How to Grow Your Business With Partnerships with David Riklan

Kathi: Hi, David. It's so good to have you on the show. It's a pleasure to see you again. We haven't seen each other for a little while.

David: Great to see you, Kathi. Excited to be here today.

Kathi: Yeah, I'm excited because everybody who's out there doing entrepreneurship needs to know how to grow themselves, but they also need to know how to JV. So I'd like to talk to you about both of those, which are your fortes, and selling and mastery and all that good golly stuff. So let's introduce you to the audience who might not know you. Tell me a little bit about your background and what got you into the whole self-growth idea.

David: I'll be happy to take everybody back down memory lane over here. I started out of college in sales and marketing at a big corporation, Hewlett-Packard. They sent me to a course from Dale Carnegie called Effective Speaking and Human Relations. And I fell in love with this concept that after your official education, you can continue to learn and grow. And I love this concept: self-improvement, personal development, self-help. Fast forward a bunch of years, and the internet in the mid '90s started to become popular. I saw an opportunity to build a website, and I purchased a domain name, selfgrowth.com, in 1995. So this is 30 years ago.

Kathi: When you could still buy it, right?

David: Yeah. You could still buy stuff like that. And I started posting information about self-improvement and self-help. We built a mini Google for self-improvement information. And it just grew from a hobby to a side business. And in 2003, I went full-time with it, with a goal being to provide a great resource for people to improve their lives.

Kathi: That's amazing. So you started it in 1990? Is that what you said?

David: 1995 was when I officially bought my first website and started it as a hobby or a side hustle. I guess the term now is side hustle.

Kathi: Yeah, exactly. And then eight years later, you're full-time, full tilt boogie.

David: Yep.

Kathi: I love the story because a lot of people think that they have to launch immediately from their real job. And this is a case in point that you don't really have to do that. But I bet when you first started populating your website, it was probably stuff that really appealed to you, right? It was the stuff you'd been into, like, yeah, I love that one. I love that one.

David: Unquestionably. It was really driven by my personal desire. I'm a strong believer that we're put on earth to grow and, we'll use the term, self-actualize, to really become the best we can be. And I'm a strong believer that you don't do that in a vacuum. You need resources, you need experts, you need information to do that. I was always on this journey myself to find the best information for me personally to improve my life. So I've been aggregating that information for many, many years. And I thought, how am I going to take this? I want to do this. I love what I'm doing. How can I apply it as a business? So I said, you know what? If I'm on this mission, a lot of other people also need to be on a similar mission. They want to improve their lives. So let's build a place where they can find the resources they need to improve their life. And that's what I've been doing literally for 30 years.

I'm a strong believer that you don't do that in a vacuum. You need resources, you need experts, you need information to do that.

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Kathi: And that's fantastic, because I think if you follow the seed of your own personal spark and develop a company around it, there's no holds barred. If you just keep at it and you're persistent, that's what I truly believe, because that's the spark in your mind. It's like, this is what I'm called to do, to grow as much as I can grow, and I know other people are doing this. Same thing for any of you who are listening out there. If you have that seed, you're like, this is what I really love, and I know that other people probably love it too. Don't you think that's a good case in point of where you should start with the business, David?

David: I love it as a starting point, but you also need to figure out a business model. For a basic business model, you need to find something that's of value to other people. It's a nice thought that just because it's of value to me, it will be of great value to other people. But it's a business, so you still need to test your hypothesis. So that was my hypothesis: I'm not alone here. And through a website, through product launches, things like that, I was able to test it. And it became clear that there's a lot of people that are on a mission to improve their life in one way, shape or form. It's their health, their finances, relationships, spirituality, their lifestyle. I think we're all trying to continue to improve. So a system or resource that enables that to happen would have a wide audience.

Kathi: And it's such a broad topic too. Like you said, it could be mental, spiritual, physical, it could be whatever it is. So how do you choose to expand? Tell me about your first book. You've written several books. What prompted your first book, and what was its title? Let's talk about that just a little bit.

