Why I Turn Down Free Money From Sponsors

 BiG Podcast - Partnerships and SponsorshipsMon, Mar 13, 2023 8:11AM • 17:44SUMMARY KEYWORDSaudience, website, product, gym, building, recommendation, people, clients, business, bike, partnership, recommend, booth, owners, company, test, trek, podcast, local bike shop, sell I will pay you $500 for a 30 minute phone call. Hey, I'm Chris Cooper, this is business is good. And today I'm going to tell you about sponsorships. Why I don't take sponsorships on my podcast and why I said no to the software company that wanted to pay me 500 bucks for a 30 minute phone call. Today, I've got three big key topics for you. First, we're going to talk about the value of your audience. Second, we're going to talk about the value of your recommendation. And third, we're going to talk about the partnership funnel. But first, a story. In 2006, I was sponsored by Trek bikes. Trek was the biggest most popular cycling company in the world. At that time. Lance Armstrong was winning the Tour de France seemingly every year on a Trek bike, everybody wanted to ride Trek bikes. But I wasn't a cyclist, I was powerlifting. Best case, I might have been the fastest powerlifter with a bicycle within a square mile or something. But the local bike shop wasn't interested in my legs, they were interested in my audience. I was a personal trainer at a local gym, I had a full book, and every Tuesday night, I would lead a cycling group for any of my clients who wanted to come. Now my clients were high earning individuals who could afford to work with a personal trainer a couple of times a week, they had high affinity they really liked and trusted me, most of them were beginners, some of them were thinking about doing their first triathlon. And so when they thought about what kind of bike should they buy, they would naturally turn to me. And so it made sense for the local bike shop to put me on a Trek. Now, this didn't make sense to me at the time, because I didn't understand the value of the audience, I thought that they really thought I was an amazing athlete. And that's why I was gonna get sponsored by Trek. Of course, at the end of the summer, the store asked for its bike back. And I don't blame, you know, at least they didn't ask me to pull up under the cover of darkness and leave the bike, because they were embarrassed by my actual cycling prowess. But they did sell bikes from this program. And I learned something, which is if you know how to build an audience, you'll never go hungry. Your audience is more valuable than what you know. even more today than 20 years ago, attention is really hard to get and it's extremely hard to keep. Now that my mentorship practice Two-Brain Business has 40,000 people on its daily email list, 10,000 YouTube subscribers and almost 3 million podcast downloads, people want to get in front of my audience. So here's why I don't take sponsors on any of my podcasts and I recently turned down offers for 500 bucks for a 30 minute phone call. And I will politely decline your offer for your amazing revenue share program if I push your product to my audience of gym owners. Let's start with point number one the audience is harder to build than the product is. If you're like me, and you're listening to this, and you're a founder or a business coach, you're probably really in love with your product. You love building out your courses or your widget or your cookies or whatever it is that you make. And you want to believe that simply making the best widget, the best courses, the best cookie will guarantee your success. This is called the technicians curse. And I first read about it in the E Myth mastery book. But the reality is that more and more, it's less about what you make and more about your ability to build an audience. building an audience is easier than ever before, except there's a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of competition for the audience's attention. And so people will often approach us because we have a very strong niche audience. I'm going to talk about the increasing value of your audience as the size of your niche decreases. But I want to tell you a story about a website company. So there was this website company and it was run by one woman. She was an amazing designer. I really loved her. She came out to one of our summits. And she spent all night in the cafe, walking people through their websites and showing them how to make it better. And the next year, she showed up at our summit and she had a booth. She wanted to talk to people about building better websites. And because everybody in the audience was a gym owner and she built gym owner websites, she sold about 35 website packages Now typically she would sell one or two of these packages a month. But at our summit, she sold 34 in a weekend, and it broke her business. Unfortunately, it was more business than she could handle. And so clients experienced delays. And they experienced a bit of a rush job. And if there was any kind of problem with their website, they struggled to get service because she was a one woman shop and she couldn't scale. So the first lesson here is that when you partner with somebody, and you put them in front of your audience, you have to make sure that they are actually ready to take on the audience that you're about to give them, we didn't foresee that she was going to get 34. But the reality is, even if she had gotten 10 new website customers from being at that summit, she would have struggled to maintain them all. So when you're looking at potential partnerships, you have to make sure that they can handle the clients that you're about to send them. The next lesson here is that the narrower your niche is, the more refined your ideal client is that you're working with, the more your value goes up. So we were working with this company called Inbody, that makes a brilliant scale, for measuring body composition in gyms. It's not cheap, the InBody is really expensive, and their competitors are cheap. And you can go buya Tanita scale at Walmart for probably 120 bucks or less. And the InBody is gonna cost you about 7000. So the InBody went to the CrossFit Games, where there are tens of thousands of people, but most of them are just athletes, they're not gym owners, and they set up this booth. And over the course of the weekend, they sold about three of their Inbody machines, which paid for the booth and maybe the travel of the people attending the booth or whatever, but three machines, and they thought, Okay, that's pretty good. A few weeks later, they came to our summit, which is only gym owners, and there were only a few hundred people there. And they sold 23 machines--like seven times as many machines--because the only people in the room were their actual target audience. And so the value of that audience goes up, the more niche you are. There was another factor at play, too. And that was affinity. So one of the mentors just happened to stand up and say, Hey, I use the InBody at my gym, and here's how it paid for itself. Having that trust with our audience is enormously valuable. And so a lot of people who were buying this expensive machine on faith, now say, Oh, well, you know, if a Two-Brain mentor uses this thing, and they can tell me how to get a great return on this investment. I'd be crazy not to do this. And so they jumped on this expensive machine. So the value of your audience goes up, the narrower your niche, and the higher your affinity. But because your audience is harder to build than the product, you have to be very selective about where you direct that audience. Which leads me to point number two, your recommendation builds or erodes your value. Your audience will associate any brand that you recommend with your core brand. And so if you make a bad recommendation, it will reflect badly on you. For a couple of years, we had a product company, a sponsor who would show up and they would like have a booth at our at our venues. And we would write blog articles about them, we would have like podcast sponsorships, this episode brought to you by bla bla bla. And I really liked the founder, there was only one problem, the product didn't work. And so people would sign up for this product on our word, they would really get excited about it, because we talked about it so much, and I loved it. And then they'd get a bad experience. So they would get late delivery of this product. And they would have all these fights back and forth with like the customer service reps. And they kept coming back to me and saying things like, I cannot believe you guys recommend these guys. They're brutal. And finally, one guy said, I'm quitting the two brain business mentorship practice, because you continually recommend this guy. And if you're recommending this person for this product, it really makes me question all of your other recommendations too. And so this became really, really a point of stress for us, because we were recommending about 12 or 13 different products at the time. And we didn't have time to keep auditing every single person. And in fact, when we'd make a recommendation, we would do a little test, we would never recommend somebody that we hadn't tried ourselves. But we wouldn't keep updating that recommendation every six months. And so as their business changed--as they changed their onboarding procedure, they changed their delivery, they changed the product a little bit. We couldn't stay on top of that. And so it became very, very tough for us to keep making recommendations on products that kept changing over time. So the value of your recommendation is massive. However, it can actually undermine the bigger product that you...