A blacksmith who sold high-end staircases through a magazine partnership asks how to grow. Evan recommends replicating that model: find partners who reach your customers, offer them a commission or custom piece, and aim for one new partnership per month. Let partners do the marketing while you make the product.
Questions this video answers
Focus on strategic partnerships: find companies or media that already reach your target customers, offer them value (e.g., a custom statue or a commission share) in exchange for promotion, replicate the successful magazine collaboration, create a repeatable cadence of one partnership per month, retain high‑performing partners and use the initial success as a case study to secure new deals.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from Jeffrey, who's one of our newer forum members, and he wrote in with a question. It's a pretty long one, so I'm just going to kind of summarize. So he's a blacksmith, and he works for a company that does really high-end work, and he made a partnership deal with the magazine where he created a bronze statue of a really famous football coach that ran in the magazine and promoted the business. And he told his boss at the company and worked out a sales commission for it so that every new sale that came in through the magazine, he made a certain percentage off. The boss at first didn't think it was going to work, but it ended up having a lot of success, and now the boss wants him to be more involved in the sales and marketing. And he's saying, "I don't really know what to do because I'm just a blacksmith ironworker," and wanted some advice on how to effectively use sales and marketing to grow this business. So thanks for the question, Jeffrey. Congratulations on the success that it's had. It's great to see. A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out these strategies and doing a lot of failing before they reach some success. It's great that you hit it on your first one. In terms of growing this business up, One of the biggest ways to— and fastest ways to grow your business is through partnerships. And it's something that you've already done, and it's worked here in this case, and I look for ways to replicate that success. And so basically through partnerships, you're finding somebody who already has the audience that you're looking for, find some kind of way to partner up with them, and have them promote you to their audience in return for either a percentage or some other kind of way that you think would work out. So in your example, you partnered up with the magazine. And you didn't pay them anything, but you had to create the statue, which cost you, you know, time and effort and materials, I presume, to make this thing. But in return, they then promoted you to their audience, and the audience came in and bought from your company. So that's a great partnership strategy and such a fast way to grow your business because they already have an established market. And so I try to find other examples like that. It could be companies, it could be media. Find people who are already catering to your target audience. They already have your customers. They're not doing the same thing that you do, right? They're not, they're not doing the iron working that you're doing or the bronze working, but they have your target audience. They do something else that's selling to your same market. And find a way to partner up with them. Give them something of value. It could either be a percentage of the commission that you're making, or it could be something else that you do, either just offering to promote them if they promote you, or you give them something, like you give them the statue just like you did with the magazine. Find something that you can do to help them and give them an incentive to want to promote you. And then they have that incentive, they go out and they do it, and they hopefully bring in new customers for you. So I try to find other opportunities. Maybe you do one per month. So you got your magazine as one, and then look for other opportunities to be able to go out and do the exact same thing. And if you're really good at creating the statues, then that might be what you do. You might find 12 partners, you do one a month, and you can come back and repeat Same thing, so like that magazine that you did it with, it doesn't have to be only a one-time thing. You come back to them in 6 months or in a year and do it all over again because they'll have new readers and the readers who read it last time may not have seen it. And so, so it could also be a good reminder. Maybe they weren't ready to buy at that time, now they're ready to buy now. So, if it worked out well with that magazine, keep them on board and do it again, again in 6 months or a year. But don't just do it as kind of a one-time thing. And then find other partners. And if you do one per month with different publications or partners where there's an opportunity for them to promote you and you can help them by creating the statue, that could be a great way to focus on what you're really good at, which is creating the statues, and they focus on helping promote you to their audience, which they can be hopefully really good at through their business. You'll find that some are really good and some aren't really good. So this magazine was a winner, that's awesome. You want to find, you know, 11 other winners that you can just repeat through every year. Some, you know, won't be that successful and so you, you know, you don't use them again the next time around. And the ones who are really good, you stick with. And something that's really specific like what you do and you said your boss does really, really high-end staircases, you probably won't have too many awesome potential partners. So even if you find 5 or 6, like if you had 6 partners and you just did it twice a year with each partner, that could be enough to drive a lot of new business to your company. So that's where I would start. You've already had some proven success. You can use it as a case study to go and talk to other companies, and it allows you to focus on what you're really good at, which is creating the actual bronze statues. And hopefully you get a nice good commission check out of it. So thanks for the question, Jeffrey. Welcome to the forums. It's great to have you as a member. And for those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I love seeing those come in. And if you have a comment about this video or a question for your own company or business, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those and I always reply. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
