The Rundown on Revenue Shared Deals

If you’re asking yourself, “What on earth is a rev share deal?” allow us to explain…

Revenue shared deals are a less common way to fund your business favored in certain instances as they decrease financial risk. Rev-shared deals are usually capital investments that are subsequently repaid from a share in the growing business’s revenue working on a performance-based model. (Think Hollywood movies set to be blockbusters, or professional athletes sharing revenue with team owners.)

The beauty of a rev share deal is you get a piece of the profit. It’s like you’re a business owner

Coach Yu

It’s worth noting that like most business practices, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. While it’s a great way to get a project off the ground, revenue-shared deals don’t produce a long-term predictable profit.

The thing with revenue share is you get paid based on how much profit or revenue there is. This means there isn’t a base salary to fall back on. You may consider switching to a more sustainable model. Also, ensure your entire team of investors are on the same page and keep the business’s best interests at the forefront. 

This is a great incentive deal as well when you’re creating partnerships. Getting a share of the revenue means you make a profit when the company makes a profit, this is a performance-based deal where the better they perform, the better you do.

Revenue shared deals can be a great asset to an early business and provide royalty-like earnings to the team with very little risk. Check out the full session above to hear more from experts on rev-shared deals!

  • Read the Transcript for The Rundown on Revenue Shared Deals

    Coach Yu: EP25

    [00:00:00] 

    Welcome to the Coach Yu show. You guys want to make money this year on the Coach Yushow. That’s why we’re here in clubhouse. Right? We’re going to grow our businesses. I’ve got a killer topic I’ve been working on for the last 10 years for you guys.

    How do you negotiate a revenue? You guys ready? We’re ready to talk about how to do this. We’re ready. Our interests are. I’m going to share some examples and give a little preface. And then you guys will have an opportunity to ask some questions on our weekly show here on start-up club, which is being recorded.

    So you guys can make sure that you listen to the parts that maybe you missed or wanted to go back to. And if you ask a question, make sure it’s something that’s useful for everyone else. So I see a lot of people that are consultants and they run agencies. And the latest thing is this fractional CMO thing.

    You may [00:01:00] have seen a lot of that, but the beauty of a rev share deal is you get a piece of the profit. It’s like you’re a business owner and. I got a taste of it, for example, with the golden state warriors, which is a basketball team. And initially I charged them $3,000 a month and that was great as a retainer.

    And we figured out, well, you know, the team was putting in maybe a hundred hours cause we had a bunch of VA. So it works out to 30 bucks an hour. But then if we put in 200 hours, it works out to $15 an hour. But if we only put in 30 hours then, and sometimes there wasn’t a lot of work than it worked out to be a hundred dollars an hour.

    So most people, they make money hourly. Right. You have a salary. There’s a rule of 2000. So let’s say that you make 10 bucks an hour. Well, that’s 20,000 a year. Cause it’s 10 times two. And add a thousand. If you make 50 bucks an hour, 50 times two is a hundred, it’s a hundred thousand dollars. If you make $200,000 a year, then that’s a hundred dollars an hour.

    So hourly translates to a salary and the [00:02:00] salary can translate to a retainer. So most people understand the idea that you’re paid for your time. But the beauty of a rev share like I had with the warriors was they paid us 1% of the revenue. And sometimes there was not much revenue sometimes during the playoffs, it was really good.

    And it’s weird. So some of you guys, maybe, you know what I’m talking about, you’ve had a taste of this. Maybe you’ve done PPC. Maybe you sold the company. Maybe, you know, you started a business with somebody and you’ll find that there isn’t a direct linkage between the amount of time you put in, in a particular period in how much you get paid.

    Right? When I first started doing PPC, there were times where we would make a hundred thousand dollars a day and I didn’t do any work at all, or I didn’t do really anything on that project for the last month or so. And there’s other projects as you guys know where, you know, you put in weeks of effort or months of effort and you actually didn’t make any money at all.

    So the thing with the rev share is [00:03:00] you get paid based on how much profit or revenue there is, and you have to set it up the right way. You have to know who you want to do a partnership with, right? W what criteria do you need for the nature of the deal and how do you structure it so that everybody wins.

    And this is such a complex thing. I see a lot of people talking about it, but not many people know how to do it. Right. And I don’t claim to be an expert. Maybe w you know, between the knowledge we have here and people like Colin Campbell, we can share some thoughts and turn the feedback we have here into a blog post, or turn into a bigger guide for everyone else.

    And we have the founder of startup club here, Mr. Colin. Welcome. Hey, thank you for welcoming. Like, I just actually dropped in because Dennis you’re on. Like, I saw the show there and I’m like, okay, I got to drop in and you’ve got reputation. Um, I remember one of the first [00:04:00] times I came with a club house. I went into a session with you and another lady.

    Um, I can’t remember her name right now, but I just was entranced like the knowledge that you have, what you share, what you deliver

    that I got from that session was in. And, uh, I just want to come in and just say hi and enjoy the joy of the moment. So glad you were here to grace, this call, and that is awesome guys, that that’s the founder startup club. This is the guy who puts this whole thing on. He just had the founder of clubhouse in a room earlier today for their big innovation pitch thing.

    I thought that was incredible. So, yeah. And then Paul was good. He, Paul was good then it was funny because we had P and G we did a session with, um, uh, Proctor and gamble ventures, and we had phenomenal [00:05:00] entrepreneurs on and the session was beginning to start and I’m like, Paul, yeah, you got to sort of shut up.

    And I actually kicked him out of the room. I didn’t actually drop him down. Like, you know, with the tech, I said, Paul, you got to leave, Paul, you gotta leave. And Jeff’s like, uh, I don’t think you could do that. I’m like, yes, I can. You gotta leave. It’s a live show. It’s a live shows.

    That is awesome. That go ahead, Jeffrey. Yeah, I was gonna say back to the topic, what you raised, you know, you know, um, having that, that revenue stream that’s based on performance, as opposed to just a flat retainer, not only is that something that’s really important for the individual, if you’re a consultant or an agency, but the flip side is if you’re a business and you’re hiring other agencies to work with you, you want to make sure that, that your interests are aligned because, you know, I recently came across a situation where, you know, um, uh, [00:06:00] media.

    Buyer was basically getting paid, um, based on the amount they spent. So their incentive was to get the company to spend as much money as possible because that’s how they made money. It didn’t matter if the ads they were buying performed or not as that didn’t affect their compensation. The only thing that affected their compensation was getting the company to spend more money.

    So the interests were not aligned and it would have been much better off if they were getting a share of the revenue, a performance-based deal where the better they perform, the better they did, not. The more money the company spent. You guys have seen how government contracts work like in the military for aircraft, where it’s cost plus.

    So it’ll be Northrop Grumman. $12 billion on a jet and they get 10% of whatever they spend as their extra top. So of course, they’re going to spend as much money as possible. Of course, they’re going to spend 20 billion instead of 12 billion because that’s more money for [00:07:00] them because they get 10% of whatever they spend.

    So, like Jeffrey said in the world of consultants, when it’s media, especially if they charge you based on what they’re spending, then they don’t really have any skin in the game. And they just want to spend as much as possible. It’s like a taxi driver that you allow them to drive wherever they want. You know, assuming that they’re honest, so that if you’re on the side of the underlying business where you own this and you want to bring in people who are good at marketing, then.

    Pretty much not hire people on a retainer because the retainer boils back to hours, which doesn’t tie to the performance. You want to find a way to tie the performance together, but at the same time, if your business isn’t healthy, then someone who’s actually good at what they’re doing might not want to take you on.

    So I know a bunch of folks that have approached us that are influencers. They want to launch a product. They want to do a pure profit share. And I’ll say no to that because the amount of effort necessary to start up a business [00:08:00] is so much more than to scale something that’s already working. So earlier today I was in San Francisco at my friend, Jonathan penthouse.

