Sohail Khan: Million Dollar Joint Venture Partnering Strategies For Growing Any Business

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. Welcome back to the show everybody. I'm happy to have you here. Today is going to be a topic that's near and dear to my heart. We're primarily going to be covering a strategy that I used primarily to build one of my first businesses. Really. I would give 80% of the credit of my success in my very first business to the strategy called joint ventures and strategic alliances. Today I have got an expert on the other line named Sohail Khan who I've invited to the show to talk about this. He's an expert at this and I'll give you a more formal introduction to him in just a moment. But before I do, I want to take a moment to thank a lot of the listeners out there who taking the time to email me and ask me questions about whether it's about how to grow their business or how to sometimes how to get started. I get a lot of folks who are actually in business who have their own, whether it's an offline or an offline business contacting me, telling me that they're happy with a lot of strategies I share and asking for some specific help. And yes, it is true, I do offer that if you email me@askbradaconrappedbusiness.com it's one of my favorite things to do is help other entrepreneurs grow their business. And I got an email recently from a guy named Jeff who was asking me how he grows his he has a printing business, so it's an offline printing business. One of the things I told him was to look for other folks in his field, whether it's prospects or people who serve his prospects and find out what what else they offer that he doesn't so that they can combine forces and create a joint venture together and apply that in a way so that it serves him, it serves his partner and obviously it serves the client. He's undergoing that right now. I gave him some very specific examples. I don't have any results to report to you yet because it's only been about a week and a half since I've talked to him. But but this came directly from a listener emailing me in emailing me with a question about how he helps grow his business. So we'll see. We'll report back on another episode about that very soon. But without any further ado, I want to get to introducing my guest. So Sohail is the founder of a company called the Joint Venture Group and prior to starting that he has over 15 years of sales and JV marketing and business experience. Having previously built a multi million dollar Internet training business which he started with just 1000 bucks back in the year 2000. He then sold a majority stake to a 150 million dollar IT company back in 2006. In 2008 the IT company went bust and so Hale lost everything but he retained the knowledge and expertise of building a business with over $10 million in sales just using joint ventures. In 2009 he set himself a challenge to make $1 million within 12 months using nothing but his JV marketing experience and he managed to close a $1.5 million joint venture in not 12 months, 30 days without a product, business or capital. He closed his biggest joint venture to date and went from 0 to 4 million customers in just 30 days. And it's now called his Joint Venture Blueprint. A few Years ago, in 2011 he launched the Ultimate Business Consultant to train individuals worldwide to operate their own six and seven figure joint venture brokerage. Also giving business owners access to a specialist professional support network to help them create high level and low cost JVs to double or even triple their sales and profits. And just Last year in 2014, Sohail published his number one international best selling book with the late great J. Conrad Levinson titled Guerrilla Marketing and Joint Ventures which was completed a few weeks before Jay's unfortunate passing. I've got the book right here in front of me. I've read it, I've made notes in it. It's incredible. I know a lot about joint ventures myself. I've done a lot of them and I still learned quite a bit. So that is why I invited Sohail on here to share some of his best bacon wrapped business strategies with you. So Hale, how are you buddy?

I'm great Brad, and thank you for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. It's always fun to talk to somebody who thinks the way I do with this. And I've noticed that in the world of structuring joint ventures it takes a certain kind of a mindset, one you can learn. But people who think a little bit out of the box, people who connect dots that other people miss, and people who see opportunities that are sometimes hiding right there in Plain sight, under your nose. And you seem to be an expert at capturing those.

Thank you.

So I don't like to go too in depth, usually about people's entrepreneurial journey. There's a lot of web, a lot of podcasts and sites out there that says, tell me how you got started, what your childhood was like, et cetera, et cetera. I like to get into the meat of things. However, your story, especially how you went from zero, you lost everything, and you went from zero to 4 million clients using JVs is absolutely pertinent to this story here. So usually I ask folks, what is the one thing that you know, you're your single best strategy or tactic that you like to use with you and your clients. But I think we've already established that it's joint ventures. So let's talk about your story, how you. How you, after you lost it all, how you used this to climb back up.

