Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road to walk. Often you have to celebrate the wins and confront the losses on your own, and it can be hard to do it all yourself, all the time.
That’s why many entrepreneurs find camaraderie — and extra cash — in creating a joint venture partnership.
A joint venture is a great way for you to combine your resources and share risk with another business for mutual benefit. The other party can give you access to their skills, audience, and resources, and vice versa. And sometimes working together can produce better results than either person could achieve alone.
If this sounds good to you, the first step is to think of an idea for a winning joint venture that will help you achieve your business goals. Here are a few ways to start brainstorming.
What Do You Lack?
The best place to start is by considering what your business is currently lacking. What weak point could a partnership with someone else help you fill and strengthen? A deficit in your business could be in any one of the following areas:
Skillset
You may need to do something you lack the skills to do. For example, you might be strong in R&D but lack good distribution. A JV idea for you would be to partner with someone with a strong network that’s hungry for the products you’re developing. You may team up with a writer, designer, or another service provider who can help you fill in content gaps.
Resources
We often team up with other businesses in order to access their resources. They could have a large and engaged email list or social media audience. They might have the financial resources that you need.
And it works the other way around as well — you may have certain resources that another business lacks. By working together, you can pool your resources so that you can both achieve your goals.
Expertise
Maybe there’s an area of your niche where you lack expertise. You can partner with an expert in that area and combine resources to offer webinars and other helpful content for your audience. Through the partnership, you can cover all the bases in your niche.
Go Through Your Network
Another way to get ideas for joint ventures is to go through your network. Look at clients, suppliers, and individuals you’ve worked with before. By looking at their skills and resources, you may come up with an idea for a project you can work on together.
This offers a few key benefits. First, finding the right partner is a major step in forming a JV. Once you know what you need and have a project idea, you then have to go searching for the right person. If you start with your network, this important step is already done.
It’s also a great way to take advantage of networking. You can team up with someone you’ve just met and start building a long-lasting relationship with them through your JV project.
Look Around For Examples
If you’re new to joint ventures and not sure where to start, a great way is to look at existing JVs to get ideas. Look at companies in your niche, competitors, brands you love, and so on to get ideas for your own partnership. See how they’ve combined their resources and what they’re doing to reach their business goals through a partnership.
As you go about searching for ideas, keep your customers and their needs in mind. The central question in your mind should be, “How can this partnership better serve my audience?”
Do you want to learn more about how to discover what it is your clients really want? Check out my course, Market Research Mastery which teaches you a simple system for finding your ideal audience.
[learn_press_profile]
