Michael: Hi, it's Michael Senoff with Michael Senoff's hardtofindseminars.com. The title of this interview is called the Best Business Strategy they Don't Teach in Joint Ventures 101. If you're like the millions of people out there who've been hit hard by the economy, it probably seems like you can't get ahead no matter how hard you try. But according to this marketing genius, even if you only have $10 in change left in your piggy bank right now, you can turn your life around just by knowing the powers of joint ventures. Although the possibilities are endless, joint venture marketing is basically a business strategy where you leverage off someone else's credibility. Picture a high end hotel that endorses a certain jewelry store to its customers. The hotel will collect a percentage of whatever sales come from its endorsement and the jewelry store gets a bunch of new customers it normally wouldn't have received. So it's a win win situation for both. But you don't have to be the hotel or the jewelry store to make money off this scenario. You could also be a third party who gets a percentage of the sale just by putting the deal together. So in this audio interview you'll hear exactly how to set up the kind of joint ventures that will drive tons of new customers to your business, help you generate leads, or simply allow you to make a living off of third party deals. You'll also learn the secret technique for thinking like your prospect so you'll know which businesses to target for the best joint ventures. You'll hear real life examples of how joint ventures make money and exactly how you can set up those kinds of deals too. You'll learn an almost foolproof way to use freebies to draw customers in from someone else's list. You'll learn the real reason paid advertising doesn't work for a lot of businesses and how joint ventures can easily be used instead. You'll learn how to legally protect yourself in a partnership without having to use intimidating legalese contracts. You'll learn a step by step guide for finding the best list with the SRDS and why you actually don't need a huge list to make money. You'll learn all about the tracking software you can use to make sure you get paid for every JV sale. You'll hear about about a major fall in 99% of all marketing books in stores today and where to turn for the best marketing advice. You'll learn the details about an amazing deal this expert made with Jay Abraham himself. According to this expert, the best way to get started is to just get started. You don't want to get caught up in what he calls analysis paralysis, where you're analyzing something to the point where you're not doing anything. You didn't start out knowing how to run. You had to take the first step, gain experience, build your confidence, and then take another. It's the same with joint ventures. And because this audio interview walks you through the whole process, it's your perfect first step. I know you're going to love this interview. Now let's get going.

Bianco: I live in Southern California as well as you do, and you know, Southern California is probably one of the best places to live on the whole planet. I mean, it's just incredible, the lifestyle here. I'm two minutes from the ocean and I'm 40 minutes from the mountains. I can go skiing and surfing in the same day if I want to. People out there stuck in a 9 to 5 job, they hate it, and it's a rat race. The money comes in and the money goes out just as fast, and they can never get ahead in life. Joint venture marketing. Learning how to do joint venture marketing can allow you to break that cycle and step away and leave all that behind and start really living your dream.

Michael: For anyone who doesn't know much about business and doesn't even know what a joint venture is, let's talk in kindergarten terms. What is a joint venture?

Bianco: Okay. Basically what a joint venture is, it's where you get to leverage off of the trust and the credibility of either other people or other businesses. A great example of this, and everyone has seen this right before their very eyes, is Oprah Winfrey. Dr. Phil, before he was on Oprah Winfrey, I mean, he was nobody. He was a struggling guy doing counseling for people and little businesses, and he was nobody. But as soon as Oprah brought him on the show, she transferred her credibility and trust onto him. Because when Oprah brings someone on her show and taps them and says, this guy is trustworthy, this guy is great, I use this guy. I love this guy's stuff. Her audience, which is comprised of millions and millions and millions of untold households that watch her religiously and want to be like Oprah. So when Oprah says, Dr. Phil, this guy's a guru. This guy can help anybody solve relationship problems. You know, you need to listen to this guy. All her audience immediately goes, well, if it's good enough for Oprah, and she says, he's great, I trust her. So then he must be great. So her ability and the trust that she's built with her audience is immediately transferred to Dr. Phil. And look what's happened to Dr. Phil.

Michael: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Bianco: Now he has his own show and he's humongous. And when Oprah does that and she taps him and says, this guy's amazing and here's his book, by the way, what do people do? They run out by the tens of thousands and they buy his book at the bookstore. And so this guy's become wealthy virtually overnight just because of his joint venture with Oprah. And guess what? Dr. Phil's show, from what I understand, is an Oprah production.

Michael: That's right, yes. She produces it.

Bianco: Guess who gets paid on his show?

Michael: She does.

Bianco: So she's a smart business woman. And so she brought him on, realized he got that credibility from her, and his sales went through the roof. So she immediately set up the deal with him to produce his own TV show, which is humongous already too, because Oprah's audience of millions of people were instantly leveraged to Dr. Phil's benefit.

Michael: I totally see. So she's built the credibility with all her TV viewing audience over the 10 years. But without that credibility, it wouldn't work, would it?

Bianco: If Dr. Phil's show came on the air without Oprah, or he was never on Oprah, nobody would know who he is, nobody would trust him or care much about him. But because like you said, Oprah has built this loyal following because what she's done, she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds and thousands of man hours putting together stories and information to her audience for their benefit. So she spent years building that trust by giving so much value from her show that people just love her. And everything she says is like gold. So when she taps you on the shoulder and says this guy's like gold too, all that trust gets transferred immediately, without delay, right to you.

Michael: That's amazing. Now that's good for tv. Let's take this same concept of joint venture, and let's say someone wants to apply this in a business type setting and to generate money. Can you make money doing something similar to that?

Bianco: That's the best thing about joint ventures is that any business, new or old, whether you have no money or no customers, or you're just starting up, or you're some huge 40 million dollar a year corporation, you can use joint venture marketing to get amazing results. You can use it to drive tons of sales, you can use it to get tons of new customers. And here's how they would do it. Like let's say, for example, you started a new company and you're selling your book. For example, you mentioned to me you had a book you're creating now, let's.

