Ensure a successful joint venture with these six simple steps
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
In the last eight years, Mac Attram, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MindSpace Coaching, has generated over $25 million through joint ventures — proving that partnerships and ventures are a key way that entrepreneurs can use to build a business. In the latest episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about how entrepreneurs can use those to get noticed.
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A Win-Win Partnership
Mac didn’t really understand the power of joint ventures, collaborations, and partnerships until someone in his networking organisation asked if he can help some clients out. He had clients — through that someone — without doing marketing or paying for any social media and Google ads.
This was when he started learning about partnerships.
When it comes to joint ventures, you have to have the mindset that it’s got to be a win-win process. If it’s not a win for you and your partner, then there’s no point continuing because, at some point in the future, there will be elements of resentment.
In essence, joint ventures are win-win strategic partnerships between two or more people or companies that agree to leverage each other’s resources to make or save money. And for Mac, it’s the fastest, most lucrative, and least competitive form of marketing.
Rather than just marketing yourself in general, you can market yourself to strategic partners and get access to their customer base and resources.
The 6-Step Million-Dollar Joint Venture Process
When teaching clients how to make joint ventures work, there’s something that they at MindSpace Coaching call “The Million-Dollar Joint Venture Process,” which comprises six steps.
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Identify your ideal joint venture partner. This comes down to understanding that you can use joint ventures for different things — to make money, save money, or leverage other people’s resources. For instance, if you want to use joint ventures to grow your sales and attract more clients, then you have to identify a joint venture partner that can help you achieve these. And the easiest way to do that is to ask yourself: Who are my ideal clients? Who already has my ideal clients? Knowing all these, you can then make a list of 10 to 20 potential joint venture partners and companies you want to collaborate with.
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Contact your prospective partners. After making a list, you got to know how to contact them — whether it’s on phone or by visiting their office or going to the same networking organisation that they belong to. Once you’ve contacted them, all you’re going to do is build rapport with them — don’t sell them anything yet. Converse with them and understand what their business is and what they do. Apart from doing your own original research, get to know them deeper in terms of the challenges that they have, the opportunities that will be there should you partner with them, and what can you do to support them. Again, you have to have that win-win mentality.
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Create a compelling joint venture proposal. You have to put your proposal in writing.
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Present the proposal. After building a rapport, follow up with them — tell them you’ve met previously and you’ve mentioned something about how you can work and collaborate together. Bring up a possibility for them to make more money or save more money and explain how you can work together to achieve it. However, make sure that you present it very succinctly.
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Close the deal. Like a sales process, you have to close the deal. Put things in writing and get it signed. This way, everyone will understand how the joint venture is going to work and how both parties are going to win.
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Maximise what you’ve already done. Think about how can you do it again and again and again. In Mac’s case, he and his joint venture partners typically do two to three collaborative things every single year. He and his partners both win because their relationship has already been built.
Overcoming Distrust
Initially, there is distrust between partners. They don’t know you and you don’t really know them apart from the initial research that you’ve done. Therefore, the communication has to be made in a way that they’d understand that you’re coming with an opportunity; that they can win and you can win.
This is why building rapport is essential.
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As most entrepreneurs will know, building rapport is really about asking more questions, listening to a lot more, and talking less. It’s a sales process wherein you will be asking questions, identifying opportunities, and listening to see where your potential partner may have some challenges and how you can support them in those.
What’s Next After a Joint Venture is Formed?
Joint ventures introduce organisational changes and open up various possibilities.
So once you’ve created a new joint venture, you have to communicate that to your salespeople, marketing people, and operational people so they’d know exactly what will happen going forward.
This part is critical because this is where things can fall apart. If the clients of a joint venture partner call or email and nobody knows where these leads or potential businesses come from, then you can’t really offer service to them.
This is why you have to make sure that the communication between the joint venture partner and yourself has to be clear. Who’s the contact point? Who are the people who are going to talk in order to make sure that everything is smooth and delivered in the way that you intended? Communication internally and externally is paramount.
Successful Joint Venture Stories
Joint ventures, for most large corporations, are nothing new — they do it all the time.
Take British Airways, for example. They are in a strategic partnership with airlines, including Sri Lankan Airlines, Qatar Airways, Qantas, and many more. This venture has helped these airlines utilise each other’s resources, such as coach fares and logistics.
In 2016, Uber and Volvo also came together in a strategic partnership to create a driverless fleet. On their own, they couldn’t do the concept alone; together, they could make it work.
The same partnerships are happening in other industries. For instance, every time Pixar and Disney are making an animation movie together, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are partnering to create packaging products related to the film.
In the personal development space where Mac is, thought leaders Anthony Robbins and Dean Graziosi launched a joint venture called “Knowledge Business Blueprint” (now known as Knowledge Broker Blueprint) two years ago. Within just a two-week window from the time they presented and launched it, it generated about $33 million.
This is a partnership between two people who are great at what they do. Together, they launched a product, which is an online course, that serves thousands of people around the world.
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Mac also has a real estate client in Indonesia who used their joint venture process and systems. From 2019 to 2021, the client managed to triple her business from $15 million to $45 million.
He also has some clients though who don’t do as much as that but are still growing exponentially.
For example, his client named Anna is a coach. She wanted to speak internationally but she wasn’t pulling the trigger. She wasn’t going for it because she didn’t know how to build partnerships internationally. Then, using their joint venture process, she did a 10-minute phone call and was able to land a joint venture deal worth $40,000.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Like marriages, some business partnerships also don’t last.
One danger you have to watch out for is non-payment. If a joint venture is successful and payments are coming in — whether from clients or otherwise — you may not get the commissions that you are due because the other party is keeping all the money. To prevent that from happening, you have to create all these legal agreements.
And speaking of agreements, another danger you have to take note of is entering a joint venture only through a verbal agreement. Someone can easily claim that they didn’t say that; they said this.
Third is when after a period of time, you and your partner develop different agendas. It could be that your partner has already met the agenda that they initially wanted, and now they have a totally different one. It could prompt them to retract and you’d end up losing out.
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Another thing is that you’ve unfortunately teamed up with the wrong joint venture partner. In the beginning, you may have thought that they’re the right one. Everything proceeded well. And it’s only after some time that you realised that they’re not the right partner and what they promised or said is not the reality.
The fifth situation is where you could have just grown apart. Initially, both of you considered the joint venture good. But now, you’ve decided to go your separate ways.
You have to watch out for all these things so you won’t be tied into something that you can’t get out of.
Getting His Own Brand Noticed
Mac has about 20 years of being an entrepreneur in his own right. And for the past years, he’s had the privilege to train and coach hundreds of thousands of people in more than 50 countries.
Most people find him and MindSpace Coaching on social media and Google. But the biggest thing has been through joint ventures — wherein he’s been invited to come and speak on some major platforms around the world where his ideal clients are (mostly, in the personal and business development niches). He’s had the pleasure to speak on the same stages as Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Les Brown, and Robert Kiyosaki from the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” series.
He’s also getting noticed by getting featured on and adding value through podcasts like The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
To learn more about him and how you can benefit most from joint ventures, visit www.macattram.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