Sure. And it's a story that I love telling, and it's something that really inspires not only me every time I tell it, but also people who hear it. So, yes, after I lost everything, literally going from multimillionaire to totally broke, I looked at something that I had previously done, or you always try and look at something that's worked previously, something that you've implemented that's worked. And that's the same thing with me. I wrap my brains trying to figure out how to get back on my feet. As, you know, when you lose everything and you're, you know, you're still, you know, you've been living sort of the multi millionaire lifestyle, you still have bills to pay. So being in survival mode, sometimes you try and grab and clutch at straws just to figure out how to get back on your feet. But fortunately for me, it was joint ventures. You know, it's something that I'd done previously. I built a $10 million company literally from scratch using joint ventures. And for me, I was very fortunate. And like you said about the joint venture, you know, even the success mindset, it really opens up your vision and, you know, you start to see things that other people don't. So to kind of long story short, for me, it was very fortunate. I saw an ad in a newspaper, and the ad was for a book called how to use your PC in two hours. The book was basically aimed at the baby boomer market. And what was interesting was not the book. Okay. It was underneath the book, there was an inscription that said, you know, over 400,000 copies sold. So my inclination and the joint venture expert Inside of me said, wow, so they've actually got 400,000 customers who have bought this book. Now if I go a bit backwards, and my previous company was an online learning company, online training, video training. So, you know, I used to produce video based training courses for corporates, for consumers, B2B. And so I contacted the company, it was a publishing company, and I asked them if they had a video version of the book. They said no. And I said, well, I have a video version of the book. Would you be interested in supplying that to your existing customers as an upsell? They said yes. They asked me to send the video, which I said was a video course on dvd, how to use your computer. And they said to me, send it to us for us to have a look at. And actually I didn't have it. I just pitched the idea on the phone and I managed to convince them to have me come down and meet them face to face and talk about how we could implement this product into their existing customers. So I got a meeting at this company, a very successful company, direct mail company, based here in the UK, $25 million turnover company, very savvy company. And I turned up at the meeting, managing director was there and the first question he asked me was, Sahel, we're really interested in this video based course that you have which could be suitable for the existing customers who have bought the book. Can we have a look at it? And obviously I didn't have it, so I had to make an excuse and say, well, I left out in such a rush. I left it at home in my office. The manu dress looked at me thinking, is this guy for real? And, and he said, okay, look, here's the thing, you know, if you can get it to us within the next three to five days, we'll definitely be interested in it. And you know, if it, if it does what it says, then we would be interested in, you know, supplying this to our existing customers who bought the book. So I left that meeting thinking, oh, you know what, damn, they're really interested in doing a deal here. But I don't have the book. Now here's an interesting point when it comes to joint ventures that nobody will ever tell you. Wherever you go, people will never tell you this. You know, the success in joint ventures is mostly to do with locking down distribution channels. Okay? So if you can lock down a distribution channel, that's where the success is. It's not really finding the product and then finding the market. It's securing the market or securing a distribution channel. And in Turn, you can put as many products as you want through that distribution channel. So in effect here we have a company who has 400,000 paying customers on their database that I have access to if I can produce the product. Okay, so that's one really, really important point that nobody ever tells you about. You know, the secret and you know, how to really make millions with joint ventures, which is look for the, look.

For the distribution channel first.

Exactly.

You know, businesses that their foundation is they have a rock solid distribution channel are the most valuable businesses in the world. I mean, look at Amazon, look at, you know, Walmart, look at all these companies, they have their channels built and you have clamoring to get into Walmart or clamoring to get to the top of Amazon because that's where all the people are. It's much easier to build a product than it is to build a sales channel.

Exactly. And that is what, you know, that's something that I get approached by a lot for clients in terms of going out there and finding distribution channels for clients. So there I was, you know, I didn't have a product, but I had, you know, a potential distribution channel that I had access to. So I had to go and find the product now. And I went into Office World staple stores looking for this product, which was a DVD video course. And I contacted a few companies and said, look, I've got a potential client here. We can probably sell a couple of thousand units of your product. But from you I need two things. One is I need better margins and I need the ability to be able to white label or basically put our own branding on the product. And I didn't really get anywhere. Most of these companies didn't really understand what I was trying to achieve because it does take a bit of time educating companies about exactly what you're trying to do. So instead I turned to, I went online and I turned to a website called elance.com, e l a n c e.com a site where you can find a lot of freelancers. And I put a project on Elance and said, look, I've got this book. If anyone can turn the book into a video course for me, this is what I'm looking for. So people started bidding on my project and I ended up paying 500 doll for a. Which essentially is a Camtasia screen recording course based on the contents of the book. So I have, I now had the DVD which I owned the rights to, paid $500 for it. And then I went back to the company, the direct mail company. And I said, look, here's the actual video based course. And they loved it. Even the MD said to me, wow, this is amazing. You know, how did you do this? And I was like, well, you know, my team have been up for a couple of days doing it when really I just outsourced it.

Now did they think, did they know that you had created it based upon their materials or did they think that you had this already out there and it just happened to be very similar to their stuff?

Well, what did I, what I ended up doing was I ended up taking elements of their materials and putting together and constructing a course. So yes, in effect they said, you know, this is really good because it covers most of the materials that we have in the book. So yes, I did create it according to some of the content that they had in the book, but actually I made it better. What we managed to do was we managed to create a DVD course which we titled how to use your PC in one hour rather than in two hours. And this is something that they really, really liked. So the managing director loved the idea and the concept. And you know, we sat down and then we started talking about, you know, how we would get this out to their customers. And they're, they're a direct mail company. It's very similar to, you know, like a QVC based company. They work on a points basis, which is a percentage. So I started negotiating with them in terms of what I wanted out of the deal. And normally it's a percentage of sales, but this time I tried to figure out, because the percentage was so low they were giving me, I just asked them, look, what was the retail price that you wanted to sell this DVD at to your customers? And they said, well, you know, we'd love to sell it at sort of 29.95. I said, okay, if you're going to sell it $29.95, basically, you know, this is, I'm just converting into dollars. Give me basically $7.95 for each one you sell. You can, but I don't want to do any of the distribution, any of the fulfillment and the marketing. You do all that. I'll give you a copy of the DVD with a license to duplicate it. And you'll have that license, you know, to duplicate the product and fulfill it and do all the, all the marketing for it. So I sat there and I thought, okay, this is a really good deal. And they agreed on it. They said, it's great. And then I started to write out the agreement, you know, the joint Venture agreement. Because you've got to make sure that when you're participating in a joint venture, you have to have an agreement in place, whether it's a letter of introduction or a solidified agreement. The reason I say that is that some people do joint ventures on handshakes, and I've done that in the past, and I have lost a lot of money. You need to have agreements in place for these sort of things, especially when you're dealing with big companies and companies doing over sort of 10, 15 million turnover.