Michael: Say I'm selling my CD ROM, my 61 hours of audio information from my hardtofindseminars.com. So I've got it all on a CD ROM.

Bianco: Amazing. Anyone who listens to that is going to know it has amazing value. So what you would do is you would think to yourself, who has my prospect before they need me? In other words, what is my prospect doing? What are they buying? What are they thinking about before they would need my CD or before they even want my cd? And then think about what companies actually have those prospects. For example, when people are at the level or at the time that they want to get more information about marketing, where are they in their life? Are they just getting into business? Are they in business? Well, you could say yes, some of them are just getting into business and they're trying to learn everything they can about marketing. So then you would say, well, who has those prospects already?

Michael: And I'm going to leverage because I don't have to screw with doing lead generating advertising, spending money on ads, spending money, entering the names into a database. That's already being done. I'm leveraging off all the efforts of that other business.

Bianco: Right, Exactly. There's other companies out there right now who have already spent maybe the last three or four years cultivating their customer list. And their customer list is your prospect list. What you need to do is find it. Like for example, anyone else who sells, let's say computers or anyone who sells office supplies. If someone's just getting into business, what are they going to do? They're going to run out and buy office supplies. They need a desk, they need a computer, they need a multitude of things. Well, you could tap into those resources. Here's a good example. People get an Internet connection. Most people who get an Internet connection, they're not just out there looking for cartoons and jokes of the day. You could leverage off of someone who sells Internet connectivity and you can offer to do a joint venture with them where you will get their customer names and you will mail them via email a special offer to get your free CD. They would want to do that with you for a couple reasons. One is they could throw that free CD in as a bonus for someone signing up for their service. But now you don't have to pay them to be your joint venture partner. You can get them to give your CD away as a free bonus to anyone that signs up for their Internet Access service.

Michael: That's right. And what does it cost me to make the CD? You know, 50 cents.

Bianco: Exactly. And now you're tapping into a constant stream of leads that don't cost you anything. And what you could do, which is what I would recommend, is you would tell the company that's going to offer us a bonus that they need to pick up the $1.50 cost or the dollar cost of producing the disc. That way you have zero marketing cost and zero effort whatsoever because you could have them contact your disc duplicating company directly to order discs so you never even have to talk to them.

Michael: Isn't that a lot easier than me screwing around building an entire customer list?

Bianco: Yeah, because see, what most businesses fall down on is lead generation. Without having a constant flow of leads to your business, you're out of business. You can't survive without a continual stream of leads coming into your business. And the only way most people think about getting leads is through advertising, paid advertising. And the problem with paid advertising is it's very expensive and it's very risky. And people make mistakes when they do their advertising and then it cost them their whole business because they spend too much money, don't bring back enough money, and then they're out of business.

Michael: Tell me if you agree with me. Most businesses automatically go into that frame of mind. Lead generating through advertising. They don't even consider joint venturing, do they?

Bianco: Well, that's because not even one in a thousand businesses even know what joint venturing is. They only know the traditional stuff they learn in business school. Joint venture marketing is something you won't learn at Harvard Business School. You won't learn it at Yale or any of the Ivy League schools. They don't teach it.

Michael: Yeah, you're right. Because when I think about it, I had no idea what it was until I started studying this Jay Abraham stuff.

Bianco: Exactly. People who have MBA in marketing don't even know this stuff.

Michael: It's such a simple, it's almost like obvious. Like why wouldn't you do it?

Bianco: Exactly. Another reason why the best way to go to start, if you're going to start a business. And I'll give you an example, I basically went out there on the Internet one day and I was playing golf with a friend of mine and he was talking about, you know, this guy was a world champion long drive record holder, he's in the Guinness Book of World Records. He has the longest drive at sea level. And I'll tell you in a second why that's important, but he has the longest drive recorded at sea level, 426 yards or something like that. I mean, over four football fields.

Michael: Was he doing it when you guys were playing golf?

Bianco: When we played golf, he hit a 400 yard drive. Okay, so this guy's got two records. We're talking about, you know, his background and what he's up to. And he mentioned that he developed a club that was called the Peace Missile Driver. And the Peace Missile Driver was made from real decommissioned nuclear missile metal. And I thought, hey, that's pretty interesting. I'd like to see that club. So the next time we got together, we brought one and we checked it out, we played with it, and I was pretty impressed with the club. And then he dropped the bomb. Shalom. And he says, we actually had this thing tested against the top club. It's a big brand name, and I won't mention the name, but it's one of the biggest brand names out there in golf. And we tested it. We paid a company that does the testing. We put it on a machine called the Iron Byron. An Iron Byron is a mechanical hitting device that is calibrated, and you can set all the adjustments to the swing speed and angles so you can get exact scientific measurements on every club's performance. And they tested it against the top brand name clubs, and it equaled it in distance and accuracy and everything. And this club was just amazing. He was like, yeah, it's amazing. And we raised money. They raised over $300,000 to start this company, to sell this club. So right away, what did they do? They had all this money, too much money to spend. And they went out, started running ads and doing different campaigns and marketing and burning through their money faster than they even realized. And then they basically were getting no results, and they went out of business. And they had 6,000 clubs produced in inventory that they paid for cash.

Michael: Here in America.

Bianco: Here in America. And they went out of business.

Michael: Okay, so did he end up telling you that he's sitting on 6,000 clubs?

Bianco: He said, we're sitting on 6,000 clubs. And I saw an opportunity there. I said, you know, with the right kind of marketing, with joint venture marketing, I could sell those clubs and I could help this thing fly. So basically, we tried to put a deal together, and then it turned out that he never finished paying the manufacturer for the club, so he didn't really own them. And so what happened is the manufacturer got him to send a letter to the manufacturer saying, dispose of the clubs wherever you want, because I can't pay you for the clubs. So then Basically, the manufacturer got ahold of me and said, hey, can you help me unload these clubs? Because I'm a manufacturer, you know, I don't know how to sell clubs at retail or I don't know what to do to get rid of these clubs. But I have a huge expense of these clubs and they're taking up, you know, I need to get rid of them, like, okay. So I kind of deal with them where I took over that whole thing and then I set up a simple website and then I went out and set up short venture deals.