David: Sure. I'll step you through it, and it's buried back here. One of the books in back of me is probably my first book. The concept is Self-Improvement: The Top 101 Experts Who Help Us Improve Our Life. And the concept was very simple for me. I was launching this self-improvement business. I was finally going full-time. This is in 2003. I made a decision to go full-time with it. And I remember sitting in an office. I had just quit my job. I gave up my health insurance. I gave up all this stuff. I had a small office, and I was like, what am I doing here in the self-improvement industry? How am I going to really make a difference? And I said, I wish I had a book that described who all the top players were, who all the experts were, who I should be working with in the self-improvement industry. I couldn't find the book. And I said, same thing. I'm interested in this book. There must be other people who want to know who all the top experts are. So I started doing research and figured out who the most well-known top 101 were. Actually, it was the top 101 most searched-for experts in the self-improvement industry. Google was around at that point, so I was looking for who's most searched for. And I wrote a chapter on each of these 101 people, like a chapter on Tony Robbins and on Brian Tracy and on Jim Rohn and all the top experts. I put this together, and lo and behold, there was a lot of interest in it, because people wanted to know who they should be studying with, who they should be learning from. That was the driving force of my first book.

Kathi: That's quite interesting, because I thought you were going to say that you connected with them and interviewed them. But instead you researched them and wrote about them. Is that how I'm hearing it?

David: I researched them and wrote about them. But interestingly enough, one of the ways that I built my business is that after I wrote a chapter about each one of them, I found a contact at their companies and I sent them their chapter. And I said, can you review? I'm putting this book together. You're one of the top 101 experts in the world. Can you have someone on your team review the chapter and make suggestions for edits? So many of these people came back and gave me edits and suggestions, and I was able to start developing relationships with these top players who didn't know me from a hole in the wall. So it enabled me to start building my business based on relationships.

Kathi: And the highest relationships you can vouch for, right?

David: Absolutely.

Kathi: You're so smart.

David: So it worked out really well. We still do business with a number of these top players, and it helped grow my business, which was selfgrowth.com at the time. And one of the interesting things that I got out of this is the importance of relationships, especially in business. It's very hard to build a business in isolation. You can do all your promotion through Facebook ads or Google ads. There are ways to do it a little bit more isolated. But what I found in the self-improvement and personal development world is people like to support each other. It's a valuable way to succeed and to grow each other's business. And what I found was a very simple concept. There was a group of people that were growing their businesses by supporting each other, and one of the main ways they'd support each other is by recommending each other. You might think someone like a Deepak Chopra wouldn't be recommending a Tony Robbins. They might see each other as competitors. But in truth, everybody was working together and recommending each other. So we started to do the same, building relationships. We'd recommend people to our audience, and other people would recommend us. So it was a great way of building a referral or cross-promotion business, and that's the way we connected as well.

It's very hard to build a business in isolation.

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Kathi: Absolutely. Here we are. Here we are. So this leads us into the Joint Venture Directory. Let's talk about the genesis of that, because I know that everyone out there listening can benefit by checking out the Joint Venture Directory if you want to play with other people.

David: Thanks for the suggestion. I love it as well. So here's the very simple concept. We created something called the Joint Venture Directory. And I just want to quickly redefine joint ventures. A joint venture for me is any time two people or two companies decide to work together to support each other in a way that benefits both their businesses. Very, very simple. It could be something as simple as you, Kathi, having me on your podcast and me promoting your podcast through social media, where you're supporting me, giving me an opportunity to talk to your audience, and I'm promoting you and recommending your podcast. It could be something closer. It could be two people coming together and creating a joint product. It could be people sending an email out recommending each other, or sending referrals. But for us, joint ventures are a very simple partnership: two people agree to support each other. And I think a lot of people in business get this concept of referral marketing and people referring people to each other. I think inherently most business owners get that. But the question becomes, where do you find the people you want to work with, who are going to recommend you, and you can recommend them, and you're going to support each other? And what I found in this big world that we describe as self-improvement and personal development, people who are coaches or authors or speakers or healers, is that many of them were doing this, but they were typically doing it in a very isolated fashion. They might have five or six business friends they're doing it with, or maybe 10 or 12 business friends that are all recommending each other. And I had the vision for building something much bigger, where in addition to your small group of five to 10 people, you can develop a much larger group of people that are supporting each other. So we built something called the Joint Venture Directory, which is now a community of over 1,500 business owners that are all looking to partner in a way to grow their businesses. What we've done is brought together this community, and we help facilitate connections between these business owners. We do that through live networking that we do multiple times a month. We have a searchable directory that I like to describe as LinkedIn on steroids for the personal development and self-improvement industry. Anybody that has a product to improve your health, improve your finances, improve your relationships, improve your business, improve your lifestyle, improve your spirituality, anything like that, fits under this umbrella of our Joint Venture Directory. And that is a large focus of what I'm doing now: helping small businesses to connect, to grow their business, and get the word out on what they do.

