Joint Venture Opportunities For Accountants

Jassen: Now, one of the things that some CPA’s may not think about doing what their business is taking advantage of joint venture opportunities. This is another area where you can essentially outsource some or a good chunk of the work of marketing by partnering with other people in businesses. Can you explain some methods that CPA’s may be able to take advantage of joint venture opportunities?

James Orr: Yes. I’d like to explain that joint venture concept for CPA’s with an example using a client. Let’s say you have a client, you’re a CPA and you have a client who is an electrician. Let’s say they own a tile store. So they own a business where they sell tiles. You could go to that store owner and say, “Look, I’d like to create a special report for people.” People that are doing tile in their houses are probably homeowners. So I want to do a special report on how homeowners can save money, certain things that they need to take advantage of on their taxes and as an accountant, as CPA I can help them with that. I want to do a special report and offer as a free thing for all of your clients. I want you to send out either your normal newsletter or want to do a special newsletter with you offering them this free special report on ways they save money as a homeowner and I want you to write a little testimonial saying that, “John’s been an accountant of mine for 17 years and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else as an accountant. You should definitely go and order this report if you like to learn how to save money.”

John has now endorsed you to his list of clients with a special report something of value to them. Maybe it’s an audio report, maybe it’s a printed special report. Whatever it happens to be and when they request that report from you, they get added to your internal mailing list. So what you’re doing is that you’re tapping into John, the tile company owner’s client list in order to do marketing for yourself. Maybe in return, you also send out a special coupon or something else like something of value for the tile owner company in your newsletter. So maybe this becomes a monthly thing for you. You take one client that you spotlight and they do a mailing to their list for you and you actually put their information in your newsletter. Then everybody benefits by doing this joint venture. They get new clients, you get new clients. You can expand your business. You can keep growing your list in giving people things of value and reasons to open up your newsletter when they get it. So all the way around, it’s win-win-win for everybody. You could do that over and over again and a lot of people just overlook that opportunity.

Jassen: Okay. This is something you can do with a fair amount of frequency, right?

James Orr: Sure. You could take four guys a month that you actually you go into joint ventures with and then in your newsletter, you have four spots for those guys to be in there. If it’s the whole back page and they get a quarter of the back page each and it’s just a coupon. So you absolutely could do this with a lot of frequency. In fact, you could outsource somebody else to go and contact your guys. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could go and outsource the process of someone else seeking out those contacts for you in doing joint ventures.