Right. The ones that you lose the most money on with the handshake deals are the most successful ones because people's attitude and everything changes when big money's on the line. And all of a sudden that gray area isn't so gray anymore. They're like, well, I'm just gonna. I mean, there's. That's why they say there's sharks out there. Right. When there's a lot of money at stake, you better have something good in writing.

Yeah. Let me tell you, I've lost. I've lost six figures on deals where I did it on a handshake. But that was when that was in the. That was in limits. Let me call it the younger days when, you know, I. I'm now a bit more wide wiser. So I'm writing the agreement up, and in the agreement, you know, I put that I have access to 400,000 customers on behalf of the company. And the managing director is sitting there, and before he signs the agreement, he says to himself, this is really, really good. If our customers really, really like the product, I'd love to roll this out to our complete customer database. And then I asked him, how big is your customer database? It was 4.2 million customers. So when I say to people how I went from zero to 4.2 million customers, in essence, that's how I did it. And getting access to their whole database as basically as their joint venture broker. So the deal was done. We signed the agreement, and it actually took us about 18 months to complete the whole deal. From zero to.

Getting the first dollar.

Yeah, yeah. But basically what happened was we did. We did just over 201,000 units, and my cup was $7.50 per unit. So overall, the deal netted me about $1.5 million. But let me go ahead.

But I was going to ask you what aspect of the deal took. So like, the. Took the majority of the time, the 18 months, I mean, was it. I know bigger companies and 25 million is a big company, but it's not like a Fortune 500. What took the longest. Sometimes they take a while to make decisions, and that can drive people crazy.

That's what it was. I was. When we first started, I was working along with the. Which is what predominantly is the CEO. Then he handed me down to his marketing team, and then I started working with the marketing team. Now, they weren't the. They weren't the guys to push it or the decision makers. So they had several campaigns going out throughout the year, and I had to basically hustle to make sure that we carried on with our campaigns during that period of time. This is one of the reasons why it took longer than expected because they, you know, they started and stopped the campaign. Started and stopped the campaign. And because I wasn't dealing directly with the CEO, the person who was appointed to work with me really wasn't the main decision maker. But, yeah, you know, we got there eventually and the deal was done and it was. It was a very good deal.

That's great. Backing up a couple other. Filling in some details that I'd like to personally know. So you said in the beginning when they were just wanting to offer you a percentage of the profits, it was a really low percentage. Do you recall what they initially wanted to offer you?

Well, put it this way, when I go into an organization and I do a joint venture deal, I pitch anywhere between sort of 15 to 25%. Their percentage was something like 5%. It was very, very low. So I went with the flip side to give them more of the. Of the margin for the product. And that worked out really in my favor.

Okay, because what you. The 8, 7, 9, 5. And you said they were selling it at 20.

29. 95.

29. Okay.

Because.

Yeah, I mean, that works out to about 20, right? About 20%.

Just under 20%, yeah. Which is where I wanted to.

So you actually got what you wanted, but did you kind of get what you wanted because you reframed it as just paying a certain dollar per.

I did. I did. I said, look, this is, you know, that's too much of a headache for me to, you know, to get around. Let's just keep it nice and simple. Instead of just doing the percentage and tallying up the numbers, you take X and I'll take Y and, you know, you. I'll give you the majority.

So, yeah. And it sounds like you ended up getting pretty much the percentage you wanted. So, I mean, there's a lesson in that, which is sometimes it's the way you frame something can make the biggest difference in the world. Big question that I know a lot of my clients and other folks that I've talked to ask about licensing deals and joint ventures. And when you're taking your idea to a bigger company, their question before they really understand this is always, well, why don't they just do it themselves if it only costs you $500, why don't they go just create it on their own?

You know, this is, you know, this is the question I get asked all the time.

I guarantee it.

Yeah, Most companies are too busy to even look at themselves and even identify the opportunity because they're so engrossed in the product they don't see the other opportunities to leverage. It takes someone like me to come into an organization and show them what they need to be doing. One of the things I'm really good at and one of the things I get called into companies is exactly for that. You know, they'll bring me in for a day and you know, my fee, you know, if you read the book, you'll see what my fees are in the book. And it's what people get out of it. You know, it's like there's things that I can, you know, hidden opportunities that I can see in a company regarding their products, regarding their database, regarding anything they're doing in business, which I can easily leverage. So it's a classic question. But here's the thing which is interesting as well, Brad. I've spoken around the world, okay, for the last, I'd say what, five years. And I've done the same presentation, okay, the same story now why not many people go out and do it, you know, so it's interesting, isn't it?

