Strategy 6 of 97 · Week 1 of the calendar
Joint ventures, strategic alliances, endorsements. All it takes is one new asset.
The TL;DR
Brian's overview
Most businesses grow using only what they already own — their own people, their own products, their own reach. That base is finite, and when it runs out of room the usual answer is to spend more on the same channels.
Power Partnering is the alternative. You gain the use of another company's people, products, research, credibility, facilities and distribution without buying any of it, and you pay only in proportion to the revenue it produces. That is why it converts a cost you could not afford into an income stream.
It is not a fringe tactic. Around two thousand of the largest corporations now take up to twenty per cent of revenue and forty per cent of profits from partnerships. The mechanism underneath all of it is the same: your problem is very often somebody else's unrecognised solution.
The common mistake
Leading with what you want. An approach that opens with your need reads as a favour request and gets declined politely.
The ones that close open with what you can solve for them — idle capacity, an unmonetised list, a product with no route to a market you already reach. Your gap multiplied by their surplus is the deal; either half alone is just an ask.
The first move · five minutes
Write down three companies that already sell to the exact buyer you want and do not compete with you. For each, name the asset they are sitting on and not fully monetising — a list, a shift, a shelf, a sales force, a relationship. Approach the one whose idle asset is largest with what it would earn them.
The deck · nine slides, already built
Carries its own figures — 95% of a Microsoft division's $32bn through partners, Shopify's ecosystem at $6.9bn, SAP buying Qualtrics at $8bn and taking it public at $21bn. Nothing to build here.
Case studies by vertical
This table exists to pass one test: no member can say that does not apply to my industry.
| Vertical | Story | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Retail | Costco & Kirkland | Premium manufacturers make to Costco's standards — it borrows the product engine and keeps the customer relationship |
| Retail | Target collaborations | Borrowing prestige rather than building it; the Missoni launch crashed the site |
| B2B | The safety-training company | Stopped cold calling; partnered with a national insurer already tied to tens of thousands of the exact buyer |
| B2B | Intel Inside | Co-funding partners' advertising to make an invisible component a purchase criterion |
| Manufacturing | The young motorcycle maker | Capital-starved; used a larger non-competitor's idle factory shift and sales force |
| Manufacturing | Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi | Shared platforms, purchasing and R&D without merging — €5.7bn annualised synergies |
| Software | Salesforce | AppExchange plus a consulting ecosystem; thousands of firms invested in its growth |
| Software | Microsoft | Roughly 95% of commercial revenue flows through partners |
| Platform | Amazon · Apple · Shopify | Supply the shelf, the traffic and the trust; partners supply the inventory |
| Media | Disney & ABC | Lacking capital for Disneyland, Disney let ABC finance and guarantee the loans for a weekly show |
| Media | Newsletter publishers | Static subscription income — until someone saw a list of prosperous investors was worth more as an endorsement channel |
| Consumer goods | Starbucks & Nestlé | Nestlé paid $7.15bn for perpetual rights to sell Starbucks coffee outside stores |
| Healthcare | The physical-therapy clinic | One owner: a surgeon referral moat plus a borrowed fitness-membership channel |
| Small business | The athletic clothing maker | Jay's own — a capped maker sold through complementary companies' trusted customer bases |
What this section solves
Written before they know the name of the problem. The same six lines feed the diagnostic's prescription and the campaign's hook, so the language a stranger recognises is authored once.
The challenge · due Friday
Three companies that already sell to your buyer and do not compete with you. For each, the asset they are sitting on and not fully using. Then one approach — opening with what it earns them, never with what you need.
The one thing this section is missing
Twelve Beyond Exponential recordings are loaded and addressable, each with its Drive file id. None has a transcript, so no honest claim can be made about which minutes cover this strategy.
Only two of the twelve carry title-level evidence — the Three Ways opening session and the Perry Marshall quadrants — and neither is this strategy. The corpus can already answer which stories, which slides, which chapters for all 97. It cannot answer which video, which minutes for any of them. Transcription is the unlock.
The 97-week calendar
A subscriber has to get a result before they are asked for anything. So the first quarter is entirely money already on the table, and the abstract material sits at the far end — where an audience that has banked three wins will tolerate it.