Flash for another high level workrate high flyer even if his stamina leaves something to be desired, and sign a handful of young talent with high star quality, charisma, or high flying potential, or just workers who I think 'sound cool' and would fit in ZEN without major profile changes. As a self-addressed rule, I try to restrict myself to hiring unemployed people only, and if I'm feeling frisky, I'd try to bring in Monday Next for a good main event star, or the likes of Vincent Victory & Gregory Grace, usually beyond their prime and likely to retire in a few years but might as well transfer their popularity to my guys and job the hell out of them while they're still mobile. Anyone under 20 in experience or stuck in the enchancement talent role are usually shoved into three or four pre-show multi-man matches until that grows, if only because I can't afford a developmental fed yet. About once every six months, I'd do a search for any unemployed workers nearing retirement with a significant amount of popularity, bring them in for a handful of shows to serve the same role as Victory & Grace before giving them the boot into the old folk's home.
This is usually pretty successful, and I usually climb pretty fairly. The longest run I've had with this was... Maybe six or seven years, before running into a brick wall. Could've improve any worker beyond 40 in popularity, so eventually the show reached a peak and couldn't grow. Couldn't figure it out. I'd be able to bring in a worker with 60 popularity, job them out to my top star at 40 popularity, but their popularity wouldn't grow. I was probably missing some semi-notable factor in transferring popularity, but after about a year of no real growth I eventually threw in the towel, booked a purposefully terrible show, and gave up.
Since then I've spent more time creating workers for projects that never actually get off the ground and using TEW as a tool for such (FWA, nGw, various e-fed shenanigans), but I've been kinda-sorta feeling the urge to give an actual promotion run another go, maybe with ZEN, maybe with a different promotion, maybe with an unknowns-only promotion, who knows. I don't want to run into the same brick wall that killed my interest in the previous run, any tips or suggestions to try and bypass that brick wall?