Michael: Give us the URL for that website.

Bianco: URL is PeaceMissileGolf.com and that's piece like Peace on Earth. Missile M I S S I L E Golf.com faces in peace. Missile Golf. And so what I did is I said, you know, I want to sell the club. It's a great club, but, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to take a lot of risk and I don't want to spend a lot of money out of pocket. So I said, you know, I bet you I could set up some joint venture deals for this, because you can put joint venture deals together for any kind of business no matter what. And so I went out on the Internet and I found about probably about 2,000 other golf websites. And I said, okay, some of these are going to be good joint venture partners, and some of them are not going to be worth my time. So I went and I did my research and I found one that had about 300,000 subscribers to their golf newsletter. And I said, okay, there is my joint venture. So I spent the next probably three weeks phoning them, sending them letters, emails, fedexing them letters, trying to get a meeting set up with them where I could explain the joint venture marketing concept and why it's to their advantage and the money that can be made. And it basically took me like three, three and a half weeks before I finally could get a phone meeting meeting with him. And then we got on the phone, I explained it all, and the vice president, I was talking to him and he said, this sounds awesome. I love it. Let me talk to the owner. And, you know, I think we can go with it. So sure enough, he called me back the next day, it's a go. And we went ahead and sent out the endorsement, an email endorsement. And they wrote some information up in the endorsement about the club and a little bit about the background. And there was a link in email to my website. Well, they sent out to about 50,000 people on their list on an email list. On an email list. And that was our test. That was our test campaign.

Michael: Was it buried in a newsletter or individual mailing?

Bianco: It was an individual mailing, a solo mailing.

Michael: And did you help them write it?

Bianco: And I gave them a little guidance. But, you know, I basically said, you go check out the product. I sent them a club. Check it out. You write your own comments, know what you think about it. Then they sent it out. And then within 16 days, we generated just from that one email. And remember, I mean, it didn't cost me a dime. I didn't have any upfront risk, no cost, nothing. I didn't even have to do the work. You know, I just sat back and they did all the work. And within 16 days, actually like 15 and a half or whatever, basically the orders came in for 16 straight days. And when it was all said and done, $22,000 plus in orders for that club.

Michael: How much was the club retailing for?

Bianco: The Club retails for 2. At that time, we were actually price testing it. So we were selling it. We had two different offers going, and it was going for $249, and it was also going for $299.

Michael: Good. Give up the goods. What kind of deal did you work from the manufacturer? What were you paying per club for the club?

Bianco: I was paying about. And here's the key, too. I managed to talk the manufacturer into drop shipping it. Now, drop shipping it means that I get the order, I send the name to them, and they pack it and ship it to my customer. So I never touched the product. So basically I was paying a fraction of that. I don't want to tell you the exact number, but it was a fraction of that. And we both know in direct marketing, to make a successful business, you need to make 200% to 300% markup. 300% markup on it.

Michael: You were making 300% markup. All right. Now, what kind of deal did you have to cut with the guy who sent the email out with him?

Bianco: I told him I would pay him 25% of the sales price.

Michael: So you made yourself at least 150 bucks a club profit in your pocket. Setting these joint ventures up is a lot of technical stuff that I always have questions about. Let me ask you this. So you directed his subscribers to your website, they ordered through your website, the money came into your account. He probably had an accounting of what was going on. And then did you cut him a check every week, month. How did that work out?

Bianco: What you can do on the Internet now? Is there's traction software you can to track all the sales so that every time there's a sale, your partner, joint venture partner gets a little email saying, here's another sale. Gather the sale so they can keep track themselves.

Michael: Give me a website that does the tracking software.

Bianco: There's hundreds of them. Some of them are good, Some of them have their problems. One of the ones is called groundbreak.

Michael: Groundbreak.com.

Bianco: Groundbreak.Com. And they actually sell the software that you install on your own website. So that one's a little more technical. But you can use a service like iBill.com and they can do that for you. The sales will actually go through their service and you can specify how much comes to you and how much comes to your partner.

Michael: So specifically, that's kind of like software for affiliates, right?

Bianco: Exactly.

Michael: Okay, so you can use it for joint ventures too.

Bianco: That's exactly what I use it for. Because affiliate programs are all good and fine, but what you want is a super affiliate. And really what it's super affiliate is if you joint venture partners.

Michael: Absolutely. Now let me ask you this. What does that software cost? If someone wants it sounds like software.

Bianco: I think it's like 200 bucks a year. You buy a license for a year for 200 iBill. I think there's some small setup charge like 50 to 100 bucks.

Michael: Now let me ask you, did you have to sign a contract with the guy?

Bianco: There's no rules in marketing and there's no rules in jv. You set them up yourself. But basically the outline structure you want to use is you want to negotiate between you want to pay your joint venture partner between 25 to 50% of the gross sales price and you want to have just a simple letter form agreement. You don't want a contract, you don't want to have all this legalize in it. You just want a simple letter stating you're going to do this, this, and this. In exchange for it, I'm going to pay you this, this, and this.

Michael: All right, let me ask you this. Why gross sales not net, and what's the difference?

Bianco: Because with net profit, you can manipulate what's in net profit. And with gross sales, it's just you can do one calculation and there's no fooling around. So what you want to do is just set it up. If you're going to give 50%, you're not going to give 50 of gross because obviously that's not your profit, but you want to give 50% of profit. So you would calculate, let's say what 50% of profit would be, and then you calculate what that would be as a percentage of growth.