    He owns a chocolate factory in San Fran. Can you imagine that? And he’s, I can’t tell you the exact numbers, but let’s just say he’s doing six figures a month and we’re trying to get to seven figures a month. He’s been growing his chocolate factory. It’s these keto chocolates and chocolates with these stress, reducing like ashwagandha and reishi mushroom, and other things like that.

    And we’ve been tuning his Facebook ads, landing pages, email sequences, customer lifetime value. And I wouldn’t take on something like that if he had just started, because the amount of effort to find a winner is way more effort than someone who’s already doing a hundred thousand 200,000 a month. And you want to go to 200 or 300,000.

    So if you are the marketing consultant, [00:09:00] Or strategy or whatever it is. You’re, you’re the worker partnering with that business owner on a rev share. Then you want to know that they have a strong signal of customers that already buy content that, you know, that works a funnel that works a product that, you know, people rave about, because then it’s easier to scale subject to the size of the market in this case, Quito and gourmet chocolates and ashwagandha and stress reduction and the new thing with, you know, hot chocolate that doesn’t have any sugar in it because it uses, Monkfruit like all this kind of stuff.

    That we know we can scale because we have thousands went like 3000, 4,000 happy customers that are on repeat. And some of these folks spend like $15,000. We don’t know why we need to talk to them and figure out why. So we can get 100 more of the same sorts of people like that. Maybe it’s groups. So a rev share deal.

    You need to have, whether you’re the business or you’re the marketing or legal person or whatever partner coming [00:10:00] in on, you want to make sure that that business has enough revenue has an existing customer base has marketing. That’s working, has an audience. And then it’s a matter of setting up the terms so that it’s clear.

    On who is doing what my favorite way to set up a ref share, because there’s so many ways like you can set up rev share based on the profit, or you could set up like an affiliate deal where it’s based on your old parameters or anything that comes to a tracking codes of the company, your tracking code we’ll pay 20%, just like all the other affiliates based on the margin you can sustain.

    But my favorite one, cause those are all tricky because just like what Jeffrey mentioned where, you know, it’s it’s cost plus, or, or it’s a piece of the revenue, then the company will be incented to not to say people are dishonest, but there’ll be incented to kind of monkey with the way profits calculated.

    So there’s less to distribute, right? So one of our clients seeds of life, they’re the ones that do the Memorial reads Magnolia reads when a loved one dies. You want to plant the tree and [00:11:00] whatnot honoring the loved one. We get 1% of their total revenue. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s coming from SEO or PPC or Facebook ads or whatever.

    We just get one. Every month, first a month, we go in, we look at how much revenue there is and Google analytics take 1% of that. And that’s the number that we build them. And some months we didn’t really do very well in the last two or three months. We didn’t do very well because our SEO might mean for various reasons.

    I mean, we launched a new website website, slowed us down, all these other things hurt us. So we got less organic traffic, but we still got paid on the overall. So if you’re able to do things that affect the overall, see if you can get a cut of the overall cause so much cleaner just to say, okay, 1%, 2%, 5% or whatever of the overall, as opposed to it had to come through your link or it had to come through your landing page, or it’s only on the ads or it’s only on PR or if you’re doing anything that’s really strategic, it’s going to be hard to separate out the impact that you drive that comes from a [00:12:00] single channel and data.

    So you say 1%, but that’s the lowest I’ve ever heard. Like we do a lot of. Yeah. With a lot of companies that help us out and provide additional value. Yeah. You know, 1% like that’s, that’s the lowest I’ve ever heard, like, is that because you’re trying to build a lot, like, I dunno, do you go lower to build a longer term relationship?

    Like what’s, what’s your, that’s a great, that’s a really smart question. So there’s three or four component or there’s three main components that go into that first is the nature of the product, right? So the golden state warriors, 1% of the revenue doesn’t sound like a lot. You have a playoff game that makes five, $10 million.

    That’s a lot of money for us. Right? 1% of a big company can be a lot of money, right? 1% of a company that does a hundred thousand dollars a month, it’s a hundred thousand dollars. Like that’s not really, you can’t even put people on that for a thousand [00:13:00] dollars a month. So if the, if the company’s big enough, then you can sustain it.

    Also, it’s the nature of the margin. So like with WWE, which is the wrestling company, we couldn’t get five or 10% because their product margins and the e-com didn’t sustain that. Like when they’re selling these giant wrestling belts, the cost of shipping and the product and all that, we were optimizing to like a 300 5400% ROIs.

    There’s not enough for them to, to give us 10% on that. Right. It’s gotta be like a couple percent when it’s like in full products where the margin is infinite, because you’re just selling a course. Or selling access to some thing like in Kajabi or learn dash or whatever. Yeah. You can have 50% cause it’s.

    So it depends, you know, if you’ve, if you’re selling things that are heavy or like physical products that the margins just going to be a lot lower, like I’m sure, like if we did a rev share with paul.com, because we know a lot of [00:14:00] players as Jeffrey knows in the pet space, because it’s a physical product.

    I mean, it’s got a good markup. I don’t know. I’m sure, but I don’t think that Jeffrey could give us a 50% rev share. Right. Maybe 5% right there, but that is if there’s a lot of, yeah. So along the same lines, in the example you gave, which I understood, it was 1% because you’re taking 1% of their total revenue, not 1% of the revenue that you’re necessarily generating, whether it can be attributed to you, but in that circumstance, what other data, what other metrics are you providing your client so that they feel comfortable, that you are performing since you’re not getting paid based on your specific performance?

    You don’t want them to think, oh, well we know given these guys 1%, but how do we even know they’re doing anything? In other words, from the company’s point of view, it’s easier when you’re paying based on the incremental revenue or based on tracking this specific performance. Right? So there’s what, the way you look at it in closing the deal.

    And [00:15:00] there’s the way you look at it to justify the value on an ongoing basis. Those are two different ways. The way you close a deal is the same way. If you’re an agency, which is to say, well, how much money you’re doing? Well, we did $2 million last year. Okay, well, let’s just use our simple math 2% or 1% on that’s 20 grand.

    Do you think if you paid us 20 grand, we could generate an additional, you know, X or $40,000, $50,000 of revenue for you, whether it’s product or services. And we know just from tweaking the ad campaigns, just from SEO, just from increasing the LTV. You know, the, um, you know, new customer purchase flow, like just, just one or two of these things that we do.

    Can that drive an additional patient? Can that increase our LTV by 10%? Can that add more volume? Because we’re moving into Instagram or LinkedIn ads, or like, do we think we can make the, you know, do you think of the changes that we have from the audit that, you know, we did an audit and here’s all the things we found that were broken.

    Do you think [00:16:00] that we can even on most conservative basis generate 10% more income or 10% more gross to go from 2 million to 2.1 million? Oh, for sure. Like, of course. Right. Okay. Well then certainly that’s worth 1% or 5% or whatever it is. Right. So that’s what you do too, before you do the deal, so that everyone looks at this and say from a business standpoint, does this make sense?

    Right. Did that make sense? Yeah. And that’s always the way to justify it, especially for higher ticket or where there’s an entrepreneur that already has a sustained business. If they’re a brand new business, then. You don’t even want to do a rev share because 50% of a thousand dollars a year is not worth it.

    Right? So then on an ongoing basis, your contribution to the overall has to be big enough that you can take out of the overall. If you just do one thing, like you just do PR you just do trade shows, you just do like mailing inserts, or you do like whatever the thing is, you do, you can [00:17:00] track what you did to your thing, but the question is how much spillover is there to affect the overall.

    Now we affect so much in digital marketing because we cover search and social and fix the website and do all these other things that we can say. Yep. The incremental value of each of these things like this is a 1%, uh, like the w we have a public case study for seeds of life, or we showed that we increased the average selling price by increasing the product prices.

    We increase the conversion. I mean increase the lifetime value. We increased how much we could pay for a new customer. So we could spend more on PPC. We increased the amount of SEO traffic we had. So each of these little, like one and 2% increases when you multiply them together, allowed us to increase their revenue from 1.1 million, two years ago to, I think we were like 2.4, 2.4, 5 million this past year.