Well, I'm telling you, like I said in the very beginning, it takes a very certain type of mindset that.

Prefers.

To have options and choices versus just strict processes. So I've got a master's training in neuro linguistic programming, nlp. And that the only reason I say that is because one of the most valuable things I learned in there, they talk about the way we make decisions and the, you know, in different contexts. But people are usually either very options oriented, they want a lot of choices in which to pick from or they want processes and step by step procedures. And the folks who, you know, if you're very systematic, like give me the blueprint and I'll follow it and I know I'll be success because I'll just copy your success. If you say, well, you can do it like this or this or this, or look at all these other options, their head will explode. But for people like me, and maybe for people like you, if you give me a blueprint and tell me just to follow it, I'll get about halfway into it and I'll start adding my own little tweaks and options and I'll get bored because I want to be able to connect dots. I want to get out there and I want the choices. And I do think that for some people doing joint ventures and these kind of creative deals, it doesn't come naturally to them.

Correct.

But if you give them a. And we'll talk about this later on, if you give them a blueprint and a step by step system to say you too can do this, then you kind of COVID both. There's people who do it naturally and then there's people who will do it if you give them a process. But you're right, it's crazy that you've told this story for so long and very few people go out there and put those kind of creative deals together. I love it.

I'll tell you something that's really interesting. You brought that up. You know, one of the first times I spoke at an event, there was about, I think about 2,000 people in the room. And when I came off the stage, this guy ran up to me and said to me, you know, I just, he said to me, what I just heard on the stage right now just made me ten grand. And I was like, I was like, how do you do that? So this is something that I document in my presentation, actually. After that he said, well, what I did was, he said, you know, you, you talking about joint ventures, right? How you can go out and get anything you want or any asset or leverage other people's products and services. Right? So he said, look, I'm a consultant and I had, I've got a company that's a client that's working with me right now, and that client is looking for a social media strategy for their company. And he goes, I've done some research and I went out and I found a couple of companies and they said that, you know, they would charge, you know, 25, 50 grand for this strategy that the, that the, the client wants. And he goes, I always, I obviously take a cut for introducing them to the client. But he goes, before you spoke, the person before you was a social media expert and she was pitching a $5,000 product which had everything in it that this company was charging for 25 grand. He goes, what I did was I rang my client and I said, you know what, I can get You a better deal on that 25 grand if you are prepared to put in a purchase order right now, because I can get that whole package for you for about ten grand. And he said to the client, if you can send me a purchase order right now, you know, I'll secure it for you. He got the purchase order through his phone, his BlackBerry. He approached the speaker before me and said, you know, this five grand package that you got, I like to buy one of those for my client.

That's fantastic. So are you saying that did I miss this and this was the same person that they're. That they were actually charging 25,000? It was the same person or different? It was a similar.

It was similar, yeah.

That's great.

He basically was going out trying to find social media companies for his client, but the person who spoke before me was a social media expert, since she was selling a five grand package from the stage. And he just put them two together, did a jv and he took five. He made five grand from.

It's connecting the dots. You know, listeners to my podcast have heard me say this many times. And it's a, you know, it's kind of a formula that I approach most business problems with. And it really is. Is based upon, you know, the JV mindset, which is, you know, I ask these questions. I go, okay, one, who else has what I need and who else needs what I have? And I brainstorm. So I think about, what do I, you know, what do I have? I have all these, you know, what is my intellectual property? What are my, you know, what value do I bring to the table? Okay, so who else needs that? And I think of every other type of company who could possibly benefit from what I've got. And if I've got distribution, well, there's a lot of people who may want that. If I've got product, then I ask, well, who else has what I need? Well, you know, what do I need? Do I need customers? Do I need distribution? Do I need product fulfillment? What do I need? The next question I ask is, what if? And the what if is a big, fun brainstorming question, which is, I just start connecting the dots. I love doing this on a whiteboard or a mind map. And, you know, what if we do this? What if I. And this can get crazy. You can sit here for hours and do what if scenarios, but I whittle it down at the end by asking, why not? So do any of these not make sense? Or, you know, well, this would be too hard to pull off, or this would be, you know, conflicts of interest, etc. But what you end up coming up with asking, who else has what I need? Who else needs what I have? What if we combine forces? And why not? It's amazing the opportunities that you can come up with. A short anecdote that I did, and this was, this was far from a major moneymaker, but it made money and it was fun. But a friend of mine had been trying to publish these vegetarian recipe books on Amazon and was having no success because he was just following one of these new little Kindle formulas and he was a nobody publishing vegetarian recipes. So he obviously wasn't getting many sales. Another person that I knew had a very popular health and wellness blog, talked a lot about nutrition. They didn't sell a book. So I asked them, how would you like to have a best selling book on Amazon and not have to write it? And they said, okay, what do you got? And I went to my other buddy Matt, and I said, how would you like to give me the rights to your book? And I'll just pay you, I'll pay you like 30. I can't remember what it was now like 35% of the revenues. He goes, yeah, go for it. I'm not making any money here. So I literally took the content in his book, rewrote just a tiny bit of it, adapted it to meet their brand. I slapped their name on it. So I licensed their name, you know, the name of their blog, presents these recipes. I licensed his content. I kept 25% of the sales, but more importantly, I owned the copyright. This is my book. I'm licensing the brand from one, the content from another. And then I went to the people that I licensed their brand and I said, okay, now here's your book. Promote the hell out of it. And they did. And it became number one bestseller for a week straight in, I don't know, like recipe books on Amazon, which was pretty good, made several thousand dollars. But it would say it's that exact mindset. Who else has something that they're not, you know, un. What does Jay Abraham call it? Underutilized resources something.