Michael: So you would both get a uniform agreement on what the profit is per unit and then you would structure a percentage of that profit.

Bianco: Basically, there's a little simple format you use to create a little agreement. And it's not a contract. It's not scary. Because if you send someone a scary looking legal contract, you're never going to get any deal. You don't want to get into a deal with someone that you don't trust. If you don't trust them and you don't like them, if you can't do a letter agreement and move forward comfortably, then you shouldn't even deal with them.

Michael: Because no matter what, if you have an ironclad contract, if someone wants to screw you, they're going to screw you.

Bianco: Yeah, exactly. Personally, myself, I've had 15 page legal contracts and it still ended up costing me $300,000 and more in bad deals that have gone south. And I've done deals where I have a simple handshake and made hundreds of thousands off of those deals.

Michael: And that's really important. I would say anyone who does go and approach joint ventures, it's very important. You just got to go with your gut, you know, listen to the pit of your stomach. If you like the guy, if you trust him, you have a good sense of someone for the most part, after talking to them for a short time, and you want to meet them eyeball to eyeball. You just got to go with it. You also got to understand that not every joint venture deal is going to work. And if you set up five of them and one works well, that's all you need.

Bianco: Exactly one success. In direct marketing, we always say one success makes up for seven or eight failures. And you have to understand that nobody can predict the success of anything because there's a lot of variables in marketing, just like there's a lot of variables in life. Your goal is to go out there and do the best you can and set up the deals as best you can and not get bogged down with analysis paralysis where you're analyzing everything to the point where you never do anything. The key to success is action.

Michael: You got to put everything in motion. Let me ask you this. Let's say I'm dead broke. I don't have 10 bucks in my bank account. No, I don't even have a bank account. I've got 10 bucks and quarters in my little piggy bank. And if I understand the power of a joint venture. And I have a telephone and not even a computer, but I've got a telephone. Is it realistic that I can, with my education, from what you're going to teach me or your information product, go out there and set up a joint venture and make money from it?

Bianco: That is a great question. You can actually not only go out and make money, but you can change your life and you can get wealthy. One joint venture can literally make you wealthy. That's how amazing it is.

Michael: Give me another example of not necessarily. It could be your experience or another experience or an example, kind of like the Oprah thing of people who have been made wealthy through joint ventures.

Bianco: One example is a high end hotel. We've got this high end hotel down the street here and the people that go there are couples and it's a romantic getaway. It has jacuzzis things and the great views in the rooms and everything. And couples get away there to celebrate things, honeymoons, anniversaries, weddings, what have you, birthdays, whatever. And this is not some cheesy hotel. This is like expensive, three, four hundred dollars a night room.

Michael: Where is it in la?

Bianco: It's right here in Newport Beach. We're both in beautiful sunny Southern California. So the owner of this hotel, he has about 50 rooms and he does good business and he makes great money, but he's not leveraging what he has. And what he has is a customer, a high ticket purchasing customer that has a lot of other needs, desires and wants. So all you got to do is figure out what else do his customers and patrons, what else would they want? Okay, they're spending money to come and see at this romantic getaway. What else do they want? Well, I can tell you what else they want. The husband, the boyfriend, the fiance, whoever he is, wants to get his significant other some nice jewelry.

Michael: So what do you do?

Bianco: You set up a joint venture between a jewelry store that sells high end jewelry and this hotel. And the ingenious way that I developed to come up with this would be, you know how you have the phone in the room and you have that little blinking light when there's a message. So what the owner of the hotels would do, and this is what we're getting them to do right now we're setting up this exact joint venture is he records a little message. It's a welcome message and it says, hi, I'm Joe Schmo, I'm the owner of this hotel. I just wanted to welcome you to the hotel and I wanted to make sure your stay was as enjoyable as possible. And I want to point out a few things so you can have the best time here. First of all, on the second floor is the gym and the first floor is this restaurant and it features this, this and this and that. Oh, and by the way, if you're thinking of doing any shopping for jewelry, my good friend owns XYZ jewelry store two blocks down. And if you go in there and tell him I sent you, he's going to give you a 10 or 15 or whatever percentage you want, say 15%, whatever deal he can create. 15% off any purchase you buy. So if you're thinking about getting any jewelry, just head down there first, check it out, mention my name and you'll get an immediate 15% discount on anything.

Michael: Great idea.

Bianco: So every time a visitor shows up at the hotel, he goes ahead and he hits the voicemail button and sends that pre recorded message to their phone. So last time they check in, they see this message light blink and they go, oh. They pick it up, get the message and hear the message. If that husband or boyfriend or whoever is thinking about buying jewelry, or even if the wife or the fiance or the significant other is, where are they going to go? First? They're going to go to that jewelry store. Now, not everyone's going to go to that store and buy. That's true, because not everyone is really interested in buying. But if he's able to send 100 people a week to that jewelry store, and even if 10% of them, which would be 10 people buy say a $2,000 product, that's $20,000 in sales a week that the hotel is now able to drive to the jewelry store. And remember, those are customers that that jewelry store would never otherwise have gotten without the help of that hotel owner.

Michael: You do a triangulation deal, you take a piece, the hotel takes a piece and the jewelry store obviously gets their markup.

Bianco: Exactly.

Michael: All right, that's exciting.

Bianco: Like, let's say you made that jewelry product. Let's say you didn't even have a jewelry store. Well, then what, what we do for you is we'd say, okay, but you make this great jewelry. Let's say you make these great Australian crystal bracelets, okay, that sell for 300 bucks or more, necklaces, whatever. And you want to sell those where you don't have any money, you only have like five of them that you could afford to make and you got some great pictures of them and that's all you got. I would recommend a either create a little brochure that has a nice one page sheet that has a picture of it and a brief description of it and a way to order phone number, a place to mail the money, what have you. Or you just have a phone number they can call where you go to them at the hotel and show it and sell it. And then you have the hotel owner put those in the packet with their room key or whatever so they can see it and make a special offer. You want to make a special offer. If you're doing that kind of endorsement of the hotel, you know, endorsing something, because then it makes it look like you cut a special deal, you're a special deal hunter for those patrons, and it makes them appreciate the fact that they're there. You're adding more value.

