Leverage Someone Else’s Client Base

This is also known as a Joint Venture (JV for short) and a highly effective and lucrative lead source for travel agents. In this audio, Heidi will explain exactly what a JV is, give you examples of great JV’s, and examples of different types of agreements you could have with your JVs.
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​Start by listening to this audio training:

You need to come up with an idea on a way that you can help them get more clients, and as a result you’ll also get more clients.

EXAMPLE #1

Here’s an example of a give, give, get. Choose a notable event or important date (use this Publicity Calendar), such as World Food Day in October as a way to get yourself and a great prospective JV Partner some fantastic media coverage (we have a detailed Press Kit here in the academy for you).

For example, you could pitch a story idea to your local TV station on authentic cuisine experiences in stunning locations and how people could plan their next trip around a magical food adventure. You could team up with a fantastic chef in your area from a top restaurant that you want to develop a JV Partner with. In your pitch to your local TV station tell them that you, a premiere local travel agent, will talk about authentic cuisine experiences in stunning vacation destinations and then a premiere local chef (maybe even local celebrity chef) will show their viewers how to create an inspired meal at home, and that their restaurant will be featuring special dishes to celebrate World Food Month. Local TV stations LOVE these sorts of features! AND, after you get the restaurant great press, that restaurant will be VERY open to doing a lucrative Joint Venture with you! You’ll get some amazing press and a JV Partner!

​You could do the same story idea for National Vegan Month (November) and National Pasta Month (October) and partner with other chefs/restaurants.

EXAMPLE #2

Here’s an example of an idea that’s worked for other agents and other businesses like Spas…

Offer to put together a little event, which could be themed around a holiday or a season like a “Spring Fling” or “Spring Sip & Spa” or “Summer Solstice” or “Winter Wonderland” or “Winter Sip & Spa” or whatever.

Spring Sip & Spa and Summer Sip & Spa are getting to be a thing… so that could be a good one to do.

In this case, your pitch would be that you’ll plan and coordinate the event, host it in their space (a winery would be an ideal location) so that they get a bunch of new ideal clients visiting their winery and tasting their wines. You’ll find other high-end businesses to partner with for the event. For example, a high-end spa/salon, a high-end boutique… local businesses that have the SAME clientele so that each “vendor” that’s participating is a business that sells a different thing to the same clientele – this allows you to cross-pollinate your clienteles.

Each business will promote the event to their clients, and you’ll send out press releases to the local media and do some other promoting in order to have a successful event (we show you how to do that here).

Since you as a travel agent will not be able to personally get too many people there you will do most of the leg work on the event. You have the least amount of local high-end clients – the other businesses that are part of the event can each bring in a lot of people because ALL of their clients are local – so what you bring to the table is the leg work.

The businesses each chip in some money to pay for expenses, or you could offer to cover them and then charge $15-$25 per person for the event and you get to keep a percentage of it to pay yourself back for the expenses. And the winery will probably want to keep at 50%-75% of it to help cover the cost of the wine for the wine tasting.

The expenses for this type of an event are really low, so even if you just make $300 in ticket sales, that’ll probably cover your expenses. And of course the whole point is that you get several new medium to big-budget clients from it.

I recommend charging somewhere in the neighborhood of $15-$25 for advance tickets and $20-$35 at the door.

Here’s an example of one that was done (and could have been done much better, but even so was quite successful):

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-sip-spa-15-friday-wine-tasting-tickets-57884703707?aff=erelexpmlt&fbclid=IwAR18Q-LrGz4OpdXqbMiKrLSqBqUGj5gpOKnv-nytVdQv2Yq1-wDu6RSYfEg

This is a great video by the Fempreneur gals on a 4-week strategy for courting prospective JV partners.

You first learned about this optional fun strategy back in Module 10 when you were doing your Cash Injections, and hopefully, you gave it a try. Now would be a great time to rinse and repeat the strategy and focus it around finding great JV partners.

​Here’s the strategy — tell 21 people about your oh-so-fabulous and growing travel agency and how you’re looking for some fantastic JV Partners.

The sooner you start spreading the word, the faster you’ll reach your goal. Start right now. Become your own publicist.

​You can do this—and you might be really surprised by how much encouragement you receive in response!