    So it resulted in us doubling the company, but it was through a bunch of little things that were only a couple percent each. And that’s what a lot of people don’t know about optimization. [00:18:00] They think is like, I did this one thing and all of a sudden millions and Ferrari’s like, no, it’s for those of you guys that do a lot of optimization, you know, it’s not like people are always looking for that one thing.

    It’s a bunch of little things, but when you add them up, You know, you get the skill kind of effect, especially if you move to ads, ads, fastest way scale, the thing I’ll call them. No. What I’m going to say is that, um, I’m sort of getting it. Um, you’re opening me up to a new, different way of thinking about it because you’re really partnering with these entrepreneurs.

    These syrups, like at, at, at pod.com, we offer 20%, but we have 20% for any incremental revenue. But what you’re suggesting as a consultant, you can come in. If you can say, look, I’ll take 1% of your revenue, but I’ll increase your profit by X that’s a different business model. That’s a totally different than what I was thinking about.

    When you first started talking about this, you raised a really good [00:19:00] point calling because what you’re talking about is an affiliate and there’s nothing wrong with the affiliate. Here’s what happens with. Because I was in the very beginning in affiliate marketing over 20 years ago. And there’s some good and bad and ugly sorts of things.

    The beauty of an affiliate, if you’re a business owner is you can say, Hey, you only get 20% of whatever sales that we directly attribute to you. And that sounds great, right? It sounds great because it sounds like, well, you know, I, I sold 10 more pet rugs and that was whatever, $400 and you get $80, right?

    Then you got a bunch of these different affiliates and different affiliates that have, you know, this is the golden retriever influencer. This is the guy who’s got a big email list. This is the guy who sells pet socks. This is the person who is really good at PPC. This is the person who has their own podcast or whatever it is.

    And so each of these affiliates is able to leverage their audience and theirs, their source of traffic. There’s, there’s three main sources of affiliate traffic, right. There’s SEO, there’s paid and there’s the email list, [00:20:00] right? So each of these leverages their source of traffic and then supposedly. This is the lie.

    But as an analytics person, I’ll tell you why it doesn’t work or why, why you can cheat the system. It, supposedly these people are contributing incremental value and you pay them the 20% and you know, the ma you know, you do the math and you can say, well, based on my margins, I could, you know, I need to maintain a 37 or 40% margin.

    So if I pay out 20%, then I’m still making this much incrementally under sales. But what you don’t realize is there’s overlap and there’s also brand risk. So 20 years ago, I set this up for Yahoo personals, which was one of the biggest, well, I think it’s the, it was the largest MRR website on the planet.

    People doing monthly recurring, we’re doing a hundred million dollars a year, right. We started a brand new property. Of course, we had the number one website on the internet. So it was pretty easy to start a website, you know, putting, we had a little link on the Yahoo homepage for [00:21:00] dating, right. And so all these people signed up and we went to a hundred million dollars a year and then.

    Started paying out. So commission junction and other affiliate programs, and we said, Hey, we’ll pay you $50 per new signup. Right? Someone signs up for the dating website, they pay $35 a month. They stay for three months. That’s a hundred dollars of revenue. We’ll pay $50. So there, therefore it’s two to one because the incremental cost of managing a dating website zero, right?

    So the math looked good and we looked at our top affiliates, but the affiliates were bidding on our name, which was no good. And the affiliates were finding all sorts of different ways to kind of cheat us where these people came through our affiliate through their affiliate link. But somehow we had already acquired them in another way.

    So I did some analysis and I looked at all the people that had signed up through one of the affiliate links. And I found that 70% of them we already had on our network. They already came soon through search. They already had come through personal.yahoo.com. And I found what they were doing is they were siphoning off the train.

    They’re finding ways. This is called the conduit approach, which happens [00:22:00] in attribution. If, if any of you guys like geeky attribution, it’s called the conduit where people find a way to try to brand traffic and whatever. And the other thing which is even scarier was I saw these landing pages. Cause these affiliates will hide where they drive the traffic from.

    Not all affiliates are like this, but then some enough for like this, you need to watch out some of these affiliates, they had these landing pages that would say, Hey, you know, it’s completely free and all, and you’re going to find the average person, you know, like they’re just like making promises that are not related.

    They’re just way off brand to get people to convert. And so our refund rate was. On that because they didn’t care about the brand. And they were only incentive to make promises that drove the conversion, as opposed to things that related to the education we want to put out there. Our brand positioning affiliates are not incentive to do that because they’re only paid on the sale.

    So they can, they, they focused on things in the ad copy would, would say, would make promises like, you know, have, have amazing sex tonight on Yahoo [00:23:00] personals and hook up with the lover of your dreams. And like, no, no, that’s not copy. We like, right. I know it converts better, but that no, no, you can’t do that.

    Right. So you can have like brand guidelines and here’s creative, you can use and all that, but Phillies are great, but you’ve got to manage that thing super carefully to call us question or point. It’s not that affiliates are better than partners, but I liked partner. Because the partner is going to is more invested in the company.

    It’s like they have a, a Phantom equity stake and there, because they’re paid on a rev share or paid on something beyond just being an affiliate, they can afford to invest in doing things in an affiliate’s never going to invest because they’re only paid X percent, you know, $20 a sale or, you know, whatever it is.

    Right. But I, my experiences are necessary evil though. Aren’t they dentists aren’t affiliates a necessary evil for your business. Yeah. It’s just like necessary. Amazon’s a necessary evil for e-commerce. Yeah, that’s true. I totally agree. Yeah, Amazon, [00:24:00] I think of Amazon is the affiliate that you have to have.

    Right. They’re a super affiliate, but there’s different levels of affiliates. There’s affiliates where they’ve drive traffic because they have a community. So I’m sure Jeffrey’s got all these pet influencers where they have a list or they have a big Instagram or something, and that’s incremental revenue because of.

    Overlap too much with the traffic that you’re already driving. Cause I know you’re spending money on Facebook ads or whatever, but, and so you’ll do that because it allows you to reach into it. Like the affiliate thing makes a lot of sense. If you have a proven model, which you do, and you can reach incremental little niches that you couldn’t do yourself by trying to run ads or whatnot, right.

    It helps you fill in a bunch of little niches, however, there’s something bigger where you do some kind of partnership. And so our partnership is one level above affiliate. The way we look, or you could also think of like an affiliate can move to a super affiliate, which basically is a partner. What’s the difference between a super affiliate and affiliate?

    It’s not because they get a higher [00:25:00] percentage or because they have closer access to the team, which is what typically happens. But because you’re working on campaigns that. You wouldn’t trust like random people on the internet who can just sign up for free in your affiliate program, you know, share a sale or whatever your thing is to, to be able to promote, right?

    So when you can create new campaigns with partners and it, it reinforces both brands, like I think about, you know, pet party and paul.com, right? With pet party, we have all the pet socks and that’s complimentary to the pet rugs. So this value that goes both ways, right. And affiliate is basically a commission salesperson, and you’re just paying them a percentage of the sale.

    But I think there’s a level up from that, right. Where you’re co-creating content. And that gives you more longevity that gives you more, more interesting. It’s like an affiliate’s basically advertising, but that you’re paying it in the form of affiliate commissions. I think that’s a great point, Dennis, because I think what it really boils down to.

    How closely your interests truly [00:26:00] are aligned. And even though an affiliate is performance based at the end of the day, their interests in the interest of your company are not necessarily aligned because their interest is not so much in growing your business in your company. As in growing their ability to get their link shared and get that conversion on their link versus a partnership where both sides of the coin are going to benefit if the whole business grows right, where they’re both trying to grow the business, because that’s going to be good for both of them.

    So you really want to get those interests aligned as much as possible. It’s a marriage versus a hookup, right? I mean, I’m not judging you. It’s like whatever you want to do. Right. But I think the marriage longer-term things better. Let me give you guys a real example. I am in Charleston, South Carolina right now.

    And the reason I am is because one of my friends. Is a mid-sized personal injury attorney, right? He does seven figures, which for personal injury [00:27:00] attorneys is not very big there’s guys that do eight, nine and 10 figures per year for personal personal injuries, like car accidents and slip and fall, and like truck drivers that kidding you or something like that.