Underutilized resources. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you say that, you know, sort of Kevin Harrington, a good friend of mine, he wrote the. Not the forward, but he wrote the testimonial for my book on the front cover. And it's something that we've been talking going backwards and forwards about for quite a while now, working together on the licensing aspect. But one target market we've identified is inventors. How we can assist inventors by helping them do more strategic alliances and joint ventures with manufacturers and distributors to get their products out there. So it's just been an ongoing discussion between us, and we're just looking at how we can actually form an entity together to do that. But that's a big. It's such a huge gap in the market in the US It's a huge market. That market in itself is worth billions. So it's quite interesting. And just to also let you know, another thing that I do, you know, I train a bunch of joint venture consultants and how I teach them to identify joint venture partners is I always say to them, you know, if you have a client, okay, try and figure out, try and zero in on that client's customer. Okay? So when that customer comes to the client, where does that customer go before they come to the client and where do they go afterwards? So those two aspects are really your ideal joint venture partners, you know, because it's not competitive.

Yeah. It's complementary. You know, like if you're trying to get a. If you're selling a house, what do people do before they go to buy a house? What do they do after they buy a house? Exactly. Kind of a. Bingo. That's a great way to unleash those. One of the things that I've done and helped, I've actually gotten some business out of this is I've got some friends who do local. Local business marketing. So PPC and SEO for companies and reputation management. And it's so funny because I've told several of them, like, you know, you should totally use that. You've already got a working relationship with these people, set up joint ventures, and it's crazy. Nobody does it. They just do their own thing. They get myopic and they do their own thing. So I've told them, allow me to work with you. So I joint venture with these local marketing consultants occasionally and say, bring me your client list. We'll sit down. All you need to do, you don't even need to tell me who your client is. Just tell me the kind of service or product they offer and let's potentially come up with this. I'll come in, I'll be part of your team, and we'll share 50, 50 in the results of it. And that's actually worked out pretty well. I need to do that more because it's just so ripe with people who already have the relationship, which is the hardest part of the whole thing, is just getting that initial trust. But if you piggyback off Somebody who has it, it makes it 10 times easier.

And talking about relationships, you know, one of the biggest things people approach me and say, you know, let's say, for example, you know, they come into one of my programs, the first question they ask is, okay, so when could I make my first million dollars doing joint ventures? And I'm like, look, here's the thing. You know, it's taken me, you know, 15, 20 years to get to this stage and 15, 20 years to become overnight success. So I say to them, the most important thing you need to focus on if you want to become successful at joint ventures and strategic alliances is relationship building. Okay? And that is where you're going to make your money. You're going to make your money from your connections and from who you know. Okay? So. And it's been interesting because I have a couple of people who have come onto my program that have done very well, as in for the first three to six months, okay? They literally spent their time just building a relationship platform, okay, and sifting through opportunities. And one of my guys, actually, probably one of my best guys, he's. In his first three months, he closed two deals. One was a $2.1 million deal and one was a 1.2 million dollar deal with Microsoft. So he spent his time building relationships, which is the key really, you know, and if you really want to become successful at this game, you know, just build your relationships, you know, build those key foundations that are going to provide you with the deals, and they're going to provide you with the opportunities to make the big. The big bucks.

Right? What did you. How much can you divulge on the nature of the deal that he did with Microsoft?

Actually, it's funny because the interview I did with him is actually on my blog. So the deal he did with Microsoft, what he basically did was that he found a. It was a green products company that provided some sort of green consultancy to big manufacturers. And what he did was he JV ed that company with a relationship that he already had built internally with Microsoft. And that deal, I don't know what the deal was worth, but he made just under a million dollars off that deal. So he made a cut by introducing the green products consultancy company to Microsoft island, basically where the deal was done. So he set the deal up for them to go in, pitch the business, and they won the business, and he made a cut from that.

That's awesome. Speaking of big deals, so, you know, we're Facebook friends and I followed you. I guess I owe you a. Congratulations. It sounds like you just. All I saw was 50 million dollar.

Client or something of that nature.

What can you. And I know this is brand new and I don't know how much you can divulge, but what can. You've got me curious.

