Joint Venture Partnering Was The Key To My 8 Figure Exit

A joint venture is a win-win situation because everybody gains and nobody loses. Joint ventures cut through the top-heavy expense of finding large numbers of customers from scratch. You don't need to do any market research. You don't need to buy a lot of expensive advertising. You don't need to weed out unqualified clients. Joint ventures drive right to the customer in one swoop. With a joint venture, you make someone else's already captured customers your client's customers. You capitalize instantly on the other's guy's resources, and he's glad to let you do it because he will capitalize on yours.

Joint ventures are a very powerful but underutilized guerrilla marketing strategy. Yet, according to another legendary marketing guru (and mentor to a few of the joint venture business experts in the world today, including me), Jay Abraham, less than 5% of all business owners use joint ventures properly and most don't know how to use them at all. Joint ventures are successful because of the old business rule that says: "People like to buy from someone they know and trust".

The best and most well-known example of a joint venture is when one company endorses (recommends) someone else's product or services to their customer list with whom they have a relationship and both share the additional profits. This is a win/win arrangement!

For those of you who do not know what a customer list is – it is a list of addresses and/or phone numbers/email addresses that a business owns of all the people who have previously bought from them. You have probably already been asked your name, address and/or phone number while purchasing something in a store, or your email when surfing the internet.

The owners can then communicate with you to try to sell you other things. Smart business owners regularly send helpful information to their customer lists, thus building a relationship with them. And when they have a good relationship, it's a lot easier to get them to buy more. The relationship between a business owner and his/her customers is the most valuable asset that a business has, the value of which isn't measured in dollars. However, if you know how to leverage it, it's as good as gold. In fact, when a business is sold, this asset is valued on the balance sheet.

You may not have realized it, but it can cost SIX TIMES AS MUCH to sell to a new buyer than to resell an existing buyer. And, it costs less and less every single time a client buys from the same business again. Eventually, when they buy from the same business enough, all of the money earned is practically pure profit.

On the flip side, using other people's mailing lists allows you to use their assets without paying for them. This way your acquisition cost is ZERO. More of the profit is yours because you don't have to pay for advertising expenses to earn them. This is the true power of Joint Ventures – leveraging other people's resources and assets or even your own for a minimal or sometimes even zero marketing investment upfront.

How To Avoid Bad Joint Venture Partnerships

Not everybody has a good experience with joint venture partnering, so here are a few pointers to help you avoid bad joint venture partnerships:
1. Have your partners sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (or Intellectual Property Rights Agreement) and have those agreements in your possession before telling your partners everything. Whether you have them sign something or not beforehand depends on the deal and the people you're working with. If you don't have a non-disclosure agreement, have your lawyer write one for you. Just be sure to explain in-depth what you need it for so he can draft a good one for you. If you can't afford to hire a lawyer, do a search for "free non-disclosure agreements" on Google. Save a few and then simply tweak them to include everything you need.