    Right. The guys on the billboards. Yeah. Billboard lawyer is better call Saul. You know, I actually know that that’s criminal defense and here, let me tell you a little something on the industry. And I think you guys, everyone here, whether or not you’re dealing with professional services or not, I’m going to give you an example that I believe will cause you to think differently about partnerships versus agencies versus affiliates, which are kind of like three ways of, of structuring these performance ish kinds of deals that are separate from employees or VA’s or hourly, or, you know, that kind of thing.

    So personal injury attorneys typically, and just for a moment, put aside any sort of negative connotation or sort of, uh, stereotypes you might have about what personal injury attorneys are just like, listen to the deal mechanics and see how it applies in your industry. Okay. So personal injury [00:28:00] attorneys, they’re looking for people that got in an accident and in order for them to collect the most money from the insurance company, cause it’s all about getting money from the insurance company, right?

    And the insurance company wants to pay as little as possible, obviously, you know, Geico and Allstate and state farm and these kinds of guys. So in order for it, in order for them to maximize the settlement, when there’s the accident, they have to have the medical records. So the person in the accident has to go to the hospital.

    They ideally the emergency room. If they actually got injured or take the ambulance there to make sure they actually do, you know, get, get seen, then they have to have what’s called continuous care. So they have to go to a chiropractor or someplace to get an MRI and they can’t have a break in coverage.

    So if they, they initially get examined, but then a month goes by and whatever, then the insurance company can say, Hey, yeah, but how do we know this? Wasn’t preexisting? How do we know? They didn’t injure it by bowing the lawn? How do we know? They weren’t really all that sick. They weren’t really that [00:29:00] hurt if they never went to the doctor again.

    So we have to, like, you can’t have more than two weeks in coverage, and then you need to work with a chiropractor or a neurologist or somebody who’s good enough at reading the MRIs and knows what to look for, to look for where the damages and soft tissue damage and things with the knees and looking at the spinal cord, like all the different things to see where there’s injuries, right?

    I’m not saying make up injuries, but being able to spot these injuries. So the personal injury attorney. Are highly dependent upon the medical professionals, a to cross referred leads. So when someone goes in, their backs hurt, they got in a fender bender, whatever, then that chiropractor could say, you should go see Ted law.com because he’s the guy I work with.

    And he takes really good care of my patients. We’ve been working together a long time and vice versa, where at a new car accident, you know, referral comes in and then Ted is going to send it to, you know, call in the chiropractor. I made that up just now calling. I kind of liked that sounds good. Calling the chiropractor, right?[00:30:00] 

    And so there’s a nice symbiotic relationship there. The same is true with real estate agents and mortgage brokers, right? Because the real estate agent wants to go. Typically that’s the first person people see, they go around and look at all the houses and then you get the loan. And so the mortgage brokers are dependent upon the referrals from the real estate agents and there’s other sort of symbiotic, peanut butter jelly kinds of deals for these sorts of partnerships.

    But. We’re doing with Ted law.com is we’re saying, Hey, we love chiropractors. We believe in taking care of the patient. We’re not just these evil, personal injury attorneys that are just trying to get as much money as possible, but we really believe in, in health. And so the, we prove that because we have a red carpet program and we, we believe, you know, we understand you came into this business because you truly want to help people live better lives and get their lives back and overcome these other sorts of issues and have lived the full range of health, not just pills and surgery, right?

    And we will, at our costs, we will help you do marketing. We will help you rank better on Google. We will help you get more reviews. We will help you run your Facebook [00:31:00] ads. We’ll do all that kind of stuff, right? No strings. And we know when we do that and we show that we take care of the referrals that the chiropractor send to us and the chiropractors will tell their other friends, these patients will tell their other friends when they get in the car X.

    You really need to see calling the chiropractor. And then when they come see called the chiropractor call and refers it to Ted law.com, right. To have that guy taken care of. Right. Cause you know, we, we go the extra mile, we send flowers, we follow up, we recognize them on their birthday and Christmas. Like we do all these things.

    Just, they don’t have to worry about anything. We take care of every little detail. Right. They don’t have to chase the hospital down for the medical records. They don’t have to worry about state farm because state farm will say, oh, oh yeah, we’ll give you 10 grand. We’ll say no, no, no, no, no. We’re going to get you 60 grand off of that.

    Right? Like we take care of you. Right. So that’s a good, so by having the, so this is, this is what I mean by a rev share partnership deal [00:32:00] because there is a symbiotic, like we help each other kind of thing between. Chiropractors and personal injury attorneys, that’s different than the relationship between a digital marketing agency and the chiropractor.

    Right. Okay. So professor you, I’m sorry, coach you coach, uh, professor, but the, but the fact is like, how do we get these deals? How do we lick broad? They’re running these small, we’re running these businesses. How do we go through and get these deals? How do we get these partnerships? Great. Well, the question is who’s complimentary to what you do.

    So who also has your customer so that you can cross refer each other. So I mentioned real estate agent and mortgage broker, or the chiropractor and the personal injury attorney, but Hey, I’m going to Costa Rica tomorrow, right? And guess what? When I’m at Costa Rica and I stay in the nice hotel, what happens when you go to the nicer hotel and coast?

    You’re going to say, [00:33:00] where should I go for the whitewater rafting tour? Who do you recommend is a good scuba diver instructor that can take me around to all the nice places to see all the fish and things like that. Right? And so that scuba instructor should work with the hotel. The hotel should work with the tour provider.

    The tour provider should work with the best, the restaurants that they could recommend along the way where, you know, cause they take you on this full day, sightseeing, adventure, and they stop along the way at different restaurants will, they should have partnerships with those restaurants. Right. And the restaurants should, should you see like there’s symbiotic?

    So I’m surprised maybe I’m just blind or, uh, but I, I see, so few businesses focusing on partnership, the partnership works so much better than just hiring an agency who doesn’t know your business or hiring more VA’s and employees who are just inexpensive, something to manage. I’m not saying don’t do that, but I think partnership has the highest ROI ROI.

    Wouldn’t be. Like, is it just me or is it true that most businesses don’t realize, like you said, Colin, [00:34:00] there’s all these other partners that are servicing that same customer and you can co-market together. Well, it’s high because it’s a percentage of when you go out and you buy advertisement, like on Facebook or television, like product does you pay no matter what, but if you can get a partnership, you can get a percentage of which means you’re, you’re setting up a deal that makes you profit from day one.

    And it creates content that you otherwise couldn’t advertise and content doesn’t carry the same power as partner content. Right? Look at the podcast. Look at the fun campaigns like you guys probably know with pet party where, you know, we’re printing, printing out pet socks to people’s faces on masks with pet, your pet, all that kind of stuff.

    We have a partnership with the humane society. And the SPC, like these adopt a pet things and just pet shelters. And that’s great because then they they’re publishing stories about how we’re working together. Right? [00:35:00] It’s just so much better than running ads. The beauty is it’s not either or on ads because we take the partnership content, the campaigns we’re running, or Hey, we have a scholarship and then we put ads against it so we can grow our list.

    So I believe the partnerships, which then you amplify through a podcast and through ads and whatever form of creating content, that is your, your best fodder for being able to run ads. So I still think it goes back to partners. No, you’re right. And I think when you plop down a a hundred dollars for Google ads, you don’t know what you’re going to get.

    Right? If you sign up a partnership, we’re saying I’m paying 20 bucks for every sales I make, you know exactly what you’re gonna get. So there’s more predictability with partnerships than advertise. Because you have a customer that’s already, we have a relationship that’s already working, right? It’s content you’re creating.

    I would ask you guys like Jeffrey and Colin. What’s the difference between a partnership versus an affiliate versus [00:36:00] an agency? Because all the agencies they’re partners to. I mean, one of the things you, you, you kind of glossed over real quickly on the, on the partnership side too, is, is the distribution or those of you, if you find a partner who has the same customers that you have, we’re looking for, that’s a way to get from one to many, that’s a way to get to distribution.

