Joint Ventures are a common practice in today’s marketplace, but truth be told, you should enter into them sparingly. Check out my blog and my companies; you will find less than three that I have entered into during the past seven years of being in business. I recently just entered into a “mini-JV” (more later on in this blog post), but again, I made sure to dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s. So, here are my random thoughts on entering into Joint Ventures (big or small).
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When we hang out our proverbial shingle and start selling something, people come to us to transact business, buying our goods or services with their hard-earned cash. I call these people customers. They transact occasionally and it’s based on the value they perceive from the product or service you provide.
Businesses need customers. But I think they need more. Some businesses stop their “sales pipeline” at the point where they transact business to create a customer. But I think that the next step in the pipeline is to transition customers into clients.
I realize that I might be redefining a term here but it works (in my mind, at least!).
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Yesterday I talked about the tricky balance between the customer always being right and Henry Ford’s admission that if he had listened to people, he would have invented a faster horse.
Ford states it well and if I were to restate what he said I would put it a little more bluntly: the customer doesn’t really know what they need. I mean that customers know they need a solution to their problem or a fulfillment to their desire but they will solve that need with the best available solution. Thus, if Henry Ford had listened to the market, he would have given them a faster horse because horses were the available solution for getting around. Click here to read more »