I'll tell you where the background to this, okay, it's a 50 million dollar company based in the US. It's a business marketing research company, very well known brand. I can't diverge anything yet, but an employee bought my book and an employee in the company bought my book and he messaged me on LinkedIn and said, I love your book and I've just given it to our CEO to read. And then the CEO contacted me and said, look, we want to get you on a call just to see if there's any opportunities in terms of how you can help us. And he said, look, I read your book, I know what your fees are, that's not a problem. But I just want to be able to be sure that you're the right person for that. So, you know, I, before I got the call, I reached out to one of my mentors, a person that I know very well and everyone knows this person, but I'm not going to mention his name. I paid, I paid him $10,000 for one hour consultation, right? To say, look, I really want to get this, I really want to close this deal. And you know, one of the, one of my big things this year is working with bigger companies and you know, Fortune 500 and you know, I'm going to go as big as I can this year, you know, you know, I want to aim as high as I can. And this company, that's the $50 million company, all their clients are Fortune 500 clients and massive corporate. So that gives my foot in the door to get introduced to them as well. Which is one of the reasons why, you know, I was so excited. So they grilled me. Actually, it was yesterday. They grilled me yesterday. There was three of them, three directors, the ce, strategic partnerships. And they just grill me on the phone. They asked me all sorts of questions. One of the questions they asked me was so, so, hang on, so why should, why you and not someone else who's doing the same thing? And I was like, have you, I said to, have you gone out and had a look at who does what I do? I said there's only probably three people in the world who do what I do in, in essence. And I said two of them are my mentors. So, and, and one of them charges twice as what I, twice As much as what I charge. So. And.

And by the way. And you guys contacted me.

Yeah, exactly. And I said to him. And he. And not only that, he's very fussy. Yeah. So I said to them, you know, and then they just bombarded me with questions, and I basically said, look, here's the deal, okay? Whether you take on my services or not, I'm here to serve you. So I said, if I can give you all the information you need on this call right now and you can go and implement it, all I want from you in return is feedback in terms of what results you got. So I said, that's good enough for me. If you don't take me on. I'm not a hard salesperson. I don't, you know, I'm not a pitch guy. Ask me the questions, and I will tell you what you need to do. Right? So, yeah.

So you took that risk. You said, listen, I'll give away keys to the kingdom if you think you can go out and unlock that door yourself.

Exactly. By the end of the call, he was like, man, you know what he said? Basically what happened was they had this big strategic partnering initiative which gave them. Bring them in a lot of corporate clients, but they shut it down last year. I don't know why, but they. And then they realized they noticed that they weren't getting any new clients and that they had these existing clients, which they were struggling to get new clients. So I said to them, look, I just. I gave them what they needed to know. Here's what you need to do if you want to, you know, you know, be successful in getting more strategic partners. And then he said to me, so what if we paid you to do it? And that's one question I get asked a lot when I close a client. They're like, okay, so if you came in to do it, what, you know, how would you do it? And what would you charge? And I was like, well, you read the book and you know what my fees are. But I said, look, we can definitely work something out. So they were, you know, it was excellent. The CEO was really impressed. He said, look, you know what? This is what we really need right now, because we've relied on that over a period of time. And he goes, because we were making so much money with the existing clients, we didn't see past that. You know, we were like, okay, you know, we've got enough business. But then, you know, what happens when, you know, you need more business, you know, so you can't. You can never have more than Enough business, okay at the end of the day. And they had a platform that they had which they, you know, they, for some strange reason, reason that they weren't utilizing as much as they used to. And you know, the director of strategic partnerships also said to me, what man, you know what? Some of the stuff that you've just shared on this call, even I didn't know you could do that. So it's interesting to me to know that a lot of these directors of strategic partnerships and business development who work in these big corporate companies, they don't know everything, you know, they just, they're put in a position where they have to go out and find these partnerships. But, and they seem to be following a company led system instead of using their own initiative sometimes. So that for me has been interesting because it identified another area for me where I can, you know, create some additional training materials for anyone who's in that sort of position in a company like that. But no, it's phenomenal. Then you know, they got, they, at the end of the call, they said, you know, we've got a, we've got a big event happening in, you know, in Vegas. And that's right about the same time when I do my five day program. So they said, I would want you to come to it, you know, vip, blah, blah, blah. And you know, we'd like to sit down there and talk to you about, you know, getting you on a retainer. So I gave him the option. I said, look, this is some of the things that I do, this is what I can do. But I said, look, you know, I'd like to get in and get out as quickly as possible and make sure that I set up a platform or foundation for you, your team, that is not reliant on me. So I said, I'm not here to bullshit you, I'm not here to BS you, I'm not here to make as much money as I can. This is what I'm here to do. But I said in return, what I would love is if you found my consulting beneficial and my service beneficial. Two things I want just two things. One is a recommendation referral. One is a recommendation and one's a referral to your database. And they have a big database. They have over something like 100,000 marketers on their list. And then they have the, you know, the big corporate companies as well, which I fingers crossed I will get an introduction into. So no, that was pretty phenomenal. And that for me has really figured out thanks to this call I had, you know, I paid $10,000 for this one hour call. The strategy in that call was some of the things that I implemented to, you know, to create that sort of environment where, you know, These three guys, I didn't PS them at all. You know, I did, I didn't put myself up at any level. I was really honest with them. And, you know, I at the same time tried to be as, you know, as transparent as I could with them and just really tell them what it's all about. And it's about relationships, you know, it's about people. And I said, this is how I work and this is how if you want to build those strategic partners and partnerships, it's really, it's a people based game, you know, so. But yeah, it's good. I'm very, I'm very over the moon.

