Charles Byrd:
Well, A.J., thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

A.J. Lawrence:
I’ve been looking forward to this because this is a subject that makes so much logical sense, especially if you are building a business that you are working with multiple people online, you’re talking to an audience, you’re doing all of the stuff that sort of we’re doing right here, but 99% of the time it feels like it just doesn’t do anything. At least my experience. And when I went through your videos and stuff, what I was most impressed was just the detailed structure you put into how to do this. And it makes logical sense on the other side, now that I’ve seen it. Of course it should be detailed and have a lot of thought to it but I know in general, it’s not something that really is approached so strategically. Before we dive in, can you maybe share where you are as an entrepreneur these days?

Charles Byrd:
Like as far as team size and all of that?

A.J. Lawrence:
No, just where are you as an entrepreneur? You can always share your team size and what you’re doing, but I’m more curious like you were working, you’ve been a couple of companies, you’ve built this company now, how does it feel as an entrepreneur for you and where you’re going?

Charles Byrd:
Oh, it feels fantastic. I think what would help is to provide the juxtaposition of where I’ve come from to here, which I worked in the Silicon Valley for 15 years, was a director at a billion dollar software company, left to get a taste of the entrepreneurial freedom I read about in books. Started with a low ticket productivity course and being new to the online space, didn’t yet have a list or connection, so started going to a lot of events and connecting with people online and quickly found my new peer group of entrepreneurs. Already had my ideal clients in their communities, so I started setting up presentations to other people’s audiences, delivering a high value training and offering the deeper dive course and started growing the list quickly, making sales, making a positive impact. So I thought, since this is working, what if I take my IT and systems background to simplify and systematize the entire joint venture process, which I did. And eventually people wondered how I book two to six joint venture promotions per week for my offers to other people’s communities. And I was in Aspen and my phone’s blowing up with texts and messenger messages and people knocking on the room door going, how do you line up so many of these deals? So I decided to put together my first high ticket event called Pure JV, to help businesses scale with partnerships. And that’s the market I’ve been serving ever since.

It’s a framework that walks folks through creating their unique joint venture strategy for their product and market, helps them identify their most profitable partners, shows them how to connect to those partners through warm channels, how to guide the conversations to land the deals frequently on the first call, operationally how to execute those deals along with turning each one into two or three more. And that’s built up over these eight years. Ten of my clients have added 1.25 to 6 million in the first year. I had four clients on stage with Tony Robbins in the last two months, one who Dr. Dan Pompa, just got booked on Joe Rogan through his PR company, showing him how to parlay that into warm intros to Lex Friedman and Andrew Huberman. And just hung up with my client, Dr. Cialdini and his team lining up, growing the Chaldini Institute. So how does it feel and where am I at in the journey is, it’s like when your whole purpose is empowering other people to achieve their goals and create a bigger impact for what they’re doing, both who they’re serving and in their own lives and their teams and building long term relationships.

It’s highly satisfying to help people do that. And you build so much goodwill and rapport from building long term relationships. You basically have an army of advocates all around. And so, that feels very good. And as businesses grow, the needs grow with it. And there’s these inflection points on the way. I’m sure we’ll chat more about that, but I’m at one of those right now from the growth and it’s a constant evolution and it keeps life fun and exciting and you just keep iterating and improving and going into bigger and bigger arenas.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, so let’s talk about this inflection point. What is changing from sort of what’s gotten you here to what’s going on now? What are you seeing that you have to change what’s happening?

Charles Byrd:
Sure. So actually, it’s been a topic at probably the last three masterminds I’ve been to over the last couple of weeks where we’re in the hot seats and stuff. So basically the business has doubled for the last three years and we’re basically hitting the capacity of the model with me as a keystone. Like I am a main operator of getting results. I have a wonderful team around me, but without me starting to delegate more of what I’m doing, key roles, key functions, I can’t do more than I’m doing. So this is where I start empowering my team. One of the folks who’s been with us like four years, bumping him up to take some of the high ticket sales calls. I’m still a key part of the fulfillment process for my VIP clients, we’ll transition more of that to my team because they’re a highly capable team.