Michael: Okay, let's do this. Let's get down to some serious stuff. Let's talk a little bit about mailing lists and let's talk about specifically the resource SRDS. You've taught me a lot about that. And also let's talk about how can we incorporate joint venture marketing by using the resources of the SRDS.

Bianco: That's a great one. I mean, for people that don't know anything about the srds, that stands for the standard Rate and Data service, which basically is like a huge book. You know, it's four or five inches thick. The direct mail list one. Actually, there's like five versions. One for advertising, one for media. But we're going to focus on the SRDS. That's for direct mailing list. And there's over 80,000 mailing lists in that book that are for rent.

Michael: How does that book get these lists?

Bianco: What happens is companies that want to rent their list will contact the SRDS and say, I want to rent my list. Here's the information on it. And they'll put it in there like a directory.

Michael: I mean, a year ago I didn't even know you could rent your list. I'd never even heard of that. So anyone who has a business and who has a good amount of customers renting your list is a whole additional source of income for your business by renting out your names.

Bianco: But.

Michael: Go on.

Bianco: That's true, but you really need a list of at least like 30,000 or more names to be able to rent it. 50,000 is really the cutoff. If you don't have more than 50,000 names, it's not a good idea to put it on the rental market because you're not going to get much action.

Michael: From it if you're a rental. But if I'm a guy who wants to do Joint Ventures. And I found a targeted list for my market that Maybe only had 3,000 names. I could still do something with that.

Bianco: You could still make a ton of money. I mean, I don't know how many people out there listening know Dan Kennedy, know who he is. But one of the things that Dan Kennedy taught me was that you don't need a humongous list to become rich. And Dan told me that he used to have 400,000 names on his list and he used to make a couple hundred grand a year from them. Then when his list got down to he shaved it down, he niched it out even more, down about 4,000 names and then he made about a million bucks a year.

Michael: Did he really have 400,000 names on his list?

Bianco: Yes. And when his list got down to 400 names, when he shaved it down and niche it out to just 400 names, he makes multi millions a year from that because he's selling those 400 name high ticket items. 400 names, it could make any one of us wealthy, but you would never get it from him. But getting back to the SRDS and the listener in there, you can go through the SRDS in your niche category, find all the lists that are available for rent that match your target prospect's demographic. Like for example, if your product sells for 100, you want to try to find lists of people who bought things for 100.

Michael: Let's use a specific example.

Bianco: Okay, let's say that you have a program on how to play better golf. You have a video game, it sells for $69 and you go, well, I want to sell this and you know, I don't know how to sell it. So you go to the SRDS book and you can buy these from you. I know you sell them occasionally on your website or you can order it from srds for like 600 bucks a year. Or you can get it at some of the bigger public libraries, carry it, go in there and you check it out and you go through the list and you look for golf lists that sell non competitive products. Obviously if another company sells a golf video that's similar to yours, they're not going to let you rent or list. You might find a company that sells pitching wedges. So obviously you sell a golf video on how to play better golf and they sell a pitching wedge. So you guys are synchronous, you're harmonious, you guys can work together to help each other. So what you would do is then you would look at their list and let's say their list says it has 85,000 names of people who have bought our pitch and wedge in the past 24 months. You can either a rent those names, but the better way to go is to contact the owner of that list. And the way you do it is you call the phone numbers that are listed in there for either the list broker or the list agent or the company itself might have its direct number in there. Ask them for what's called the data card.

Michael: What's a data card?

Bianco: It's like a sheet of information that has all the information on how they generated those names. Whether it's some TV spot, print media, direct mail, sales, letters, what have you. It says where the names came from, how much the average ticket of purchase is, like what dollar amount they bought. And then it says, you know what their specific category is. Like it's 80% male, 30% people you know have a college education. Whatever information they've gathered, it's all in there. And then you contact the owner of that list and propose the joint venture deal.

Michael: Wait, can I interrupt? There's one more thing you can do which I just learned about. You can also ask them for a usage list and you can find out what that pitching wedge manufacturer, the company who's selling pitching wedges, you can get a list of everyone they've rented that list out to over the last year and sometimes the last two years. And you can see which companies used the list and which companies repeated the list.

Bianco: Exactly. That gives you a good indication. And here's another little trick. You can ask the company with a list to send you a copy of the promotion they used to generate their sales.

Michael: Isn't that incredible?

Bianco: And when you can analyze their promotion and figure out how they got 85,000 sales, you can weave the same psychology, the same emotional psychology that they use to generate their sales into your whatever your selling piece is.

Michael: Right. Why try and guess? I mean, if the company sold pitching wedges using a certain psychology or sold to only credit card buyers or sold to only higher income people, you want to use that same set of demographics and psychology in your piece.

Bianco: Yeah. You want to look at their sales proposition. What was their unique sales proposition? Were they selling on the best price? Were they selling on exclusivity? What was the main thrust of their selling proposition? And you want to make sure that yours is in the same area as that.

Michael: And how did they order? Did they pay by credit card? Was it a free offer where they could try the pitching wedge for 30 days and then pay? Was it a three payment program? Was it a one payment program? Do you want to try and match it up identically?

Bianco: Yeah. There's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel. I mean, if people want a challenge out there, go have some kids. But in business, you want to make it as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. You don't need challenges in business and you shouldn't try to get into areas where you go, oh, this is a real challenge. I want this. What you want to do is go out there and find home runs and then hit them.