A joint venture for me is any time two people or two companies decide to work together to support each other in a way that benefits both their businesses.

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Kathi: Yeah, it's fantastic. So I'm sure that it hasn't been smooth sailing all through your career. Talk to me about one of the times when you just felt like nothing's working, nothing's happening here. When did that happen as you were launching these products, and how did you get out of it?

David: Well, I have to tell you, I'm going to share one particular one that was devastating for me. Devastating. And I'll explain why. One of the things that's very popular in this industry is email marketing, and that's in all industries, where people get on a list and you get reminders or coupons or whatever. We're no different. As we were building selfgrowth.com, we started building an email list, and our most important list was our list of customers or potential customers. These were people who were paying for our services. So I had an email list at the time, and it was literally several thousand experts. A lot of them were people in the industry that were paying us to advertise or promote. So this was our bread and butter, people that were investing in us and spending money with us. And this goes back to very early 2000s, before I went full-time with it. I was almost ready to go full-time. I felt I was about six months away from going full-time. So I had this email list, and I'd periodically send an email out updating people on what's going on. There were thousands of people. And one particular day, I sent an email out to the whole group saying, oh, we have a new service that we're providing. I just want to give you an update on what it's about. And I got an email back from one of my subscribers that said, I'm no longer interested in this. Can you please take me off the list? Unfortunately, what happened, due to a technology glitch, is that email not only went to me, but went to everybody on the list.

Kathi: Oh no. He replied to all.

David: So now that email saying take me off the list went to thousands of people. All my valuable contacts got this email, which I could have lived with. But then someone responded to that email, and the response was, why are you telling me to take you off my list? I'm not on your list. You should be sending this directly to David. And that went to everybody.

Kathi: Right. Right. Right.

David: And then there was another email that said, are you guys stupid? Why are you sending these emails to everybody? And that went to everybody. And then the cursing started: you guys are some blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that went back and forth. About 10 to 15 emails went back and forth, and they were getting increasingly angry, going to my whole list. People were yelling, take me off your list. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. After maybe an hour and a half, we figured out how to stop it, and we got that taken care of. But the damage was done, and it extended me going full-time from six months to close to three years.

Kathi: Wow.

David: So it set my business back a solid two years.

Kathi: Holy smokes.

David: So that was probably one of the most painful moments, because it was just out of control. I didn't know what to do with it. Very, very painful. And after that happened, I was like, oh my god, I've been working on this part-time. Keep in mind, at that point I had already been working at it part-time for about five years. I was very close to going full-time, making a lot more money at it. And then this happened. And I remember thinking, oh my god, is it worth continuing with this? Is it worth continuing with this? And I tapped into something that I was unaware of. What I tapped into was a vision that I had when I first bought the website selfgrowth.com in 1995. I had a vision of where it was going to go and what impact it was going to have on people. And it was a clear picture in my head. We talk about visualization. I had a very clear picture in my head. And I had to go back into that, to tap back into the energy of the original vision that I had. That energy, that original vision, really took me through that period of rebuilding, because I now had to rebuild, get new people on the list. I had to rebuild the relationship with these people who just got this horrible series of emails. I can't even believe it. It was brutal. I'm not sure if I did it consciously or subconsciously, but I deleted all the bad emails. And at that time I was thinking, should I go on? But you need to have something to tap into, right? To keep you going in those times. And that vision, that initial vision, was still with me. And that tapped in, and I said, you know what? I brushed myself off. All right, I'll deal with it. It's slowing me down. It's going to hurt money for a little bit. I still had my full-time job. And I got back on the horse, and I kept riding until I did whatever I needed to do to go full-time with it. And I've been full-time now for 22 years, since 2003, and I haven't looked back.

You need to have something to tap into to keep you going in those times.

Kathi: Yeah. So what did you do? Did you write an email to everyone saying that this was a disaster out of your control?