And so, looking for even part of the fulfillment that we can create videos and interactive things that take them further, taking like a two hour call down to a 30 minutes call because we just operate in a more refined way, which is a continuous process. We already do, and how can we take that a lot further? Not to mention, coming up at this point in the business, we focused on really nailing a high ticket front end offer and filling it consistently, which happens like clockwork. Landed two clients in the last two days, another Friday. It’s a machine. That said, adding a high ticket back end. We’re going to be launching a mastermind this year, which we’ve not had a high ticket back end. So looking at the moves to make for where you are while always keeping focused on what’s actually getting you the results and not chasing all the rabbits around, just catch the one.

A.J. Lawrence:
My team with the last agency I sold near the end, they used to go keep A.J. away from squirrels. That was rabbits, squirrels, bright shiny objects. That is once you get to a level. But let’s kind of talk about this because it’s one thing to say, okay, to start pulling yourself away as the main face, still be a value add, still be the draw that VIP kind of come work with Charles directly. But how are you going about moving theme? Because what happens is yes, you’ve trained your team this, but you’re now kind of in a point where you’re not the guaranteer of quality your team is sort of taking on. How are you going about, are you utilizing something like eos? Is it coaching? What are some of the methods you’re kind of coming to develop this transition?

Charles Byrd:
Sure. So I’ll give just a few different examples. So number one, the person that’s being ramped up for selling our high ticket offer. Not only has he been a coach in our program for four plus years, he’s done some of the lower ticket coaching. And my business partner Bill Baren is personally coaching him on the sales process. So it’s being specifically trained. He does sales for another client of mine with similar priced offers and is doing quite well. So it’s ramping him up on something that’s already a strength and then making sure it’s to the standards or beyond [of] what I’m providing. And then on a lot of the other work, a new hire to us from, probably approaching two months ago.

One of the a players on our team used to work for an agency that trained her how to be a top notch JV manager. They managed Brian Tracy, Jack Canfield, some larger industry names, and she’s been a joy to work with for many years. And one of the co-founders of the agency that hired her, I got an introduction, jumped on a call and she’s like, oh, did you know I hired and trained Leslie at the previous company? And I’m like, no, go on.

It turns out she’d sold her position in the company after founding an agency and running it for 10 years. So I’m hiring people that actually have more experience than I at running larger organizations. So having her help with operations and SOPs and some of the JV work. Plus, in fact, she and I were just to traffic and conversion together, and it’s interesting having “new hire” who knows the players as well and knows exactly what she’s doing. So it’s looking to hire, up as it were in experience, and just bringing in really strong people. Conversely, you can create super dialed SOPs and then bring in less evolved people that just follow the process and get great results too.

A.J. Lawrence:
That is kind of fun of transitioning into more structure. Because it does seem like doing those things requires a little more cross t’s dotted i’s. Just more thought process of how to do that. What I would love to kind of talk about is a little bit like what are some of the, maybe some of them more different, but who are some of the types of people who most benefit from your style of JV but then also just helping maybe some of the audience a little outside? Are there categories or areas where you didn’t think and then someone was able to utilize it who generally tends to do well with this style of joint venture planning?

Charles Byrd:
So I’ll start with saying a person who’s not transactional by nature. Because sometimes joint ventures people get the impression it can be transactional, and in certain circles it is. I personally don’t like that. And I guide my clients and I operate out of building long term deep relationships where you’re connecting with folks and supporting each other over time. And of course in life there’s always a value exchange and it’s great to be conscious of that, though it shouldn’t be transactional. Like, I will only do this if you do that. That gets very annoying. So people that really do value relationships and understand that the only thing in life that actually matters are relationships. I mean, once you’re a couple rungs up Maslow’s hierarchy there, everything else that is relevant are relationships.

