Joint Venture Lightning

How do you raise $14 million in four years?

Well, for starters… we’re contacting about 2,000 businesses that are earning $5 million or more per year in sales and are located within our service area. We mailed the top executive at each business and asked them to please include us in their budget for the coming year with a pledge of $10,000 per year for four years. If you do the math on that then you’ll see we have about $80 million in pledge requests currently out.

How do we convert that into actual donations?

You start with a simple phone call each business and ask, “Who handles your donation requests from local charities?” Once you get the name and are connected to that person, simply ask if they received the letter of request we  just mailed to them. You’ll be amazed at how many do not recall getting the letter. That’s fine. It gives you an opportunity to drop by to hand-deliver a more detailed request pack with a copy of the original letter.

This takes time. It also takes timing. We mailed the letter in early June because we don’t know which businesses are on a calendar year or a fiscal year. Why does it matter? Because many businesses have donation committees who consider requests and make recommendations for yearly budgets. If the company is on a July to June fiscal year then you don’t want to miss out and have to wait another year to begin the process. If they’re on a calendar year or on a third quarter fiscal year then your June request is a little early… which is fine. You just need to make sure you do plenty of follow-up like providing the committee additional info packs closer to their decision time.

I’ll cover the follow-up calling plan in detail in the next post. So, stay tuned.

It’s the most I’ve had to raise for one cause but I think it’s doable.

Yep. I was hired by the Southwestern Virginia 2nd Harvest Food Bank as their major & planned gifts director. The organization needs about $3 million in yearly operating funds, about $2.5 million for the distribution center facility in Abingdon, Virginia and about $4.2 million for the main distribution facility in Salem, Virginia.

It turns out that distributing free food is an expensive business when you move over 11 million pounds per year and serve over 350 non-profit organizations in 26 counties and 10 cities. You see, when a non-profit of this size gets a shipment of food trucked in… it comes by the tractor trailer load… on pallets… weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds. You need fork lifts and people who know how to drive them to unload that much free food.

Also, the trucking companies that deliver it do not work for free. Neither do the gas stations where these truck fuel up. One load of food can cost over $5,000 of shipping charges alone.

Then there is a little thing called Health and Safety. The Food Bank gets inspected by three different agencies… the USDA, the Dept. of Health, and the Feeding America network. Passing such intense scrutiny isn’t easy or cheap, especially for a massive warehouse facility.

So, that’s what I’m up to these days. I’m still trying to help a few clients with their joint venture projects online but most of my time is dedicated to achieving the goal of $14 million dollars in 4 years so we can help end hunger in southwestern Virginia. You can check out the food bank website at www.swvafoodbank.org

I love shooting testimonial videos.

They’re great for building your self-esteem and confidence. They’re also great for building your prospects trust in your capabilities before they risk contacting you for more details.

I like to shoot testimonials for my clients within the first week or two of starting a new project so that I can get their clients’ perspective on how they do business, what differentiates them in the market, etc. This info helps me focus the sales message and content for the marketing and website.

I like to shoot my own testimonial videos for Joint Venture Lightning after about a month so that my clients have had a chance to work with me and see results.

You can see these new testimonial videos here:

• George Schaefer with TrainingMyHorse.com
• Geoffrey Zimmerman, Author of “Love Never Dies”

If you have ANY happy clients at all then you absolutely MUST get them on video singing your praises.

I use a simple interview techniques so that my clients don’t have to prepare ahead of time by trying to remember some script. I want their comments to be completely open, honest and spontaneous.

You can either leave your interview questions in the video, the way I did with Geoffrey Zimmerman or you can cut them out and just leave the clients comments the way I did with George Schaefer. How do you know when to do either technique?

Simple. If they answer your questions in complete sentences by re-stating the premise of the question in their answer then you can cut out your side of the interview. If they only answer the questions then it makes more sense to leave your comments in the video.

Good luck and Happy New Year. May your 2008 and beyond be prosperous and peaceful.

I first spoke with professional life coach and certified hypnotherapist Gail DaVall the other day to get an idea of how we might be able to work together.