Michael: So look at this. We've got the company's direct mail piece that generated them, $80,000 in orders. We know how much it retailed for. We know how many sales they're producing every month. The only thing we don't know is how much they're spending on advertising. If we could determine their exact cost on what they spend on mailing and promoting the direct mail piece, we could have all the necessary numbers to figure out everything about the business.

Bianco: You can take the number of sales they make in a year and multiply it by the product cost, and you can figure out almost at $, how much money that company is generating in sales every year.

Michael: Now let me ask you this. Do you have to beware with some of the information in the SRDS? Can you trust everything in there?

Bianco: You can't trust everything in there. And you know, obviously in this short time on the phone here, we can't like share, you know, years and years and years of experience in selecting the right list. There's definitely, you know, you need to get some more information. There's little tricks and tactics to make sure that you don't get burned. Because, you know, there's a lot of unscrupulous people in life and in business too. And you got to watch out. There are definitely lists out there that are not worth renting that you will get bogus information from. And so you need to learn how to pick the right list. There are a lot of people that teach that out there. You can go to seminars that will teach you how to do that. I have a product that contains like a two and a half hour video that teaches you how to find the right list. But in a nutshell, yeah, you got to be careful. You can't just trust everything that list brokers or companies trying to rent either list tell you. You have to know how to weed out the winners from the losers.

Michael: You really know your stuff. I mean, I've talked to you for many, many hours in the last year and a half or two years. How did you learn all this stuff. Tell me about how you got educated and got excited about direct marketing and entrepreneurship and all that stuff.

Bianco: I started out in business probably about 17 years ago, and I was in college and needed to make money for school because my education was being taken care of. But I needed some spending cash and I needed some money to do things and go places and travel and things. So I set up a little company. My little company was a design company, and I designed logos and graphics and brochures for corporations and small businesses. And right away I realized that no matter how great I was at designing, and I was pretty good. Not to toot my own horn, but I was pretty good. I wasn't the best in the world, but I was pretty good. And I realized pretty quickly that it doesn't matter how good you are what you do, it matters how good you are at marketing what you do. And so I learned real quickly that I was pretty good at getting sales. And there was people I knew, they were out there doing exactly what I was doing. They were better than me, but I was making a heck of a lot more money than them. And then I realized there's something to the selling and marketing thing. So then after a few years of being in business, I realized, you know what? I want to become an expert at marketing. Because when I'm an expert at marketing, I can help any business, including my own, drive sales right through the roof. And so I went out and I basically said, okay. I bought all the books from the bookstore, which by the way, 99.9% of them are written by professional writers who know absolutely nothing about what they're talking about. And all they do is go buy all the other books on the shelf, read them all, and then rehash it all out.

Michael: All out just to sell a book.

Bianco: Just to sell a book. So what you get is every book out there is a rehash from a different writer's perspective of the same stuff that doesn't work. And so what I realized right away is that that stuff doesn't work. I bought all the books in the bookstore, I tried everything they said and none of it worked. And I went, huh? So then I went out and I found somebody who had a kick butt company making tons of money. I said, hey, how did you learn the market so great? And they said this person's name. And they threw out some names. Claude Hopkins. And go read this if you can find it, and get John E. Kennedy Reason why Advertising. These are some of the great books from the 20s and 30s about how to write direct response copy. How to write direct response ads and sales letters.

Michael: Do you remember how you first got exposed to it? The good stuff?

Bianco: Do you remember someone told me they recommended that those are the books I go buy. And when I went and bought those books and read them, I was floored. I was like, this stuff is amazing. And then I tried it. I wrote some sales letters, I wrote some ads, and they worked like crazy. And I was shocked and surprised. But then I continued it and said, okay, I want to learn more. There's got to be people alive today. These guys are all deceased. But I said, there's got to be people alive today that know this stuff. So I went to a Tony Robbins seminar, and he had a gentleman by the name of Jay Abraham. I went to a master seminar to Tony Robbins, and Jay Abraham was one of his speakers. And he came up there, and he started talking about business and marketing, and he just blew me away. In the one hour that he spoke, I felt like this guy's brain and mind were, like, separated at birth. Everything he said to me, it triggered in my own head that I knew that, but I didn't have the ability to articulate it until he explained it to me. And then once he did, it was like I knew it and I used it, and I made a ton of money, and I went out and I said, you know what? This is the guy that is going to be my mentor. So I contacted him by phone because he lives right here in Southern California, too. And I said, I want to do a barter with you. I want to trade you one of the services that I do for one of the services you do, which is one of your upcoming Protege events. And he said, well, put it in writing and let me know what you're thinking. I'm a real busy guy, you know, I'll look forward to your letter. So I sat down. I spent about a week writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting this letter because I felt like this is my only one shot, you know, if I don't make it work here with this letter, it ain't going to happen.

Michael: And you didn't really have the money to pay 20 grand for the seminar?

Bianco: Yeah, I didn't have the money. I wanted to go. I knew this event would be a springboard to massive success for me.

Michael: Was this the protege training? This is the protege training in 1989, 1990.

Bianco: It was 97. I wrote this letter, and I explained I wanted to trade him one of the services that I performed that really ranged from anywhere from 15,000 to $30,000.

Michael: What were you doing then?

Bianco: We were doing these interactive marketing CD-ROMs for corporations like Texaco, Coldwell Banker, Disney. And these things were really complicated, interactive. This was before the Internet.

Michael: This was before the Internet was nothing

Bianco: but black and white text. And everyone thought the Internet's a joke and it's a bunch of computer geeks and it's never going anywhere. So everyone was really hot. Everyone had computers and everyone was hot on CD ROMs. So we would get these companies that would contact us and say, hey, we saw what you did for Texaco. We want you to do that for us. And we're talking huge projects, 50, 60, 80, $90,000 project that would take three months to develop. And then we were doing that and I said, you know what, Jay Abraham could have one of these to promote his seminar.