Our family, our significant others, the people we work with, our clients. When you’re surrounded by high quality people that you care about and they care about you, life is a very different experience than those who do not. So it’s certainly worth investing time and effort in that. And the fact is, that comes back in spades. Number two, when I describe an ideal client, and it doesn’t mean everyone has to fit in this exactly, but those who are million plus, usually well over that, they’re known for what they do. Their offers are already converting, can help those people extraordinarily quickly through this process. I’ll give an example of that.I just got off a sales call today with a company that are fantastic at what they do, but they want to retool a brand new offer just for joint venturing with. And so we can help folks like that too, although we’re not typically seeking out people trying to create a brand new offer. In any case, as an example, one of my clients, Todd Hartley, Tony Robbins hired him to train all of his sales teams how to leverage video in their sales process.

And that worked so well that now Tony has him on stage for all the business mastery events. In fact, he was just on stage a day or two ago with Tony and he wanted to take that offer to other people’s audiences beyond his own and Tony’s. So he was referred over. He wanted to compress my five-week engagement into four weeks, focused in on like, let’s get the meetings booked and follow the process. Within the four week engagement, he landed six joint ventures. Because we helped him create the strategy, identify ideal partners, showed him how to land those partners, how to execute the JVs, he landed six of them. The first one brought in 125k, the next one brought in 125k.

He’s added an average of 100,000 a month for the last ten months. He sent me a text over the new year saying, you had the most impact on my business than anyone else. Thank you so much. So someone like that, it’s very easy to serve and support and there’s a bunch of other stories like that, or there’s people that they’re transitioning from one thing into the next and they want to get a tight strategy and offer and lead source for it.

A.J. Lawrence:
What are some more unique, other than sort of a course or that type of community base, what are some people who have been able, just out of curiosity, a little more different that have been able to utilize something like this?

Charles Byrd:
Well, my core market and the one I really came up in is coaches, consultants, course builders, that online leaning space. But I’ve ended up with big accounting companies and financial planning companies and lots of doctors and folks in the healthcare space. One of my clients, Dr. Isaac Jones, he has a 50K mastermind group helping doctors take elements of their practice online. In the first year, helped him add 1.25 million. My client, Regan Archibald, he’s a world renowned peptides expert. So I taught him to partner with high end entrepreneur masterminds who comes in, runs blood work on the folks, does a talk explaining what those markers mean and then has high ticket offers to help resolve issues and so forth.

So he’s added over a million in the first year as well. So it’s just a framework to get your product service or messaging in front of other people’s audiences systematically, along with teeing up referrals systematically as well.

A.J. Lawrence:
No, that’s really interesting because I just interviewed someone who has a franchise of a peptide type thing where it is very similar. His franchisees’ avatar would fit very much into going and talking to these types of events. Entrepreneurs who are looking to diversify, add additional revenue streams, et cetera. Okay, so maybe a question in looking at something like this, one of the things when an entrepreneur starts thinking maybe there is something here, maybe there’s some gold in those hills over there, what should they start thinking about to get ready before they even start talking to you? How should they think about, is this something for me before you then start defining how to go about either you or someone else to help them in this process?

Charles Byrd:
So I think people hear this kind of idea and they’ve probably seen it happening around them. But when people don’t have a framework for how the deals are structured, how you would start the conversation, how you would identify who would be an ideal partner, I think with anything in life, if we don’t know the next step or it starts getting fuzzy after step two or three, we just go do the thing we know how to do because we don’t want to go reinvent the wheel. And so, simply being guided on who is already serving your ideal clients, whose types of offers or communities is full of your ideal clients, who’s systematically creating your ideal clients. So I’ll give you a brief example of one of my clients, Catherine Dunn, who teaches people how to create and launch online programs. Or you could think of someone helping people write their first book or something like that. What’s the problem being created? Once they have their new shiny course or their new book, they need to get it in front of an audience. Otherwise all that works kind of pointless.

So if you look at the people helping folks write books or create courses, they are producing my ideal client all day like it’s a factory. So think about who’s doing that for you as an example, or you look at adjacent markets. I met a woman at traffic conversion that helps folks get their TEDx talk booked and shows them how to apply, how to get accepted, how to deliver the talk, how to get 50,000 views.

A.J. Lawrence:
Very Straightforward. Yeah.