    Why do you think when you buy a new car for the last 10 years, it comes preloaded with Sirius satellite radio, right? Because the car companies know that the consumer wants a better experience, you know, for audio when they’re in the car and Sirius, satellite knows our best customer is someone who’s in, who has a car.

    So it’s, it’s a partnership that works for both of them because your car is going to give you a better experience, going to be happy with the car. If you have satellite radio and conversely satellite radio can now get in every car. So you find those. Partnerships. And I think from a startup perspective, cause we all here in, in start up club, [00:37:00] um, partnerships, even in the early stages of your startup can be extremely valuable when I was a co-founder of a company called bar point.com years ago, we.

    Had a product that lets you find product information and comparative pricing, et cetera, and reviews based on scanning a barcode from your cell phone, uh, on a product. So we very early on, before we were, had a finished product, we went out and developed a partnership with symbol technologies. There were the largest manufacturer of barcode scanning devices.

    Now they’re part of Motorola and we got a partnership with them because you know, for them they want to sell more barcode scanners. If we had content and a product that made people interested in scanning barcodes, it would help their business. So it was in their interest to help us grow our startup. And not only did we get a partnership, but eventually they ended up investing $3 million in our company as we grew the company.

    So partnerships, I think to your point, Dennis are much more powerful potentially than affiliates [00:38:00] and in many ways, much more powerful. If it’s the right partner, then even engaging an agency. Oh, way more. And then the partners, the hallmark, a partnership like in that deal there with the barcodes, it’s creating the partnership creates additional value for the underlying customer.

    That’s what makes it a partnership? There’s it creates convenience. You’re creating new products. I’ll give an example. Two days ago, I opened up my mail. I always love when I get these gifts, right? You like it. When he gives these gifts written, it was a book from Chandler bolt. It was his new book published.

    The second edition. I love the first one and I loved it so much that I made a post on Facebook and I said, Hey, my buddy Chandler bolt of self publishing school wrote this second edition. I’ve read it. It’s fantastic. If you want to publish a book, this is the framework you need to use. And then he commented back and then all these other people commented back and long story short Chandler reached out.

    Yesterday. And he said, you know, we ought to just do a webinar [00:39:00] on here’s the three things you need to do if you want to publish. And I said, of course let’s do that, but let’s not, let’s not just do that with me. Let’s do it in partnership with my business partner, Warren Whitlock, who runs free ebooks.net.

    So free ebooks.net is the number one website for free eBooks. We have a million visitors a month that come just from organic, from Google, because we rank on all these keywords related to eBooks. And we have 5 million people in our emails. And the whole vision of, so we had a meeting yesterday. So the whole vision of free eBooks is let’s distribute free eBooks to everybody like in Africa where these kids like don’t have access to libraries or let’s help authors get their stuff out there.

    Let’s create this, this amazing place where people can learn, especially with COVID, it’s hard to get together. Right? And so it makes so much sense that there should be a partnership between free eBooks and self publishing school. Right? Self publishing school is, Hey, you’re an author. You want, you’re an expert, you’re a dentist.

    You’re, you know, whatever, you have some kind of expertise. You [00:40:00] want to turn into a book. Let’s, let’s bring those together. So then today we decided on a date and 20 days from now, we’re going to have a webinar and they’re going to send people from their list, which, you know, we, we can sell personal brand courses or we can help them put their book on our website, which has a domain ranked 73.

    So there’s a lot of SEO power on our website. And a lot of eyeballs, a lot of authors don’t get any eyeballs to their books. Like you said Jeffrey. So our, our user base of all the people, all these people that are consuming free eBooks and all be, we get a lot of traffic from Google and then their base of P of entrepreneurs and startup people that want to publish a book for whatever reason.

    Good reasons. Right. There’s a great crossover between those two audiences, right? That’s what I mean by partnership. And then no one’s having to pay anything. And this partnership like directly, it’s not like there’s a, you know what I mean? It’s not like an agency where you have to pay all this money and hope you get something.

    Instead it’s a rev share, which is what we’re talking about here [00:41:00] in today’s session, on clubhouse, where any new person who signs up for the done for you services on writing a book, they’re going to kick back a little bit to us, right. But the same time we’ve published all this training on, Hey, if you want to write your own book because Warren’s written 17 books and I’ve written a few books.

    If you want to publish a book here, it is like, here’s the checklist. It’s a hundred pages. And you can go through all the steps and we’ve done it ourselves many times, but in Chandler will also agree. Yep. This is the way to do it. You promote your book, use a dollar a day strategy. Or we have a course on that dollar a day, which, you know, Chandler said many times all.

    Yeah. Dennis’s dollar a day. Strategy is really good. You know, once you launch your book, you need to get traffic to it, you know, and this is the way to do it. So you can go through all the training. We have it for free his books for free. Right. We have all these free books as the name would imply. But if you just are like, you know what, screw it.

    I just want to have someone do it for me. Okay. We’ll talk to Chandler and his team at self publishing school, we’ll do it for you. And then if they sign up for the [00:42:00] services, then we get paid to cut. Right? So it’s like, we’re, we’re an affiliate kind of, but we’re better than that because we’re a partner, right?

    Because there’s, there’s a crossover that goes both ways. That’s what I want you guys to see. And, and what a partner, why partnerships so much more powerful than affiliate? Right? Dennis, we got a few people who may have questions or things they want to add to the conversation. Let’s go see what Kim has to say, Kim.

    Welcome. Hi guys. Thank you so much for bringing me up. I appreciate it. I would love to know, um, Dennis or to any of you, how you might suggest sort of starting those conversations, especially when it’s been a relationship that has maybe just been sort of, you know, almost a, Hey, I’ll refer you, you refer me kind of relationship.

    Um, for example, I do a lot of on-camera training media training and so a lot of, um, good, like the perfect person for me as a PR agency or a PR person who gets them, the publicity, and then they need [00:43:00] somebody that can actually do the on-camera training. And so I’ve had several referrals from them, but it’s never been sort of an official read, share kind of, um, conversation.

    So how do you suggest. Having those conversations and figuring out, you know, how much do I pay you if you refer someone to me and do I pay them? Partly because a lot of times, if I refer to them, they’re going to, they’re going to actually have a bigger project potentially than what they’re going to get from me.

    Um, so how do you, how do you have those conversations where it’s, especially when you’ve been kind of on a, uh, just friendly referral basis in the past? That that makes sense. Oh, Kim, that’s a great question. So moving from a referral basis, which is like one-off between consultants and agencies to a real rev share kind of program, several things.

    First off, typically in the agency space, it’s 15 to 20% on. That’s what people pay for referrals. That’s like kind of what it is. I’ve seen more or less, depending on what it is. [00:44:00] Sometimes it’s on the lifetime, but that’s what agencies will do because you’ll have people that are experts in video production or on camera work or PPC or building websites.

    And so they all kind of cross refer because it’s difficult for any one agency to try to do all these things. So there’s just like a nice little referral thing that goes back and forth. That is like you said, kind of informal, but the way to make it structured in a rev share deal is your packages and services need to be structured in order for people to refer it in so that you have what’s called a productized service.

    Have you, have you heard of that Kim? A productized service? Not really. So is it almost being part of their package? Yeah, the idea is like, here here’s like the value meal, right? Actually I don’t say value meal. Cause it implies, it’s like low quality McDonald’s kind of food, but the idea of a package is, Hey, these PR agencies, they’re trying to take care of their clients and the clients that want to, like, let’s say the PR agencies have a small, medium, large, you know, Goldilocks kind of offering.

    Most agencies kind of have that. Like, uh, you [00:45:00] know, in most than the clients will choose like the middle one, right. Goldilocks, but let’s say that they package your thing into their premium offering. That creates convenience for the underlying client, because they know the PR agency is going to get a lot of PR and media mentions.