Michael: Well, you said, was this your business? You were doing my business, you were doing it all on your own. I had programmers, but you'd outsource and stuff.

Bianco: I outsourced to exactly subcontracted out to do certain programming or production of the cd, like producing the actual cd, stamping it out, packaging, printing.

Michael: Is it labor intensive job doing these things?

Bianco: Yeah, is was a real headache. Because the technology that we were using, it had to work on both platforms, Apple and PC. So everything we did, we had to do it twice. It was really labor intensive when you had to change something, a color or a graphic or a video. It was just super time consuming and working 12 hours a day.

Michael: Did you have to travel And I

Bianco: had to travel as well to have meetings to show it and all this. It was very tedious, very labor intense and pretty much after about a year and a half of doing that, pretty unrewarding. Sure, you got paid good money, but it was really unrewarding. You never got to put your name on the product because it was their corporate product and they didn't want to promote you. They weren't going to pay you all that money to have you promote yourself.

Michael: It was just a job, almost like a job.

Bianco: It was a job that was going nowhere because you never got any self promotion out of it.

Michael: I know your skills on the computer in graphic design are incredible. I'm sure you took that with you, didn't you?

Bianco: Yeah, I definitely took that with me onto my new ventures. I basically contacted Jay and said, I want to trade you this $25,000 interactive CD and you let me come to your one event. You know, I sent that letter out and I waited and about 5...6 days went by, and I thought, okay. I know he got the letter the day after I mailed it. It's probably a dud. He's probably not going to call me. The event was, like, two weeks away. I said, you know, whatever. I'm not going to be going. Then the phone rings, and it was his assistant saying, "Jay got your letter. He's totally stoked. He wants to meet you, and he wants to do this, and he has some other ideas. He wants to do some things." And I'm like, wow. So we set the meeting. I went out there to Jay's office the day before the meeting, actually, his assistant called me and said, you know what? Do you mind going to Jay's house? He's not working tomorrow, but he wants to meet with you still. Go to his house. And I said, great. No problem. You know, go to his home. And this guy's making 20 million bucks a year. This is one of the top marketing guys in the world. Make 30 grand a day.

Michael: Were you nervous?

Bianco: No, I wasn't really nervous because I know a lot of very wealthy people and celebrities and stuff, so I wasn't nervous, but I was excited. It's going to be a lot more personable. I love it. So I pull up to his beautiful home in Palos Verde, California, right here. And I'm like, wow. I knock on the door. His nanny opens the door. Come on in. In his big palatial mansion practically. I go in there. Jay comes down. He's in jeans and a T shirt. And then he's going, hey, did you eat lunch yet? I'm like, no. And he goes, hey, want some lunch? I said, sure. So next thing you know, we're sitting in his living room floor eating these salads. Jay's real health conscious, and I'm health conscious, too. So we're eating these salads and drinking this bottled water, and we're rapping out. He's asking me about my past and what I'm into. And, you know, Jay's a real inquisitive guy, real personable, real friendly. It was just amazing. And I'm just sitting there going, wow, this guy's nothing like I thought he would be. What do you want? Here's the deal. Okay, great.

Michael: Thanks.

Bianco: Goodbye. See ya. But he wasn't like that at all. We spent, like, two hours talking about everything and showing us things, and we basically put a deal together on a handshake. And the next thing you know, I'm going to his event. And, you know, one of the things that was great About Jay is that he said, why you only want to go to one of my events? Don't you want to go to all of my events? Sure. But, you know, I didn't think, you know, I was going to ask. Well, you know what? Here's what I'm going to do. You do the CD for me, and you can come to all my events for the next two years. I'm like, wow, really? But I'm not going to fly you there. You got to pay. And I have my events all over the country, but I'll let you in for free. And none of my events are less than 5,000 bucks apiece. And I usually have three or four events per year. And then I have one major event where it's 15, 20, 25 grand. You're welcome to come all of them. And I'm like, wow, you're the best, Jay. Thanks. So then basically, I went to the Protege thing, and I just got mind meld with Jay and just sucked up and absorbed everything. And then he gave me a whole bunch of home study materials, like, a lot of the stuff that he sells. And I went through those tapes, listened to them day and night pretty much for. For weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, read the books over and over and over and over until I could use and implement anything without even having to reference the books again. I, like, knew that stuff. And then I went out and started doing it, using it for my clients and using it on my own businesses and just making tons of money. And to this day, it's just, you know, if I even use five or six of the strategies that I learned from Jay, I can make more money than a man could even need in his entire life. And that's what I do.

Michael: How do you like to learn best? Are you a reader? Audio, video. What do you find is the most effective way for you in setting this marketing information?

Bianco: I like to read and listen to audio. Most of the videos, unfortunately, that are out there are rather boring. It's someone standing on stage, just standing there with no props, no diagrams, nothing. The audio is pretty much just the same. And I can listen to the audio while I'm doing other things. I can be out cleaning my pool, or I could be out jogging or riding my bike or driving somewhere, and I can listen to it in my car. The way I make money is a bunch of different ways. One way is I either consult and advise companies, and I have clients that I advise the corporations that are doing as much as $45 million a year all the way down to companies that do $300,000 to $400,000 a year in revenue. You know, the marketing strategies, including joint venture marketing. It works like crazy in all of them.

Michael: You worked out of a huge high rise office?

Bianco: No, I used to actually have a huge 1200 foot office. That was my personal office. And you know, big overhead, big expense, you know, getting dressed up in a suit and tie every day. But you know what? I didn't like it and I didn't need it. So I basically, you know, I have a big home and I have an office in my home and I do all my consulting and advising now through phone, fax, Internet, email. I rarely will go to the, you know, customers of the client's office local. I would drive over there once in a while.

