Marketers will often cringe when they hear the words “joint venture”. The idea of having to share the workload for a project with another party, and the profits, can seem like an impossible scenario for an entrepreneur who has always made project decisions on their own. Of course, when 9 out of every 10 entrepreneurial efforts fail you have to ask just how much of that was due to poor decision making made in the vacuum of a one-man (or one-woman) committee?
Joint ventures do have something to offer even the most obsessive entrepreneurs, and it is something quite valuable: the chance to succeed where before the path looked impossibly difficult. This is why every business owner needs to look at the chance to joint venture as yet another opportunity to expand their business when such an opportunity arises.
So how exactly do joint ventures work, and how do you know when to embark upon one?
Called JVs for short, joint ventures are often the result of two business parties coming together accidentally and discovering that they each have something that the other might be able to exploit for profit. For example, two business owners might meet at an industry conference and find they have a lot in common, but whereas one of them is great at producing products the other might excel instead at the marketing end of things. They discover they each own one half of a coin that can be banked if they pool their talents and decide to concentrate only on the tasks they are good at, and leave the others to their partner.
Marriages are a perfect example of the classic joint venture, where one spouse agrees to stay at home and rear the children while the other builds a career and brings in the money. By exploiting each others talents, they build a family together with relative ease compared to the solo parent who finds the task a whole lot more demanding.
Online marketers are often forced to work by themselves for a very long time. This is because they are required to build a certain level of expertise in their business before others will take them seriously. So they get used to the idea of working alone. But there comes a point when they recognize that certain weaknesses are holding them back. Unfortunately the realization is often accompanied by an admission that they have neither the talent nor the time to rectify the weakness. This is when the thought of a joint venture starts to look sensible.
Health and fitness vendors are usually passionate about their products because they are pursing a lifestyle profession. Because of this, their marketing skills might not be as well developed as they would like. If this sounds like I am talking about you, then it might be time to begin leveraging the marketing skills of other health and fitness vendors like yourself.
The first step, of course, is to find other vendors who share your interests. This is not always easy, but if you CAN find a group of similar vendors there are several options open to you. One of them is to approach other vendors with the aim of initiating an adswap. Adswap is a term used to describe two vendors who are willing to advertise the existence of the other vendor to their own list of customers. But in order for this to work, the two vendors would not want to be direct competitors. If both sell a blood sugar monitoring device, they have little to gain by sending clients to each other.
But if one sells a blood sugar monitoring device, and the other sells a diabetes management information product, the exchange of clients makes perfect sense, since the sale of one vendor’s product does not rob the other of a sale. Instead, a client of one vendor may even discover that the product from the second vendor raises the value of the first vendor’s product in the eyes of clients. Such partnerships work well for both vendors, and they would be keen to share as many clients as they can.
This is the appeal behind the adswap idea, but it represents only one possible form of joint venture between two different parties in the health and fitness industry. To learn about more opportunities, and to join a like-minded group of health and fitness vendors, get yourself across to Carolyn Hansen’s joint venture membership signup page where you can meet others like yourself and start communicating with the aim of starting your own joint ventures.