    But then if you’re going to be on CNN or the local ABC syndicate, then you’ve got to bring in Kim and then it creates more perceived value because they don’t have to work between five or six different sorts of other people. It’s all under one roof. So you, you get packaged in to their thing. And the margins are such that they, they don’t cause the lasting one is not because you’re trying to hide anything.

    But the last thing a client wants to do is try to figure out well. So the PR agency says, I need you to go talk to Kim. Now I got to look at the different packages Kim has and the sale occurs. Then Kim has to remember to kick back 20% to the PR agency and vice versa. It’s just, it’s putting more work on the client.

    So the client actually. Especially for good agencies, the client [00:46:00] appreciates not having the client trusts so-and-so from the PR agency to make all the underlying decisions of the other vendors that are, it’s like a think of a good PR agency or good agencies like a general contractor. You know what I mean?

    Sure, sure. So that totally makes sense. And I’ve actually had a couple, um, agents. I have one agency that’s kind of put me in like, got my pricing and put me in their package. How would it work if it was the other way, if I’m referring to a PR agency, uh, where they’re going to probably get a much bigger contract, per se, than if they’re just hiring me to come do a couple of sessions, I’m going to work.

    So Kim, your business, you are solo or you have a team, or what is your structure? My husband and I we’re both former journalists. And so we do it. We work together and train. So we’re a small or small. And if you’re working with agencies that are smaller than they can set up a landing page and they could set up, they could allow you to guest blog, they could send out messages to the email list.

    [00:47:00] They could set up a webinar together with you. Other ways to show that it’s a partnership, as opposed to, you know, this is a friend of ours, Kim, or something, you know, we’re going to show a close, closer tie in. And then you, as an on-camera person, you can interview some of these other clients that they have.

    So that, so it’s not as not a testimonial, not a, I hate to say case study because that’s, that’s like a, you know, a disguise testimonial, but actually in a helpful way, how, how X achieve Y Z, like how this particular client achieved this result, this is how they did it. You’re, you’re edifying them. You’re trying to be as transparent as possible.

    You’re not trying to promote your services. You’re trying to transparently and openly teach as much as you can on how you do stuff. If you do that, then that will send traffic to the. And people fill out a form or becomes a lead. And they mentioned that this might be a step further than what you have, but if you have, if you can do this and it’s not much effort, I think it’d be the next step for you.

    If you have a lead magnet. Right. So here’s, Kim’s 10 tips on how to be on camera. [00:48:00] Right? Make sure you do this, make sure you don’t do that. Make sure you dress this way, make sure you, you know, whatever it is. Right, right. Practice exercises. And that way, when people come in and they mentioned, oh yeah, you know, I use Kim’s exercises.

    Then the PR agency knows it came from you. And likewise, if you have content on your site, then you know, they’re going to have to put in their email address to get Kim’s 10 tips on how to not sound like an idiot. When you’re on TV, you have your, you know, your, your 15 minutes of fame or whatever. Then when you have that, when you get that email address, like, let’s assume you have like a HubSpot or Infusionsoft or whatever, then you’re going to send them, you know, like what an auto responder does.

    Right. And how to set that up. So then your system just, you know, drips on them. Like, let’s say a series of seven messages over 10 days. And one of them is like, Hey, if you want to take it to the next level and you want to combine being on camera with getting the PR. Cause if you know how to be on camera, but you’re not getting the media appearances, then you know, then I, you know, this, this is who I work with and here’s examples of other [00:49:00] folks and whatnot, and in a very gentle way, not in a hard pushy kind of way.

    And then you have a system that’s pushing traffic to them without you having to manually make the referral each time, which is what you’re talking about right now, versus them having to manually make the referral. And then they would then in turn, have give you a D you, I would get rev share by these people that come to them.

    I see the traffic coming through there, clicking on the link. There’s a UTM where people are filling out the form. Right? What we’re talking about is this, this whole point of rev share. If you were here since the beginning is talking about. Partnerships that systematize the content production. So you don’t have to manually be there at every point if you’re there for every single deal that every sale.

    And I’m just talking to Kim, I’m talking to everyone here. That’s not a rev share that that’s a referral and there’s nothing wrong with referrals, but if you want a true system, you have to have it so that you’re not involved every time. Right. Great, great, great, great thoughts. Thank you so much. Thanks.[00:50:00] 

    Thank you, Kim Dennis, I’ve got a question about what you and Kim are discussing. Couldn’t you, um, have both sides of that partnership. Offering the same bundle. So for example, you mentioned like the PR firm let’s say their normal PR service, I’m just making up numbers. So don’t hold me to it. Let’s say their normal service is $9,000 a month, but if you want media training as well, it’s $12,000 a month.

    And that includes Kim services. And Kim is getting that $3,000 a month or whatever. She worked out with them under that package and conversely, and they can say we’ve partnered with Kim. Um, and you don’t have to break, get out the breakout, the pricing though. That’s the mistake people make. You don’t have.

    Because you’re all what you selling according to you, wouldn’t break out the pricing. The customer’s paying the third, the 12,000 a month, but behind the scenes, Kim’s getting her 3000. Right? And then conversely, conversely Kim says, you know, my normal to her customers, my normal media training is $3,000 a month.

    Um, [00:51:00] or whatever it is. But if you’re interested in a full PR package, I’m partnered with ABC agency and for $12,000 a month, you get all of that PR services and you also get my stuff or whatever, whatever the number, but you could both be offering the same bundle. Couldn’t you bundle the, the bundle that you both offer it.

    And that way it allows cross referred traffic. You don’t have to discount the bundle, but we see some people will do that because they’ll say it’s the reason why we do that is because it’s less effort because, you know, rather than having to set up two different things, we can work together. There’s efficiency.

    Right. We get under the hood one time versus twice, but you don’t have to discount. But the point is that a bundle shows collaboration between Kim and the agency or anyone listening or watching it’s whatever you are doing with the partner, clients and customers will pay for the convenience of knowing that there’s this whole thing already in.

    And by the way, sometimes this can be done physically too. Obviously it’s a little bit different now in the world of COVID and more people working [00:52:00] from home. But a lot of times you can be in the same physical location, which makes it even easier. So you’ll see a lot of law firms, we may have an accountant who has an office in their law firm.

    And if they have a client who needs accounting, help, the account they need is right there. You could have an office inside of the PR firm or vice versa, so that you’re, you’re not only offering the bundle as a business package, but you’re physically in the same location. It’s like a, a nail spot. It also has a massage therapist in the back.

    That massage therapist is probably not an employee of the nail salon, but they were working out of the same location and they can offer more services to the customers in partnership. Does that make sense? And it works products and services. So the same way a lot of chiropractors are growing because they’re partnering with nutritionist.

    And massage therapists, which brings them more business, because anyone who comes in on a issue with their gut, they probably have something else wrong. Right. Or they probably need some other kinds of coaching or they need some physical training where they need an, a vitamin C [00:53:00] I V. Drip. Right? So that’s in PR and services, but it also works.

    My buddy, John Kosh, he runs the virtual summit mastery. So he’s got the number one program on any, like if you see anyone that’s launching a virtual summit is for my buddy Yon, he’s got the dominant program. They’re all using his framework courses, all that. Right. And so he’s been teaching this thing, doing super well, tons of virtual summits that are launching under his program that are doing well.

    And he came to us for a partnership and said, Hey, The dollar a day stuff. Let’s, let’s create a bundle like Jeffrey set. So if you want the virtual summit mastery, the whole program, all the templates, the private group, all, you know, blah-blah-blah how to do it all by yourself. You know, as one person could actually launch it, you know, instead of like a podcast with 60 episodes, like here’s the whole thing, right?

    It’s a thousand dollars. And if you want Dennis’s program on dollar a day and how to drive sales through Facebook, that’s a thousand dollars. But if you buy the virtual summit mastery, [00:54:00] then we will give you the dollar a day training for free, right? So it’s like a two for one, and then we’ll do the same thing.