David: Well, first, a lot of people I had to take off the list. A lot of my customers and a lot of people I took off the list, so there was nothing I could do about them. The ones who were screaming back and forth at each other, there was nothing I could do about those folks who wanted to get off the list. And a lot of people just said, take me off the list. Obviously you don't have this down. You don't have the tech down. And over a period of time, we rebuilt and got new people on the list, and we got through it, and the revenue came back. But it was a very painful lesson. Very. And unfortunately, the tech wasn't there at the time, but now the technology has gotten a little better.

Kathi: Oh, yeah. Technology is rocking right now. And I love what you said about how you had to come back to your vision, because I find that when I work with clients, they start with their passion and they start with their motivation, and they have the vision of what it's going to look like. And then what generally happens, actually, in my sphere now with the clients that I'm working with, is they get in, they get just unbelievably enmeshed in the crap of tech, and then they lose their passion. And they're like, I'm incompetent. I don't know how to do this. And they spend all their time being busy trying to clean up stuff that they shouldn't even touch. And then their inspiration just falls off, and when things happen, they don't have the motivation to continue forward or, like you said, dust yourself off and move forward. So I think that's a really valuable lesson. Although, boy, that's painful.

David: Very much painful. That was painful. I have a few of those.

Kathi: But that was a good story to start with for today. That's a very good story to tell. And it's a good lesson for all of us, because all of this stuff hits us. Things hit us all the time. And it's a matter of how you're going to reset and go back to that inspiration point where you're very excited about what you do. And that's really why I have this podcast, because we all have this stuff going on, and there is light at the end of the tunnel. We all have setbacks, every single one of us. And the question is, how do we jump back into it? So I absolutely love that story. That's fantastic. Now, you started at HP. You were in marketing, is that what you said?

David: Primarily sales at the time, but then I had different positions in sales and marketing, and that was my focus for a number of years. So I was in corporate America for a long time. I did try another business that didn't take off, but mostly corporate stuff, selling to big companies. But the internet, as we know, has been a game changer for everybody and everywhere.

Kathi: Oh, big time. Big time. And HP was one of my clients too, and I love them. But I don't want to be in a corporate world all the time, especially when you have all the badges and you have to check in with security and all that just to get through the door to do your work.

David: Absolutely.

Kathi: Okay. So you went to college, went corporate, said I need to expand. You started expanding, you started SelfGrowth. If you had to look back at your 18-year-old self as you're going into college and thinking about your life, what advice would you give him? Little David?

David: Well, the advice that I'd give, if I had the knowledge I have now: I remember back in the day a friend of mine was begging me to buy Microsoft, before it was really a company that anybody had heard about. He begged me to buy Microsoft. So I'd say, when your friend tells you to buy Microsoft, buy Microsoft.

Kathi: I'm with you on that. My husband used to work for Tech Data, and he was employee number 48 or something. What a boon to keep that stock, I'm sure.

David: Yeah. And I would have said buy that and hold that for a while. So that would have been my message. Buy that stock and hold that stock for a while.

Kathi: Hold that stock. Absolutely. That's great. What's the most memorable part of your career so far as an entrepreneur?

David: There was one point for me that was a game changer, and it was the launch of my first book, Self-Improvement: The Top 101 Experts. The reason it was a game changer is it showed me what was possible. There was this idea at the time that some people were doing for a book launch, where they'd get a handful of people and pick one day to promote their book. It was typically done through Amazon.com. I decided back in the day, and this goes back to 2003, literally a long time ago, that I was going to sell the book myself off my website as a PDF. So it wasn't going to go through Amazon, and I was going to get other people to help me promote it. We were selling the book for $27 as a PDF.

Kathi: It was physical?

David: It was just a PDF. No physical book.

Kathi: Wow. $27.

David: And if you bought it, you got some downloads, some bonuses, some audio recordings, things like that. So $27. And I'd gotten a number of people that I know, that I'll call partners now, to promote it and recommend it on that same day. And in a 24-hour period, with the help of some friends, we were able to sell over 4,000 copies of this book, $100,000 of ebooks in 24 hours, without Amazon.com.

Kathi: Without Amazon.

David: We sold $100,000 through something called ClickBank. $100,000 worth of ebooks in one day for $27.

Kathi: And back then that was a lot. That would be like a $54 PDF download at this point.

