Danny Bermant helps established coaches and consultants attract their ideal clients through joint venture partnerships. In the last 3 years alone, he has worked with over 400 JV partners and supported numerous launches, summits, giveaways, webinars and other joint ventures, both for his clients, and for other partners, that have generated millions of dollars in revenue.
Danny’s passion is people and the nurturing of professional relationships. His friends refer to him as “Captain JV” – he is a prolific networker. He has worked with some of the biggest names in marketing and in the process built a sizable network of over 4,000 contacts across every major industry. Nothing gives him more pleasure than enabling both businesses and non-profit organizations to forge new and fruitful partnerships.
In this interview, Danny explained how you can get better results from partnering with others, even if you’ve had bad experience with partnering in the past. He provided some detailed techniques to create lasting, powerful relationships with other like-minded entrepreneurs. Below it, you can read a summary of his answers to my questions.
Who do you serve and who are your clients?
I serve established coaches and consultants. They have a list and an offer, but they are looking for a better way to bring clients on board. The people I work with are collaborative rather than competitive. They are not predatorial types of people; they’re people who like working with others. Naturally, they prefer a more inclusive partnership with other businesses. They have a preference for this rather than having to really go out and pitch and hustle. They like having a situation where they are working with like-minded businesses who refer clients to them or promote them, which means they have people coming into their orbit who are warm and pre-sold.
What is their problem, their need, and what are the symptoms of that problem?
I think the problem is that many of them are already sold on the idea of partnerships, but it hasn’t worked very well for them. They are finding three main obstacles or challenges. The first one is that they are not meeting the right people. They are connecting with partners where the audience and the offer aren’t the right fit. They don’t know how to go about meeting the right people.
The second problem is that when they do meet partners, it doesn’t work out very well. They agree to work together, but someone drops the ball. For example, there’s a webinar coming up, and they were counting on you promoting it, but you never got the memo and don’t show up. This has led many to give up on joint ventures because people keep letting them down.
The third challenge, which I hear most often, is that they meet someone who is full of promise and aligned with their business, but the results are lousy, and they don’t know why. If any one of these things is missing, it becomes a struggle to get results. Despite this, people keep seeing others succeed with joint ventures and wonder, “What am I doing wrong?”
What are the common mistakes people make or obstacles they face when they’re trying to solve the problem on their own or with other solutions?
They often have a very transactional mindset, going into meetings with a “What can you do for me?” and “If you do this for me, what will I do for you?” mentality. This quid pro quo mindset is reinforced by many networking groups. However, to build good relationships and partnerships, you need to approach them with a more generous attitude.
For instance, if your business aligns with theirs and you like what they are doing, you should start by offering support. Ask them if there are other people they’d like to meet or work with, and offer to share their masterclass with your audience. Putting yourself out there and offering to help others is what partnership is about.
The initial motivation to work with someone should be genuine appreciation for what they are doing and the belief that it will benefit your audience. If you don’t truly believe in what they offer, it won’t resonate with your audience, and you’ll lose their trust.
For example, I once had someone ask me to promote a masterclass about passive income. After reviewing the content, I realized it wouldn’t resonate with my audience, so I politely declined and asked if they had something else coming up later in the year that might be a better fit.
To avoid mistakes and overcome obstacles, my approach is very process-oriented. When entering a joint venture, you need a thorough process. This means not jumping into a quick 15-minute meeting but spending more time to understand each other’s programs, audiences, and struggles. It’s important to assess the before and after states of their audience and even request a replay of their masterclass to ensure it resonates with your audience.
Slowing down and following a detailed process helps ensure the partnership will be beneficial. Sometimes, I challenge people to explain how they solve problems, asking for specifics to evaluate what they are teaching. When promoting a PDF or course, I request to see the actual content to ensure its quality.
Ultimately, seeing the offer and copy is crucial because if it doesn’t meet your standards, you can’t, in good faith, promote it.
How did you gain your own expertise, and how did you turn that into a business?
Firstly, I’ve been networking and collaborating for the best part of 20 years. I started by attending BNI meetings with many small business owners back in 2002. I was very impressed by how networking groups had a core of businesses that shared a lot in common and made a concerted effort to look out for each other.
When you collaborate with other businesses and meet regularly, making a point of catching up and touching base about current offers and activities, you are much more likely to think of each other. This means that when opportunities arise, you’re in a much better position to help each other. Keeping people top of mind has been a constant theme in my experience.
I also worked at Mirasee for two years, overseeing numerous launches, giveaways, summits, and webinars. From this experience, I noticed the difference between those who do well in joint ventures and those who don’t — the successful ones have a process.
What benefit, goal, objective, or outcome do people achieve who follow your advice?
Of the people who follow my advice, they all find that joint venture partnerships are by far the best way to get their perfect clients. Let’s take advertising as an example. While some people are incredible at advertising, for most business owners, you can find an audience through ads that fits relatively well. However, it will never be as good a fit as a business owner you met firsthand, where you know that their audience is similar to yours and the offers complement each other.
If you think of it as a Venn diagram, the two audiences will fit very nicely in a way that other channels cannot achieve. Joint ventures are a very effective and enjoyable way to grow your business.
What is a free valuable resource you can direct people to that will further help them solve their problem?
This is quite an easy one to remember. I have a webinar that comes out on the last Thursday of every month. It’s called “Joint Ventures That Deliver Leads.” It’s all about how to attract JV partners that are aligned with you and who want to promote you again and again. So, remember, it’s always on the last Thursday of every month.
Here’s the link: https://www.captainjv.co/jvs-that-work-ef/
Is there anything I forgot to ask or something you would like to add?
I would just say, as a general observation, if you want to be an extremely popular business that everybody wants to promote, put yourself out there for people. When you are someone who is offering support to other businesses, people will want to help you in return. This goes back to my memories of BNI: if I help your business, you’re going to want to help my business. It is absolutely true. Whenever I put myself out there for people, I always get other businesses responding and asking, “What can I do to help you?”