    We’ll say, Hey, you know, you can buy our dollar at age training, the whole program thousand dollars. But if you buy it and you mentioned Jaan, we’ll give you virtual summit for free. And so we see a lot of folks who have info products that will create bundle. To say, you know, if you, if you buy our thing, we’ll get these other things that a discount where it’s like, you know, if the cost of the value of all five things would be a thousand, but it’s only 200 or, you know, whatever it is.

    And there’s a lot of synergy there. You see what I mean? Yup. That makes sense. Um, Dennis, we got a few minutes left. Let’s make sure we get to Lisa and see if Lisa, did you have a question or a comment you wanted to add Lisa, if you’re there on mute yourself.

    All right. Lisa might be tied up. Uh, we, we won’t go to Lisa right now, but Kim was at helpful. [00:55:00] Very, yes. Just definitely kind of opening my eyes and to be thinking of things and just a little bit of a different way. Um, partly because a lot of times. I might end up referring more people than they, to them.

    Then they refer to me just because of the nature of whatever the situation is. Um, and or for bigger packages or smaller packages. And so it’s just good to sort of have ways to think about how do you make it kind of a win-win for Everett for both sides. So, yes. Great, great ideas. Thank you very much.

    Thank you, Kim. So we have Dominique, I guess is our last question or comment or since, since we lost Lisa here, Dominique. Welcome. Hello? Hello. Hi Dennis. How is everyone doing? Hi, Jeffrey. Um, my question is, and then Dennis, you are too, you’re tapping on this a little earlier when I had jumped in. Um, but it was in terms of ensuring that you’re getting paid.

    What your. Agreement, [00:56:00] um, is, uh, how, how are your agreement as outlined, right. Making sure that you’re not being underpaid or anything of that nature. And so my question for you is if you can kind of just circle back on that and just kind of dig a little deeper in terms of how or the different ways that you can structure, um, a rev share deal.

    And I, I, I asked that because I have gotten approached multiple times for rev share deals, but I never really dove into it because I’m like, I don’t want to make a mistake or anything like that. And so this, and literally I was a client, a potential client proposed this again to me a little before new years.

    And so this conversation is just so timely for me. Like, are you guys in my head because I do want to, but, um, I want to make sure that I know. That, whatever the deal is that we’re getting paid that and doing it right. And my [00:57:00] second sub question is around contracts. Okay. Okay. Well, let’s do it the first part.

    So dominate your, your question’s more around how to ensure you’re getting paid as to like how you structure, what the percentages are. And. Correct. So I know you guys talked about links or getting 1% of all of their revenue. I do love that idea. Um, but yeah, I’m just curious to, how do you really, how do you, how does that happen?

    How do you do it? Okay. You raised a good question because in the world of lead gen where there’s partnerships and affiliates, a very common problem that causes a lot of these deals to fall apart, getting the credit, because let’s say you drive a lead to a real estate agent as an example, and it, you know, you sell a house in California, it’s a $20,000 commission because all the houses are a million dollars now, you know, in COVID times.

    And it’s not because the real estate [00:58:00] agent is dishonest. It’s because there’s, there’s some tracking that breaks down because maybe it was some content that you created together. But then someone called in and whoever answered the phone, you know, maybe they didn’t ask the question. How did you hear about us or where this deal come from?

    So they just wrote down internet or they wrote down other or whatever. They didn’t really care if there’s an intermediary, like a receptionist or someone who answers the phone or see a community person, or if it’s smaller where you’re working with these other consultants or people that refer you, or it could be agency owners, or it could be other contractors in different areas of expertise.

    They just don’t know that the lead came from you. So that’s why to our point with Kim, we’ve really liked to have some kind of lead magnet, some kind of thing where you’re providing so much value on, you know, how do you show up on camera, whatever it is that they have to put in an email address. And then [00:59:00] you scan through your CRM, your HubSpot, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, like whatever it is.

    And you look for matches. Of who opted in for that particular thing and who became a client. Right. And we see it all the time where people will buy our courses. Actually, the majority of our courses, we made the switch. Like 90 days ago, we put out most of our courses for $7 and people look at this and they say, why is Dennis putting them in this course?

    There’s no way this course can have any value of it’s only $7, but I know it’s Dennis and Stephan should be like a $700 course or a $500 course. Why is it only $7? It’s because. Right. Right. And then what we’ll do is we’ll match that back to, so we did one with Ben Fisher. Who’s the number one guy for Google my business.

    And he’s got the most platinum. So anyway, you know, you want to rank on Google, my business and all that. This is the guy and we create all this training. We have a guide for $7. How do you kick other people out for their GMBs? How do you get disapproved? How do you like all this stuff on everything to do with ranking locally, right?

    [01:00:00] $7, no brainer, because then we match that list against anyone who purchased our services, our done for you services. And we can see like, okay, this one came from Ben. This other one came from Ben. It’s not because we want the $7. Right. So think about something that gives you more visibility, because if you rely upon like dentists have this issue too, like we’ve done a lot of stuff with digital agencies that do lead gen where they really liked the idea of performance.

    Oh yeah. We take care of our clients because we only charge them for the lead. You know why you don’t see that as a common model? It’s because they don’t track the leads and therefore the agency doesn’t get paid. And then if they do track the leads, then that dentist will say, well, I’m going to, I’m going to contest this lead because it wasn’t a good lead.

    Or this one is a patient that was rescheduling. Or this is one that they didn’t have insurance. So they are, this is one where instead, they’ll just try to nitpick. And then, because, you know, if you’re being paid based, if you have, you know, the commissions paid based on leads, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna go down the list and [01:01:00] like, say, Nope, not this one, not this one.

    This was the wrong number. This, this one was not qualified in some way, you know, So to get around that you have to have some sort of intermediate level to track. You cannot rely upon whoever answers the phone to mark down, that it came from Dominique. Right? And it’s not because people are dishonest. It’s just because the tracking between two organizations causes things to fall between the cracks.

    Does that make sense? That’s why I asked the question. Um, not necessarily as if we’re offering their product necessarily, but more so because of the fact that we’ve built their platform. And so, um, because little deeper context is I have a visual branding agency. So we design platforms for small businesses, medium sized businesses and corporations, et cetera.

    Um, and with that, because of the fact that we’ve done a lot of their revamp and [01:02:00] help them with their systems and everything of that nature. I get the question is like, you know, what do you guys think about, you know, a launch longer-term relationship and you guys can get a percentage and this and that.

    And I kind of just towed around it a little bit or say, you know, let’s table that for now, let’s just focus on, you know, your project at hand, but I would like to, uh, but to ensure that we’re doing it well and doing it right, I definitely know that digital component has to be, or some kind of tracking component has to be in there.

    But sometimes that is where the iffy part comes in. So I will reconsider this a little more, especially because again, it’s come across my desk multiple times. So I’m like, okay, me too. Clearly, people want this. So let me look into this more. And I know that there’s greater revenue on the, on the backend of that.

    It’s just. It takes a long way, bigger and harder to sell me on that. Like Harmon brothers or whatever. Like I consider this other stuff is like paid lead [01:03:00] gen because the part of his ongoing residual income, but you can, you have, but most people don’t do it because they don’t know how to structure the deal.

    And then the tracking piece, which we just started to talk about here, there’s a whole nother world called digital plumbing. Plumbing is how you track how all the data moves between your site, the different social media sites, their site, their email list, your email list, the different forms, like just lots of systems where stuff just like falls between the cracks.

    And we don’t have enough time to really talk about that here. But if you go to blitz metrics.com/dpc digital plumbing, Three letters, DPC. You’ll see how we do that. It’s arguably our most popular course. We’ve had the last 10 years and it shows you how to set that up. And we think that data is oiled. And if you don’t track everything, you’re leaving money on the table and you could be driving value that you don’t even know you’re doing that.

    You could then tell the partner, Hey, you know, did you know, we drove you this many leads and [01:04:00] this, this much traffic from our site and from this, and from that, and this, you got this one big customer who came from us, like that’s nice negotiating leverage. Right. If you knew that. Yeah. And with the, and with the, when you were talking about the 1% deal is part of your agreement that you’ll have access to their books so that you can see, oh yeah.