Charles Byrd:
So who is very adjacent to that? That would be people getting a book written, now they want to talk, or vice versa. Maybe they have the talk, then they want the book, and then they figure out the talk and the book are kind of pointless unless you have a product off the back. So then you need to create a consulting offer or program or course. So if you look at the customer journey, what are people going to need on the way to get to where they’re going? And then you just start connecting the dots around lining up joint venture partnerships. So it’s really a way of rewiring how you see the world. And once you do, it just clicks. You’re like, oh, this goes with that, that goes with this.

And that makes it a lot easier to start identifying who those ideal partners are. And then you’re guided on exactly how to connect with those partners through warm channels. It’s a framework for executing this whole process.

A.J. Lawrence:
And it makes so much logical sense because there are so many businesses, their focus is to consistently find new ways to service their existing market. Because as everyone knows, it’s a 10th of a cost to cross-sell or upsell someone compared to getting a new client. Yet most businesses are so mono-focused or very limited offering. If you already have that relationship, finding ways from the receiving side, it’s like we do this, but our audience loves us. How can we find someone who can offer them something and we can make a little bit off of that from their efforts by partnering. I mean, it is a great thing without having to consistently finding a way to do that, without having to constantly expand your offer. And why I usually do suggest you should find ways to expand your offer doesn’t fit for everyone. Some people really are focused just on whatever that offer is. So it’s a great way of finding partner, not just to pitch, but then to find people to come on and work with your audience at the same time.

Charles Byrd:
And it’s a value add. So if you look at all these entrepreneur kind of groups or programs or masterminds, one of my clients, Jackson Millan, has a program teaching entrepreneurs how to manage their money to retain more personal wealth for investing and really creating the kind of life that you would like from the business. And so he at the time had like an 11k offer. He was running Facebook ads that weren’t working particularly well and started working a lot worse when Facebook shut down his account. You want to be very wary of only getting your leads from one source like that. You want to diversify. Once his Facebook account was shut down, he was referred over. He’s a quick start personality wise so hired me immediately, did everything I told him, guided him to do.

He lined up 70 joint ventures in two months. These are presentations to other people’s groups. I taught him how to create embedded partnerships. This means, let’s say, these entrepreneur groups or masterminds, he comes into them as the expert on what to do with your money that you’re making in the business. Not like how to invest it, but how to divvy it up. So you’re actually getting the result from the business that the reason you’re working so hard. And he set up at least 15 embedded partnerships. It enabled him to more than triple the business.

He went from 1.8 million to 6 million in the first year, all through partnerships. All the while touring Australia with his wife and two dogs in a 4×4 campervan before buying a farm in the jungle with a bunch of kooky animals.

A.J. Lawrence:
As one does.

Charles Byrd:
As one does. Lovely guy. And just see, if you look at an offer like that, he’s complementing and serving those entrepreneur communities. So the hosts are happy to have them. They’re not talking about how to manage money. They don’t probably even know themselves. So why not bring in the expert that complements what they’re doing.

I was just at the Scalable founders board mastermind with Roland and Ryan yesterday. They’re teaching people to build businesses that grow over time. And then you have someone like Jackson come in where their message complements and lifts and takes those entrepreneurs further. You’re looking for those kind of adjacencies.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, let’s talk a little bit about sort of the structure. Because like I said, I think while there’s opportunity and just by what you said, all of a sudden, little sparks over. Ideas are one thing, execution is everything. So how do you take this from, oh, this is something that could work to actually, as you said, consistently not just book 70 but to make 70 types of opportunities work, or at least the majority, hopefully.

Charles Byrd:
So for one, having a framework, the reason like you even mentioned yourself, you’ve put a little time and effort into this topic over time, and it wasn’t very fruitful. Because when you don’t have a specific strategy and framework and know how to execute that strategy, it would be like me saying, I’m going to go learn Facebook ads. Now, I know over time I could, but me logging in there, I can post an ad, it is not going to work. I have no idea how to make a Facebook ad work. So it’d be like any of us picking something we don’t know anything about, and then, yes, over a long period of time, you can figure it out or you can just have an expert show you exactly how to do it and get that machine up and going very expeditiously, like within five weeks, landing promotions every single week like clockwork. So I think, for one, if the idea is intriguing, you’d likely want to accelerate that. But the way you start thinking about it again, if it’s something you’d like to do, then you start looking for who the adjacent ideal type of partners are, and then you’re like, where are those folks spending time? Are they in the other high ticket mastermind groups? It’s one of the reasons I’m in so many groups is because they’re full of ideal partners, clients and stages and referral partners.

