What’s Your Peanut Butter and Chocolate Combination? AKA “Why Joint Venture?”
November 4, 2010 by Andrea J. Lee
Filed under Andrea Recommends, For Coaches
There are lots of reasons to pursue a joint venture. Here are a few; see if you can add any that pertain to your own circumstance:
- Make more money. By accessing your joint venture partner’s client database, you have the opportunity to make more sales, and of course, so does your partner by accessing yours!
- Lighten your workload. Many hands make light work when it comes to any project. If you decide to offer a TeleSeminar together, perhaps you’ll do the marketing and your joint venture partner will create the content. Whatever permutation of this, you’ll do less work and still cross the finish line.
- Increase creativity. Loneliness is a common experience among online business own¬ers. Joint venturing combats this, and as an added bonus, often leads to MUCH better ideas for products because the combination of your content together makes for something far fresher and more innovative than you could have come up with yourself. (That’s where the peanut butter and chocolate expression comes in.)
- Pave the way for future projects. Once you try a joint venture, and you find the right partner (more on this in the ‘How NOT to Mess Up a Joint Venture Kit’ below) you may find yourself hooked. By starting small, you get to know your partner, and can make wise decisions about how you could work even closer next time.
- Have fun. After all, inspiring or helping for a living is a gift in and of itself…when was the last time you thought about waiting tables or something else for a living? Sharing the joy of running an online business with someone who’s in the same boat can really shine a light on how fortunate we are.
So how to make the most out of Joint Venturing? 
After seeing all the benefits possible, you may be tempted to run out and grab the nearest warm body and offer them a joint venture. Probably not the best technique. 
That said, here are a few key points to bear in mind when entering the joint venture arena.
- Select your partners with care. The main criteria is that the partner should be someone who is already in touch with, or doing business with, people you want to do business with too.
- Get to know your partners. In preparation for approaching them with an invitation, sign up for their publications, visit their websites, read everything about them and their history. Try to understand their values and motivation as best you can from what they make public.
- Start asking, what value could I provide this partner? What do I have that they don’t? What could they be doing that they aren’t? What challenge or goals are they pursuing and how can I help them get there?
With this in mind, the best first step is to create a shortlist of potential joint venture partners. An excel spreadsheet would be nice since you’ll likely be tracking a few things over time.
Love the sound of a joint venture boost to your business but stuck on some aspect of this? Remember that one of the most important elements is negotiating the revenue share. I address that in full detail (sample scripts and exceptions included) in the mini-product below. For other questions or insights, leave your comments below.