David: Yeah. So that was a lot. Ebooks were typically $9.95, so that was a fair amount to ask for an ebook at the time. And I remember I had it set up where I'd get an email every time we got a sale. So imagine getting 4,000 emails in 24 hours. They were coming in at 150 emails an hour. So every minute, every 30 seconds, you made a sale, you made a sale, you made a sale. They just kept coming in, and I was overwhelmed by the power and success of this. It was just amazing. And it opened up the world to the concept and value of partners, working with partners and joint ventures. And I do have a free gift for folks that I want to offer before I go. So it opened up that idea, and it also demonstrated to me the interest in self-improvement and personal development. So it opened up partners, demonstrated the interest in self-improvement and personal development, and it opened up the idea that there's money to be made in this industry.

Kathi: Absolutely. That's amazing. Even without Amazon, good job. So that was the spark for the JV Directory, right?

David: That was one of the initial sparks.

Kathi: Love that. Love that. What a great story. I love that story. That's fantastic, because everybody was doing the Amazon thing. Everybody does the Amazon bestseller. You get on the bandwagon. I did it back in the day for my first book, same thing. Only you were much more calculated about it. I love it. And you already had your partners.

David: Yes. Yep.

Kathi: That's fantastic. Were the majority of your partners people that were in the book?

David: Some of them were people in the book, some of them were friends, plus we had our own list. And I'd say the biggest one, which was a bit of a coup for us, was Jim Rohn, who was known at the time for basically teaching Tony Robbins the ropes. He promoted for us, and that was a big boon. And it worked out really well for everybody involved.

Kathi: Love it. Love it. Okay. So how did you celebrate your success? I'm asking everybody this question because I think that none of us pause long enough to celebrate successes. What did you do to celebrate?

David: I probably was on a high for a day, if that much. And after that, it was like, there's so much opportunity over here. I got down and I refocused. That's how I celebrated. Because what's interesting is there's a tendency, when you do really well or really poorly, to step away. When you do really well, you're tempted to go celebrate, to overcelebrate. Or when you do really poorly, you're tempted to get overly depressed. And regardless of whether it's a success or a fail, for me it's a trigger to stay focused and to refocus.

Regardless of whether it's a success or a fail, for me it's a trigger to stay focused and to refocus.

Kathi: Interesting. Interesting. I asked that because back when I launched my first book, it was self-published and whatnot, I didn't take a minute to celebrate. I didn't pause. I just went right into, oh, now I've got to do this, I've got to do that. So I'm teaching myself, and that's why I'm asking all my guests: how do you celebrate? Do you pause? What do you do? Because I do think that it's important to acknowledge. It sounds like you did do the acknowledgement, acknowledged that it's a win, and then moved forward. So I know we're coming to the end of this. Let's talk about the free offer that you have for the readers and listeners and watchers who are checking out this podcast. What do you have?

David: Happy to. So one of the things I've mentioned a couple of times is joint ventures. And I gave a couple of ideas on how we do joint ventures and partnerships, but there are a lot of different ways to do that. We came up with 21 different ways to do joint ventures and partnerships. And the gift that I'd like to offer is a mini book that we wrote, a special report on 21 ways to use joint ventures to grow your business. So we're going to give everybody 21 ways to use joint ventures. And the website to go to is literally spelled out: jointventuredirectory.com. Very, very simple. Just go to jointventuredirectory.com and sign up. You get 21 effective ways to use joint ventures to grow your business.

Kathi: That's fantastic. And I know if you implement even two or three of them, your business is going to grow. So that's a great gift. And for those of you who are reading or watching, the link will also be below in the show notes, so you can just click and do it. But if you're listening and you're walking down the road shuffling your feet while you're listening to this podcast, it's jointventuredirectory.com. So, David, it's been a pleasure. I really appreciate having you on. I love the stories that you've told, and I'm just happy that you're here in the world helping everyone who's on the road to growing, because we all are growing and expanding. It's a matter of us doing it with intention.

David: Absolutely. Thank you for having me here, and I wish you and all your listeners great success in everything you do.

Kathi: Perfect. Thank you, David. It's been a pleasure. Until next time, you guys, make sure to download, make sure to like this podcast, make sure to give a comment. Please give us some love here at Organized and Energized! The Podcast. I very much appreciate that. And until next week, I'll see you all then. Thanks, David.

David: You're welcome.