Picking
a Business Partner:
A Cautionary Tale of Woe
Just a quick thought before we begin. Some
people are so cautious and protective about their customer list that they hardly
ever do joint ventures. Other
people are so loose and deal-happy that they’ll do a JV with almost anybody. Neither extreme is good.
Of course there’s good spot
somewhere in the middle. The more
prolific you are, the more products you develop yourself, and the bigger your
own list is, the more you control your own destiny.
Please understand that on the
Internet there are very few people who can make any kind of real living just
promoting other peoples’ affiliate programs – you need to develop your own
following. And in the brick and
mortar world, you can distribute other peoples’ products, but you make the
most money on the ones you own yourself.
Onward.
What
I’d like to focus on today is not just restricted to JV’s, but it applies to
anyone you work with in any kind of professional capacity.
I’ve had a lot of experience in the corporate world, I’ve been
stabbed in the back many, many times, and I don’t care to repeat those
experiences.
As a matter of fact one of the biggest reasons I went out on my own as an independent consultant was so that nobody else could force me to work with evil people.
About 3000 years ago, Solomon said “He who is reliable in a small thing is reliable also in large things.” That is very, very true. Wayne Dyer has his own adaptation of that statement: “How a person does anything is how they do everything.” Obviously that’s somewhat oversimplified, but it’s a darn good thing to keep in mind.
Several
years ago I was the sales manager of a tiny hi-tech startup company, and we were
running a business with a gun to our head. Selling a “missionary” product in a hyper-conservative
market, working with very little money and needing to stretch every penny and
make every minute produce results.
Maybe
we could afford to make one or two mistakes, but that was about it.
Every step had to be a step in the right direction or we would be
history.
So anyway I had this friend another company, Dale. Dale would call me up every now and then and do JV’s with me. He sold this software, I sold related hardware, and he’d ring me up and say “I’ve got a customer who will buy 5 units, and your list price is $1000, but since ...
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