A Joint Venture (JV) is also known as ‘business deal’, ‘strategic alliance’, or ‘strategic partnership’. Probably the simplest definition is that Joint venture is a win-win strategic partnership between two or more businesses or individuals who agree to leverage each other’s resources in order to achieve common economic objectives. Resources could be in the form of technology, relationships, access to existing customers, expertise, knowledge, credibility, employees, facilities, finance, etc.
Examples of Easy, Profitable and Simple Joint Venture Deals
Here are just a few examples of JV deals you can broker:
1. Tollgating
2. Reciprocal Arrangements
3. Sharing Resources
4. Promotional Partnerships
5. Create Profit Centers for Businesses
Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Method #1: Tollgating
Tollgating simply means finding a group of people with a high enough demand and connecting them with the source of supply. You then stand between them (like a tollgate collector) and collect money as buyers go through the tollgate. This method is also known as “Triangulation.”
Examples of Tollgating:
1. Let’s say that in your local area, there’s an Association of Architects. Say they have at least 50 members and they socialize weekly. If you’re able to persuade them to meet once a week at a specific restaurant or hotel, you can arrange a deal with the restaurant/hotel owner to give you a percentage of their weekly bill.
2. Another way you can tollgate is by finding successful businesses. There are businesses out there who are actually turning customers away because they are unable to meet the demand. Get them to pass the leads to you. Then you can direct these leads to another business who will do all the work. You then collect commissions for every converted lead.
3. Locate someone with a product to sell, and find someone who owns a list of customers who have a strong desire for the product in question. Get the list owner to endorse the product, and you collect commission from every sale made.
4. When a business goes bankrupt, make money by locating someone who is willing to: buy the old inventory, buy the old phone number in order to convert incoming callers, buy the database of customers, fulfill pending orders, take over the lease, etc.
Method #2: Reciprocal Arrangements
This is a I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine sort of arrangement.
The fact is that each business has strengths and weaknesses, and many business owners don’t know how to compensate for their weaknesses, thus producing problems. But a smart JV broker like you can address this by partnering up businesses with complementary qualities so that together they are stronger and more profitable.
Examples of Reciprocal Arrangements:
1. Barter – a magazine may agree to let a restaurant pay for a month’s worth of advertising by lettting the magazine’s key staff to eat for free for a set period of time; a marketing consultant may agree to help a fitness professional generate more leads in exchange for personal training.
2. Connect two businesses with products/services that complement each other. Get them to tap into each others customer base by getting them to continually endorse/promote each others goods to their own customers. For example, you can arrange for a beauty spa to promote a health club down the road (and vice versa); or encourage a hair salon to “reward” their loyal customers with gift certificates from a restaurant, thus driving potentially lifetime customers to the restaurant. In all cases, you collect a commission from any resulting sales.
Method #3: Sharing Existing Resources
You can leverage existing resources that are underutilized and make money in the process.
Examples of Sharing Resources:
1. You can launch a jewelry designer’s career by arranging to have her creations displayed along with the goods in a posh retail shop selling designer handbags. The jewelry designer doesn’t pay any rent, but she pays a commission to you and the retail shop owner every time she makes a sale.
2. You can make passive income by finding student tenants for landlords in your local area. You can semi-automate the process by giving a list of local accommodations to a person working in the Admissions Office of major Universities/schools in your area and ask them to actively help the student applicants find accommodations. Make sure to reward your contacts, of course.
3. Licensing – If you have (or know someone with) a system, intellectual resources, or any non-perishable intangibles that other people are willing to pay for, you can simply grant them rights to use these resources in exchange for a small fee. You can license a software, hard to get information, a useful research finding, a specialist equipment, etc. Bob Serling has a wealth of resources about licensing.
4. Piggybacking – you can take advantage of an existing infrastructure easily. For example, you can insert your promotional leaflet in the envelopes of a National direct mailing company who already mails 100,000 letters a month to their existing subscribers. Agree to give them a percentage of your profits.
Method #4: Promotional Partnerships
Are you (or do you know) someone who is an expert salesperson/marketer? You can team up with someone who has a product/service to sell but is clueless about how to sell it.
1. Become an Agent – You can help book speakers, bands, entertainers, artists, performers, etc. and get paid a healthy commission.
2. Affiliate Marketing – You can market/sell other people’s products and gain a commission for every sale made. If you don’t want to do the selling, you can get someone else to do it for you. You can also look for businesses with no affiliates, set up their affiliate program, recruit the affiliates, let them do all the selling and marketing, and then you just collect a small commission.
Method #5: Creating Profit Centers for Existing Businesses
It’s a fact that many people who are in business don’t know how to gain a steady stream of buyers continuously.
1. Bundling- You can add a complimentary product or service to an existing one with already existing distribution routes, and collect commissions. For example, most real estate agents can make more money and serve their customers even more if they also recommend services like removals, interior design, plumbing, electrical, plastering, etc. to every person they sell a house to. But most real estate agents don’t know this, so you can set up this arrangement and profit.
2. Encourage restaurants to sell Advertising spaces and get paid by finding advertisers. Restaurants can earn money by displaying ads on their bathrooms, at the back of their menu, on their wide screen TVs, or even on their announcement boards.
3. Do you live in an area where there are no 24-hour Dentists / restaurants / bakeries/ liquor store/ entertainment centers? You can arrange a deal where a business owner agrees to allow someone else to use their existing facilities at times when they are usually closed in return for rent money or a percentage of the profits.
4. Talk to an offline business who have no clue about online marketing. Strike a deal where you use online marketing methods to promote the business, and get paid commission for any resulting sales. You can easily do this deal with Experts and Gurus – people who have a wealth of information inside their heads, but they lack knowledge how to turn their expertise into information products and sell them online. You can act as their online publisher (or JV with an existing online publisher) and take a piece of the profits.
In Conclusion
Being a Joint Venture broker can be very easy and rewarding if only you know how to listen to other people’s needs. To be successful all you need to do is solve problems by leveraging already existing resources and establishing trustworthy relationships. You don’t need a product or business of your own. You don’t need to be an expert, you don’t need any experience, you can be 18 years old or 80 years old, you can have a PhD or you can be a high school drop out – it doesn’t matter.