And then when you have a framework to leverage those communities along with providing a ton of value to those communities, then in reality it’s actually easy. I’ll give you an example. One of my clients, Mark Podolsky, who’s in the Genius Network, he has an offer teaching people how to buy raw land and then sell that for more. And he and I met at Genius. We were talking, and I think his program was around 6k or something. I’m like, are you getting this in front of other people’s audiences? And by the way, he has a podcast as well and he’s had over 1000 guests. He landed one JV from 1000 guests. And I’m like, do you have a framework for guiding those conversations straight into joint ventures? He’s like, I do not.

So he hired me, and he shot a testimonial the other day. He said, I alluded to the fact he’d probably add a million in the first year, and he didn’t believe me, but he hired me anyway. And showing him how to leverage the podcast to systematically book partners, how to walk into the Genius Network and identify land partners. I helped him add 2 million within about the first six months. So when you have a framework, he had everything he needed. He had the program, the authority, the podcast. He just didn’t know how to use it in a way that would consistently deliver results around partnerships. So it’s like having the ingredient but not the recipe.

It makes a big difference.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay. You’re transitioning to that next stage of building a business where it’s like you are not the only part of the business. There is more. You’re creating more structure. That’s pretty significant. Most businesses don’t even get close to that. You’re having success by all these partnerships. You’re growing, you’re having this.

How do you go about differentiating between the business success and your own success as an entrepreneur? And then I would love to know, what does that mean as a person, to have success as an entrepreneur for you?

Charles Byrd:
So one thing, it’s kind of been baked into my DNA, and probably because I had loving parents. But you see all these folks?

A.J. Lawrence:
Those are helpful. Those are helpful.

Charles Byrd:
You see all these folks? I’ll point to Genius Network, but you could pick any high end mastermind. These people that have run off and made millions of dollars, and then they figure out, my family won’t talk to me, I’m on my third wife. Like they’ve devoted everything to business success and honestly just failed at life. I don’t care if you have a billion dollars in the bank, if you don’t have friends and no one, it’s pointless. So part of my business success relates to creating a business that empowers me to have a wonderful family life and personal life. Like I just flew in from a mastermind last night. I’m here today. And then I fly to Las Vegas, which my family just flew there this morning because my 13 year old’s in a cheerleading competition. It’s the national one, the biggest one at the end of the whole season, so I’m flying in for that.

And then I had them change their flights so we could add a day and a half to just run around Vegas as a family doing fun stuff. And it’s making time to show up to their events. On Saturday, as we were talking about before we were rolling, I flew in from an event and the next morning took my daughter snowboarding. Or at least we tried till we drove two and a half hours and hit a blizzard. But the point is, it’s prioritizing family first and building the business around it along with your own health. And in reality, there’s an ebb and flow to everything in life. But by prioritizing your health, working out, I do so in the morning by prioritizing devoted family time, which we usually get by taking the kids out to dinner in Napa or like somewhere where we’re actually able to bond and connect or go on these trips. Point being, I use the business to serve having a full life with my family.

And if you’re just working yourself to death, if you’re sacrificing relationships for perceived growth or real growth in the business, and again, there’s seasons for things. I’m not pretending everything’s always dialed in like that. But if it is 95% of the time, then you’re winning and doing it right. In my perspective, that’s at least how I have engineered my business. And a gentleman I met at traffic and conversion who we really clicked with, he just made a post about how he’s grown this SEO company over 15 or more years and he’s never missed one of his kids games or practices. I certainly can’t say that I show up at specific ones but if you engineer your life and certainly the business around your bigger goals, you’re certainly going to end up with a more gratifying, beautiful life. And let’s say the companies, I’m making numbers up, but hits 15 million instead of 28. But one you’re happy and one you’re fried and burnt out. What’s the point?