That's great. Congratulations. And you said you're doing retainer. Are you doing a percentage of the profits that you produce as well with them or just.

Correct? Yeah, correct. That's.

Yeah, that's fun. Especially, I mean, taking down much bigger companies, the elephants like that, you know, the. But the downside is, yeah, sometimes they take a lot longer to make decisions. Sometimes you get red tape and bureaucracy and you're used to being small, nimble entrepreneurs who can move on a dime. But it's fun to work with companies who have really big resources, whether it's customer list capital and one deal can literally make a lifetime.

Oh, yeah. To be honest with you, you know, where I am now in life, I don't need the money. So it's not about the money. So I can be as creative as I want to. I can literally go into, I can just go into companies and be very creative. So. But as long as I get, you know, in return, you know, one is access to their industry, so I get more knowledge. And number two, Number two is the, you know, you know, the testimonial, which is, which is the big thing, working with corporates. But that's my main thing for this year, you know, doing a lot of consulting gigs with huge companies. And let me tell you something I've learned over the years. And obviously, you know, you read my book, you can see in there, you know, know, whether it's an individual, whether it's a multimillionaire billionaire CEO, you know, people are just people, okay? So always bear that in mind when you're going into meetings or you're having conversations with people. You know, people are just people. You know, they feel the same way as we do. They listen and hear the Same way they speak the same way in essence. And you know, you just have to be able to find something that you can, can relate to, to that individual person. And it's true, it's true what they say, man. You know, people like doing business with people they like, you know, it's just, it's so true.

Yeah, you're right. Now, is there a nut in your business that you're trying to crack right now or something that I know you're, you know, I know you're holding. And we'll talk about this in a second, you know, an event and you're selling your book and you're doing a lot of that. But, but are there any challenges right now that you're having that you're trying to either find more resources or skills you're trying to master or channels you're trying to get into?

I think channels. In terms of channels, we're launching a more comprehensive program this year for people who are looking to become six and seven figure consultants. I'm definitely looking for more resources on that side in terms of people who have access to that channel, access to people who are in their database, for example, who might be interested in taking what they know, their life experience or their business experience, and doing something bigger with that and becoming consultants. So that's one of the main things I'm focusing on this year because, you know, it's something that I've been doing for years and I'm a person that always. I do a lot of testing. You know, I do experimentation. I go out there and I try things and touchwood, most of the times it works, you know, even how crazy it is, but it works. And I like to always bring that down, down to people and say, look, this is what you should try or try and do this and do this. And it's, it's phenomenal the, the sort of results that that one gets with sort of some strategies. Even though I've got to reach out sometimes to my mentors and I love doing that because I don't know everything. But what I do know is, is, is pretty, is pretty good compared to, you know, where it can get me. So I think just that really, you know, and the other thing is more education and more awareness in aspect of joint ventures and strategic alliances. I like to see more people use them and apply them. That's something that I'd love to see people do.

Right on. Who do you turn to when you're looking for advice? Whether it's mentors in the past or.

Current, there's a couple of people. You know, I have put it this way, and I'll put it this way. When I was younger, okay, I'm still young, I looked up to a lot of people who then became people that I spoke to, spoke with on stage and, you know, and then became friends and then became mentors. So the people who I really look up to and the people I reach out to are the people who have been there and done it. Okay. And they have that systematic, you know, they create those systematic results in the marketplace. Like, you know, I've got people that, you know, like Ken Blanchard, for example, Brian Tracy, Jay Abraham. Obviously there was J. Cole Levinson, bless him, he's passed away now. But people who've been on the front line and, you know, they've seen the changes in the marketplace over the years, but what they do is still consistent compared to the people who do million dollar launches or maybe million dollars, they're always reinventing themselves every, like Tuesday and Friday. So even though I know there's people and there's some, there's some great people out there who are making good money and, you know, they go with the flow where the money is. That's where they go. But then you've got the hardcore, what I call, not even the academics, but the people who are consistent in the marketplace who have been doing it for like a hundred years and whatever the, however the economy changes and the market changes, these guys are still on top of their game. So those are the people I tend to sort of reach out to.

Nice. That's great. Well, so, Hale, this has been, this has been a phenomenal chat about joint ventures. I love your story. I love the lessons that it, that it teaches. And I mean, for anybody listening to the, you know, to the original story about how you partnered with that company, it's not about exactly what you did. It's about the, you know, it's about the essence of what you did. You, you know, you kept your eyes open, kept a wide gaze, noticed somebody who, you know, might, you know, they had a book. You said 400,000 sold.

So.

To 99.9% of the population. They're going to glaze over that. But you said what if?

What if?

Yeah, they've got 400,000 customers, what that means. So that's what I would do. Anytime you see something like that. Well, what does that mean when they're making that statement? Well, that means they have 400,000 customers. Well, great. Well, what if they don't have, you know, or what. What else do they need. And you didn't know that they could have had a video course, but you took it upon yourself to reach out and simply ask, hey, what if they don't? And if they did, cool, there's probably something else you could have done with them, but they didn't have it. And that opened up a world of opportunity. I firmly believe that, that the only thing keeping most people from being highly successful is a lack of curiosity.