    There’s always an audit. Every audit got it. Whoever is whoever’s taking in the money is the one who has to pay out the money to the, to us or whoever the other. And then we’d like to have a 30 day grace period, because there could be refunds. There could be data issues. So they’ll pay it out. Let’s let’s say to us, let’s say they’re the underlying, like the Magnolia company, the seats of life they’re paying us every month.

    Right. We invoice them on the first and net of adjustments. Right. That we’ll true it up. But what we don’t do is wait, 30 days after the end of the month, have them pay right away. And then, [01:05:00] you know, we’ll adjust it in the next setting. And we just think it’s better to have the timing be as tight as possible and allow for adjustments as opposed to wait until everything’s done.

    Like we, I’m not going to tell you it was, but we did a program with somebody who’s really well known and made a lot of money, but we didn’t get paid for six months because they said, well, we have to wait for the numbers to settle. And the accountants have to look at it and all this and that. And I said, well, why don’t you just pay this amount?

    And then if we think that $5,000 is going to go back because of adjustments, then we’ll write you a check for 5,000. It’s just better and everyone should have access, read only access to the Google analytics and the Google analytics. Most people don’t know this. The Google analytics should be where all the conversions, I don’t care if it’s Shopify or infusion soft or wherever it is, all that data should be tracked back to Google analytics.

    Even though they’re the source of revenue could be some other system I could jobby or something like that. And that way everybody can come in [01:06:00] and audit the data and see where the traffic sources are. The digital plumbing set up properly. Then everyone is not going to be surprised at the end of the month or any argument about who’s creating value, which then causes the underlying client to say, you know what?

    I don’t want to work with you anymore. I’m gonna kill this partnership. Yeah. But we just invested three months and we built all this stuff for you. And you know, now you’re going to abandon us while, you know, we put in all the investment and you’re going to keep reaping it while we’re in to not pay us anymore.

    Like, that’ll avoid that situation. Cause everyone would be in tune along the way. Got it. So don’t. Don’t audit their financials, audit their analytics analytics. So the market, so marketing is not a, to the penny, you know, T account know source of truth, but it is, it is actually the most important part in partnerships because accounting is, is like accounting has to be tied to the penny because of the books and that kind of thing.

    So it sounds sort of counterintuitive, but there is a marketing set of books, which is what’s really most important here. And then there’s the actual [01:07:00] finance set of books. We care more about the marketing side, because that’s where the data is. That’s where. You can do analysis and it doesn’t have to be exact.

    And the point of a rev share is it’s not exact because, you know, cause you’re setting it on 5% of the gross or 20% affiliate codes, you know, based on, or based on like whatever is, we know that those things are not exact, but they they’re the closest approximation we have to what value we’re driving and we can revisit it every quarter.

    And we could say, you know, maybe we didn’t do as much, let’s cut it down from 5% to 3% or let’s structure this other thing because the deal has changed because our businesses have changed or, you know, whatever. Right. We’re putting in more, we need to, you know, we need to find a way to reflect that, that we’re doing these other things that we weren’t doing initially.

    And we all agree that yeah, this, this other thing that we’re doing is worthwhile to keep doing. Yeah. And are you making, are you making the deal and then going to your lawyers and then having them draft it out or do you have like a template and the, you have like a [01:08:00] section that you’re outlining the deal and then sign off from there, like.

    That’s a good question. So this is really fodder for G so Jeffrey, we should have this as a whole nother, please do. I’ll just tell you that the quick answer is anytime there is a contract, almost nobody understands this. And when there’s a contract, there’s two parts. There’s the statement of work, which is the business terms and planning who’s doing what and when and how and how the deal works.

    And then there’s the T’s and C’s the terms and conditions, which the legalees template stuff you need both. So in one page, you should be able to outline the terms of the deal who, where, what, when, why, how, and then the rest of it on payment and intellectual property and escalation and access. And who’s in charge of what like that is that’s templatized, but you can never templatize the business terms.

    That’ll get you in trouble and people like, oh, you have a template. I can just fill in the blanks. Like no, no, no business terms are always [01:09:00] written in plain English. And if you can’t write the business terms in plain English in three to five sentences, you don’t know what the deal is. Correct. Great point.

    Great point then I said, yep. Yep. Thank you guys. Thank you, Dominique. You know Dennis, there’s one thing Dominique made me think of this when you guys were talking, if there’s one way to demonstrate how valuable a rev share Deere deal can be. Cause she mentioned that it could be more very lucrative. You think about who is typically the highest paid employee at a successful company, not counting stock compensation and equity, but just on a cash salary basis, who is typically the highest paid employee at a, at a successful company.

    Then. Salesforce top salesperson, right? Top salesperson is going to make more money than the CEO. Why? Because they’re on a rev share. They’re getting a condition based on performance. That’s how it works. [01:10:00] And guess what your see people think of salespeople as salespeople, like some person and yes, the top salesperson internally, it could be inside sales, outside sales gets the most money, but guess what?

    I consider your ad campaigns, a sales person to, I consider your partnerships, basically salespeople. They’re all salespeople. They’re just not people that are W2 or 10 99 or whatever it is, but they’re all sources of revenue, which is why we want to track them at the campaign level inside Google analytics, which is the UTM campaign parameter.

    Right. It just goes back to having that data because it may be. There’s a partnership that you, because you’re on someone’s podcast. So it’s sort of an unofficial partnership and that’s driving you a ton of traffic and someone else has taken credit for it.

    You don’t even know because you weren’t tracking it. Yeah. Well, what a great topic. Great discussion. As you said, Dennis, this can lead us in [01:11:00] down a few paths for some other sessions diving into some of these things that were brought up tonight, uh, deeper. So thank you for that. Thank you. And thank you to Kim and Dominique and everyone who participated tonight and especially thanks to everyone who stayed with us and listen.

    Yeah. Thank you guys. And if you’re setting up a partnership, I’d love to hear about how it’s going, or if you have questions along the way, or you’re having some kind of success. We love highlighting other people that execute because this is not just something. Cooking show where you watch Gordon Ramsay cook.

    We’re actually cooking together, right? You’re here because you are an entrepreneur, a startup you want to follow the things is not just theoretical. These are real examples. You know, Jeffrey’s not just talking because he’s in the front left and started the room. He actually set up a partnership just a few weeks ago with my buddy Brennan, right?

    Because the two companies in the pet space we’re actually living and breathing it. Right? Absolutely. So living in this is what we do in the coach. You show, we implement and we share from [01:12:00] other people that have implemented, we share our direct examples and we encourage you guys to share. And I love spending time with you guys every week.

    We do it for free because we want to see you win. And we love being part of startup club. So awesome scene calling the founder, pop in. Lot of people that are working behind the scenes to make this stuff happen, you know, give them a little bit of love and pay it forward. You learn something good, pay it forward.

    And yeah. Show where you got credit, right? Help someone else. You find something, you find someone else who’s struggling because they they’re missing out. They’re just doing sales or they’re just hiring agencies and they miss on the partnership angle, help them out. Right. This, this is a, this is a, what is the word?

    The opposite of scarcity. People who have the abundance, abundance. Yeah. We all have the abundance. So every week we just, we discuss something new because we all believe in abundance. Yup. I’d love you guys. And as Dennis mentioned, this show’s recorded. So you can find recordings of all the coaches shows [01:13:00] over@startup.club, which is the website for startup club, but we also have replaced turned on which, which is a great new feature on clubhouse.

    So if you go to start-up club or if you go to Dennis’s profile or my profile, you’ll actually be able to listen to, or share the replay of this show. So if you miss something or you want to make notes or go back and listen again, easy to do, and we hope we encourage you to do so. You guys are amazing.

    Love you all. I’m going to go to red lobster, eat some food, Jeffrey. All right, well thank you everyone. Thank you, Dennis. And this has been the coach you show. We hope you’ll come back. We do this every Thursday evening at 5:00 PM. Pacific 8:00 PM. Eastern here in start-up club. Hope to see you again. Thanks everyone guys.

    Soon. Next week.

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