Joint Venture

Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level?

Do you want to expand your community, make fruitful new colleague relationships, grow your business, and even have a lot of fun doing it?

You can do all that with joint venture (JV) partnerships.

Just in case you’re unclear what a JV partnership is, here’s a definition: It’s when 2 or more organizations come together for the purpose of cross-promotion, expanding each other’s communities and visibilities, offering more to each other’s communities, and generally bringing in more business.

A JV partnership can happen both online and offline. It can be via email or social media, or of course in person and in conversations.

Why Pursue Joint Venture Partners?

The reason JV partnerships are so important is that as you grow your business, they’re one of the best ways to expand and grow your client community. If you want your business to expand, your community is going to need to expand.

You need more people to know about you, and a JV partnership is one of the quickest ways to get that exposure. It allows you to have direct access to like-minded entrepreneurs and their communities.

Who Should Do JV Partnerships & When?

JV partnerships are not only good if you’re starting out – they should happen throughout the lifespan of your business. And they’re not just for small business, either: lots of really big corporations do JV partnerships. For example, if you have a credit card that awards miles for an airline, that’s a JV partnership between the card company and the airline. Can you think of fast food offers to the local amusement park or movie theaters? All these are examples of two businesses coming together to cross-promote each other to build more business.

In addition to being vitally important to building your community, JV partnerships are also a lot of fun, and allow you to feel much more connected. So often when you’re a solo-preneur, you’re only connecting with clients. It’s a very different relationship when you connect with other entrepreneurs. It can be rewarding in different and very interesting ways, and there are so many enjoyable and worthwhile ways to team up.

Types of JV Partnerships

• Referral partner. For example, let’s say you’re a yoga instructor and you team up with a physical therapist in your neighborhood. Because you like the way the other works and you know that your clients could use each other’s services, you agree to promote one another to your own clients whenever it’s appropriate.
• Event promotion. You team up with another entrepreneur to promote an event (usually via email). This could be a special deal, a free class, or a website launch – anything that happens for only a short time or for one-time only. This works best for things that are not expensive – it should be either free or relatively inexpensive because the partner’s community is just getting to know you. Once those people are in your community, then they are more ready to engage in your services in a bigger way.
• Guest Hosting. When you are hosted by another entrepreneur either virtually or in real life. Maybe you’re a nutritional coach and you give a free or low-cost talk to a fitness center you partner with. Or you could be a guest speaker at a teleclass they are hosting. The host partner sets up the event and promotes you to their community.
• Host a Telesummit. Choose a topic for the telesummit and then connect with anywhere from 7 – 15 entrepreneurs who are experts on that topic. Host a different call each day where you interview one expert, or do it over the course of 2 days. Sometimes you can be the interviewer or sometimes the partner just gives a talk. These can be live or prerecorded. The partner gets a platform to speak from and make an offering to the listeners. As the organizer, what you receive is that the partner sends emails about the telesummit to their community, and anyone who registers becomes part of your community now. This can add up to many, many new people in your community.
• Gift Giveaway. A group of entrepreneurs or organizations, each with some kind of free gift to offer to the combined communities. The gift could be anything from an e-book to a manual to a free session of some kind. When you are the host of the giveaway, when someone registers for any of these giveaways, you capture their email address and they become part of your community. Similarly, when you are a participant, your business gets exposed to the communities of the host and the other participants.
• Joint Event. For example a yoga instructor and nutritional coach team up to do an afternoon workshop. You get similar audiences, cross-promote each other, and you both get lots of targeted exposure.
• Guest Blogging/Article Writing. If a partner sends out a newsletter or blog that is well-read, you can provide fresh content for them, and you get exposure to their community.
• Product/Service Partnership. For example, if your Pilates studio is down the street from a local shop selling workout gear, you might offer that your teachers will exclusively wear and recommend the shop’s leggings in exchange for a similar recommendation of your studio from the shop to their customers.
• Raffles and Auctions. Many schools and non-profit organizations need to raise money for supplies and extracurricular activities and frequently feature the services of local entrepreneurs as the biddable donated prizes. You get exposure to the school community, the school benefits from the money bid on your offer, and you will gain one new client for sure!

I hope this list has gotten your creative juices flowing and that you’re starting to think about possibilities for your business or soul-centered project. Are your internal gears turning? What other kinds of JV partnerships could you forge for your business?