Correct.

If you're just simply curious, well, ask better questions and you'll uncover amazing results. I know that that's been the main thing that helped me in my business and you know, how can I work with other people, partnerships with them, piggybacking off of what they've already done in order to further everybody's business interests. And it's not a, it's not a parasitic relationship. You're not trying to get something at the expense of the companies you're working with. You're trying to make it so that, you know, one plus one makes three.

And I think also, you know, I love the, the, the adage of, you know, what if you have to challenge yourself consistently and you know, if you want to, if you want to stay on top of your game, okay, in whatever industry you're in, you have to do that. You have to consistently challenge yourself because as human beings, we are amazing. You know, it's like you just don't know your potential. I mean, I have, I don't even think I've hit my potential. But you know, it's you, you fascinate yourself. So I think you should always strive, you know, to challenge yourself consistently. And a lot of people, you know, sadly, they tend to focus just on the aspect of the money, you know, like, know, I won't do that because I won't make money or I don't know if it'll work for me or, you know, you've got to look beyond that. You have to really look beyond that because, you know, as an individual person you can accomplish so much by, by actually, you know, getting yourself out there and actually challenging yourself as well and you become a better person for it as well.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So if people want more training from Sohail, recommend and I'll put a link on the blog in the show notes to get your book with J. Conrad Levinson called Guerrilla Marketing and Joint Ventures. Million Dollar Partnering Strategies for Growing Any Business in Any Economy. But you've also got, you've also got a, what is it, a five day event in Las Vegas In February, Yes.

I usually do a three day event to teach joint venture brokering to individuals and businesses who are interested, but we're going. I teamed up with another guy, Martin Howey, who's He's trained over 4,000 consultants worldwide and it's pretty phenomenal. So he's been a mentor to me as well. I mean I did his program many years ago and I'm just so blessed that, you know, he approached me to work together. So we're doing a five day program. It's called the Ultimate Business Consultant program and it's everything and anything you need to become a successful six and even seven figure business development consultant. And, and we're also launching the International association of Business Development Consultants to assist and help people because this is what we do day in, day out and we love doing it and you know, it's pretty lucrative in itself. You know, it's, I always say to people, look, you know, you know, set me a challenge, you know, drop me off anywhere in the world like they used to do in the Internet marketing, drop me off anywhere in the world and I can make money now. I'm very, very blessed because obviously I have a book that's the bestseller now as well. So it's very easy for me to do that and just pop a book into a business or you know, get that in front of people and then on the back of it, you know, I sell my consulting. So we also supply all our consultants with their own ready made book that they can use as well and get business but very similar to the strategies that I've done. And yeah, that program is on end of February 23rd to the 27th in Las Vegas. It's a five day program and it's going to be pretty phenomenal. So you know, if anyone's interested in that program, then, you know, the place to go is www.ultimatebusinessconsultant.com. and just there's no pitching, we don't do that. There's no hard sell. Just book a call in with Martin, a discovery call and then he'll tell you all about the program and then you can ask as many questions as you want and only until you feel satisfied that you know, you know, we've answered your questions and it's something that you definitely see yourself benefiting from. Then you know, definitely go and sign up for the program.

That's fantastic. And I know you've got a lot of other training to do as well. Make sure and put the, you know, all the resources that you've got contact information in the show notes here so that people can reach out to you. And I really appreciate you taking the time here to chat with me. So hey, and share some of these strategies. There is, you know, the reason I call my business podcast Bacon Wrapped Business because you know, the idea of wrapping something in bacon, it's just adding some, adding some really different flavor and different taste to food. You know, you can wrap it in bacon. Well, this is exactly what we're doing with these strategies. What Sohail and I have just talked about is really taking any business and wrapping it in bacon or taking something that you normally wouldn't think about off the top of your head. And when you do this, it can have dramatic business changing. You can take a, you know, results. You can take a business who is on the brink of failure and organize one strategic joint venture relationship and completely save that business and turn it around. So that's why we bring these ideas to you. Now if you want more stuff like this from me and you have any ideas or you have any questions specifically for yours truly, you can always reach me@askbradaconratbusiness.com youm can also review the show on itunes. I read every single one of them and I love every single one of you guys who have have taken the time to leave me a review. It's one of the reasons I do what I do bring this to you for free. But I never want you to feel like it's a free resource because it's taken Sohail's time, it's taken my time, and it's a conversation that you may not get to have on your own. Maybe you can, but it would probably cost you a lot of money. So the way you can pay me back is share the show with your friends, tell other people about it, leave a review and send me an email. Let me know what you think or let me know what problems you're having to ask. Bradakenratbusiness.com lastly, if you're not already subscribing to this show on itunes, you can simply hit that subscribe button and every single new episode, or as I like to call them, epicizzles, will download directly to your phone and you'll never miss an episode. So Hale, thank you very much for your time, buddy and I look forward to hearing more about, you know, this, this 50 million dollar company that you just struck a deal with and see how that plays out and look forward to staying in touch with you in the future.

Thanks Brad. Thank you for having me yeah.

Thank you.

Sam.