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, at a certain point as an entrepreneur, your needs are met. So it’s like, what do you do then? And serving your family, I love that phrase because there’s a lot of talk in the industry, of course, of service leaders, serving your team. But serving your family, that’s a great way to look at it and a great framework to follow as you go forward.

Charles Byrd:
I have another really good friend and client, Joe Stolte. He’s built and sold like five companies. He’s running one right now called Daily.ai. He’s a co-founder with Peter Diamandis and Eben Pagan. He doesn’t work past five. His family’s always the top priority. He brings his kids to all his events, speaking masterminds. It’s a way of living and being and I highly gravitate toward that and practice it and encourage it.

A.J. Lawrence:
I think there’s a lot for the audience to take away. I mean, one hopefully, most importantly, serving your family and sort of this idea of building your entrepreneurial life around what is possible to further that opportunity to be there but in the more direct way. Looking at utilizing JVs to extend and to increase your reach and the types of opportunities you can create from that I think is really fascinating. How can the audience learn more about you? Learn more about Pure JV?

Charles Byrd:
So for one, you can pop over to charlesbyrd.com. We did set up a special link, I’m sure you’ll have it in the show notes. But it’s my.purejv.com/beyond-8-figures. Rolls off the tongue.

A.J. Lawrence:
I know, my bad.

Charles Byrd:
We’ll put the link there, but you can check out that. We’ve got a download for you on 10 things to keep in mind around joint ventures to have successful ones. You definitely want to check that out. And you can certainly check out charlesbyrd.com. There’s a button on there if you’d like to book a call with me or my team. And I’ll just point out, no matter what your current lead source, it’s important to look at diversifying. So if someone’s heavily in on paying for traffic, I’ve had clients like Women’s REIN, a $42 million real estate training company that’s driven through paid ads.

And if anything goes wrong with the ad account or anything like that, the whole empire crumbles. So by diversifying your leads, each new partnership, each new stage, each new presentation or referral partnership are independent lead sources. So they add to your overall leads. Plus, warm traffic converts two to three times higher than paid traffic to begin with. For high tech things up to like 20 times higher. So it simply complements your other lead sources, or it can, of course, be your sole lead source. And then really creating strong referral systems. I get 12 to 20 referrals per week to million dollar plus businesses, as do my clients, following the framework.

And those don’t just lead to direct client acquisition, they lead to stages, referral partnerships, speaking opportunities. So we all have networks, and by nurturing those and understanding how to guide them into bigger winning outcomes, the sky’s the limit.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, you and your team were very generous. You sent over, and we’ll have all these links in the show, notes, our socials and in the newsletter when this episode comes out. But having gone through it, you have your actual talk at Genius you shared with us, shared with the audience, and then also a blueprint of how to look at it to get people started on how to think. We’ll have the links so you can get a feel of what Charles is doing, how he talks about it, where the audience is getting out of it. It’s kind of fun. You do one of those things, always a grunt, but they’re fun.

Get up, stretch, do these things. But other than that, it is a lot of things to learn from what Charles does with his clients. And then also just the blueprint is great because it is so well thought out. It is very much, you’ll see if you’re familiar with building out other channels. The thought Charles has put in, Charles and his team, is very logical and very strategic. So go take a look at it. And Charles, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

I really appreciate it.

Charles Byrd:
Well, A.J., I enjoyed the conversation and thanks so much for having me.

A.J. Lawrence:
No, and I think we’re going to be talking more because I have a bunch of questions anyway on this show. So, guys, if we start doing JVs you know who to thank. But everyone, look, today, thank you so much for listening. Go check out Charles’ video on the show notes and stuff or just on the email when we send it out because it really does give you a good perspective on another way of reaching out to potential clients that can help you expand your reach, and as Charles said, maybe diversify your sources. Look, it is really pretty cool, and it’s, I think, something well worth thinking about. All right, everyone, thank you again for listening, and I’ll talk with you soon. Bye-bye everyone.