Our first conversation focused on what she does for a living as a life coach and relaxation therapy specialist. Then we discussed why she was looking for a joint venture partner like me. She told me that she had been wanting to launch the online side of her business for several years and had bought domains, invested thousands in internet marketing courses, tried learning how to do all of the technical side of web marketing but she just never seemed to be able to get over the hurdle of actually launching her products online.

So, we set an appointment to meet face to face for later in the week. At the meeting, Gail showed me page after page of how she had planned out her web site, written sales copy, designed layouts, etc. She also brought sample cd’s she had produced as physical product to sell once she had her site up and running.

Once she filled me in on her current situation, I presented some details of how I work, how I select partner businesses to joint venture with and outlined my system of launching e-products works.The meeting took about an hour and a half and ended with me giving her an assignment of setting up some testimonials that we could video record for her new web site.

My first step was to look into her competition and research better domains than the ones she had already purchased. I settled on working with her personal domain first to help her begin building a local client base with www.gaildavall.com.

Our first priority is to help her increase local business to stimulate cash flow before we get into marketing her audio programs. It’s been two weeks and Gail’s schedule has prevented her from arranging the testimonial video shoot for the near futur. So, I have worked on setting up her appointment calendar and auto-responder. I’ll follow-up with Gail early next week to nail down a date for the first video / photo shoot so that I can customize her header banner and load her testimonials page.

In the meantime, I have been busy working on FitClub4.com, JointVentureLightning.com, BrianGDuvall.com and GeoffreyZimmerman.com. I’ll be posting updates on the progress of Geoffrey Zimmerman’s web site in an upcoming case study, so stay tuned.

Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

“A joint venture (often abbreviated JV) is an entity formed between two or more parties to undertake economic activity together. The parties agree to create a new entity by both contributing equity, and they then share in the revenues, expenses, and control of the enterprise. The venture can be for one specific project only, or a continuing business relationship such as the Sony Ericsson joint venture. This is in contrast to a strategic alliance, which involves no equity stake by the participants, and is a much less rigid arrangement.

Organizations can also form joint ventures, for example, a child welfare organization in the Midwest initiated a joint venture whose mission is to develop and service client tracking software for human service organizations. The five partners all sit on the joint venture corporation’s board, and together have been able to provide the community with a much-needed resource.

The phrase generally refers to the purpose of the entity and not to a type of entity. Therefore, a joint venture may be a corporation, limited liability company, partnership or other legal structure, depending on a number of considerations such as tax and tort liability.”

There are different types of JV deals but the fastest and easiest is probably the endorsed internet joint venture. An endorsed JV is when the company or individual that you are partnering with endorses or recommends your products or services to the customers on their mailing list. One of the reasons that this can be so successful is that your partner already has an established relationship or rapport with everyone on their list… a customer base who values their opinion.

Now there is another way to leverage the value of internet joint ventures beyond simply tapping into somebody else’s mailing list.

You could spend thousands of dollars buying programs from various marketing guru’s. Then you could spend months learning how to do all of the various steps required to build an internet business. I’ll cover the detail on what’s involved in producing and launching your own electronic and physical products in future posts. Here’s a short sample list of some of the tasks that you will face:

• Idea development
• Niche market research
• Content development
• Video production
• Text production (electronic and/or physical)
• Graphic design
• Photography
• Web site development
• List building
• SEO
• Traffic generation
• Deliverability
• Testing and refinement

And that’s just the product side of your business. You also need to consider:

• Accounting
• Business structure (sole proprietorship vs. incorporating)
• Taxes
• Regulatory Compliance
• Employee management
• Payroll
• Expenses

Starting to get the picture? There is too much for one person to do. This is one of the main reasons people never take action on their ideas. Another key reason is uncertainty of what to do next.

Or you could follow Rich Scheffren’s advice and outsource all of the functions that you can’t or don’t like to do yourself and hire an experienced, successful business development and marketing team. Having the experts at Joint Venture Lightning on your team speeds the process and greatly increases your chances for success.

You can see our scope of services on the About Us page. No internet hype, just real world experience from the trenches of the business battlefront.

We are looking to team up with entrepreneurs like you who have great ideas but who need help getting them produced and launched. You bring the idea, passion and expertise and we’ll bring the business experience. Together we can produce real products and real profits.

Be sure to subscribe to begin your joint venture project today.