Michael: If anyone listening wants to become a joint venture expert like yourself and has visions of going to a J.O.B. or regular office like maybe your dad did or what you would think of anyone who has a job, it's absolutely the total opposite. You wake up, you get out of bed, you don't have to shower, you don't even have to brush your teeth. You can go sit down in your office and you can start doing business. You can do it on the phone, you can do it through email, you can do it through a fax, through the Internet. It's absolutely incredible. You can be home with your kids. Even though you and I both know that can be a royal pain. There's a lot of interruptions there. But the lifestyle, talk about the lifestyle. If someone wanted to just get into joint ventures and quit their normal job or start some joint ventures on the side, they could think about maybe quitting their normal job once their income got to a point where they felt secure enough. Let's talk about the lifestyle.

Bianco: That's the key to true happiness. Really. It's lifestyle. It's not maybe the best lifestyle in the world. I'm not, you know, rich and famous like, you know, a lot of people.

Michael: Who would want to be anyway?

Bianco: Exactly, yeah, after everything. But I live in Southern California as well as you do. And you know, Southern California is probably one of the best places to live in the whole planet. I mean, it's just incredible, the lifestyle here. And you know, you got to have money to live in California. You got to have money to live in southern California. I'm two minutes from the ocean and I'm 40 minutes from the mountain. I can go skiiing and surfing in the same day if I want to. And the lifestyle is, you know, I have a beautiful home and I have a pool and most people out there, you know, stuck in a 9 to 5 job, they hate it and it's a rat race. The money comes in and the money goes out just as fast. And they can never get ahead of my joint venture marketing. Learning how to do joint venture marketing can allow you to break that cycle and to step away and leave all that behind and start really living your dream.

Michael: Okay, but it's easier said than done. Let's say a guy's got two kids like yourself and like myself, and he's been in a job, a job working for a boss. He can't stand fighting traffic every day, up early, out the door at 6, home at 7. The kids maybe just went to sleep. So he's a weekend dad and he's scared to leave that job or he doesn't believe that this really can be done. How do you convince...? You know, if you had a magic pill that you could put in this guy's coffee in the morning, how do you convince someone what do they need to do and think internally to get over that fear, to just go for it?

Bianco: The reason they have that fear is basically it's just lack of knowledge, it's lack of know how, they don't know how to do it. So the first thing they need to do is they need to get educated on joint venture marketing. That's the route they want to take.

Michael: Where could someone get some good marketing books and tapes from?

Bianco: That's a good question. A lot of the bookstores, there's nothing. Don't go to the bookstores. What you need to do is either go to your website at hardtofindseminars.com

Michael: Let's talk about...the person has a lack of knowledge. So if that person took the time and educated themselves on marketing, is that enough to tip them over the edge to take a risk and try and put some of these deals together?

Bianco: It is. Because once you learn how easy it is and you have template letters and things like that to contact people and information to educate the prospect, the people that you want to do the joint venture with, you'll have the ammunition and the confidence to do it. Because think about when you're learning something new, you don't know how to do it, how much confidence does someone have?

Michael: You mentioned letters. So does that mean if I'm a shy person and the fear of getting on the phone and actually talking to someone scares the hell out of me, can I still do joint ventures and be able to sit in front of my computer and be able to use a letter to set these deals up.

Bianco: Yeah, you don't even really need a computer to do this. All you need is the will and the information. There's template letters to contact the joint venture partner. And that letter explains to them everything they need to know to make a decision if they want to do a joint venture. And so you can use letters so that you don't have to talk to anybody until they're ready to go, until they're ready to do the deal. So, yes, you don't have to pick up the phone and do all kind of cold calling to companies and sit there stumbling over yourself, trying to make sure you don't say the wrong thing. There's letters that do all the selling for you, and you want to use letters anyway, because how many phone calls can one guy make in a day? Or one girl making a day? 20, 30, 50, 100 if you hustle. How many letters can one person send out in a day? Hundreds.

Michael: Absolutely. You use the postman to do all your work.

Bianco: It's leveraging your time. The key is get some joint ventures under your belt, get the experience, and then go for the higher percentage amount of money that stops you from getting a deal. Even if you have to make no money on the first deal that you do, get it done so you can have that success story to share with everyone else.

Michael: Right. And start building your confidence, because it takes the same exact amount of time to do a joint venture for 10 cents as it does for $10 million.

Bianco: Right now I'm working on a humongous joint venture deal where my joint venture partner will introduce one of my products, and the product sells for $497, and I will share with them half the profit. And they have a customer list that's a rabid buyer list. I mean, these people buy stuff in the $500 to $5,000 range constantly. And we're going to do a mailing with 125,000 name lists here in the next 30 days, and we expect to net five figures each.

Michael: Is this better than investing in the stock market?

Bianco: That's the thing a lot of people say, well, what about real estate? What about the stock market? What about buying and selling notes and all these other, like, really complicated things? Well, the problem with all that stuff is that you have no control over what happens once you put your money into that investment. Whereas with direct marketing and joint venture marketing, you can test on a very small scale, you can test something for a couple hundred dollars and see the results. You can see what's going to happen. And if it doesn't work, you can tweak it and twist it and test it again. And once you find that program that worked, then you can roll it out to tens or hundreds of thousands of people and you can predict with very, very accurate predictions what your results are going to be because you just multiply them out.

Michael: This has been an incredible educational, informative conversation on joint ventures. It really has.

Bianco: I appreciate being here. It was a pleasure. Mike, you're always a great interviewer. I love listening to your interviews myself. I always learn a lot, lot. I'm a constant and continual eternal student myself. You know, I call myself an expert because other people do, because I've had some fantastic results in my consulting, in my advisory. But also, you know, I look at myself as an eternal student myself. I'm always learning. I never stop learning. I never want to stop learning. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be interviewed here. And I hope everything is going great for you in the future and I wish you the best.