Latest / The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson / How to License and Sell Your Content with Mitch Axelrod

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How to License and Sell Your Content with Mitch Axelrod · The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson

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  Three, two, one, zero.
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  Ignition.
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  Lift off.
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  Ending small business failure.
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  Welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast with the number one small business expert, Melinda
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  Emerson.
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  Melinda's goal is to end small business failure, and she'll give you the information
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  you need to succeed and live the life you dream of.
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  Now here's your host, the small biz chat lady herself, Melinda Emerson.
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  Have you subscribed to the small biz chat podcast?
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  Well, it's time.
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  Every Wednesday, we offer listeners bite sized actionable tips to start and grow a successful
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  small business.
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  In just twenty minutes or so a week, you can get a ton of insight and resources to propel
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  your business forward.
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  Be sure to subscribe to the Small Bitch Chat podcast today.
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  Now it's time for me to introduce my very first guest, mister Mitch Axelrod.
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  Mitch, welcome to the Small Bitch Chat podcast.
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  It's great to be with you, Melinda.
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  All right, let me formally introduce you before we jump in.
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  Mr.
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  Mitch Axelrod is a forty five year veteran speaker trainer advisor and number one Wall
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  Street bestselling author.
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  He has delivered over 3,500 seminars, workshops, keynotes, and executive briefings
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  and coaching clinic to more than 1,000,000 people on business, entrepreneurship, sales,
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  leadership, values, and intellectual property, as well as life skills.
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  Mitch has appeared on a dozen media.
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  He's taught at NYU, USC, Notre Dame, and Harvard, and he has helped his clients generate
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  $3,000,000,000 that's billion with a B y'all in revenue.
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  So for more information, go to the new game of IP.com.
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  Mitch, welcome to the Small Bitch Chat podcast.
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  Good to be with you.
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  All right, so let's jump into it.
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  Tell me a little bit about your background.
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  How did you get started developing IP and ultimately licensing deals?
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  Well, this part of my business started to materialize after I lost a million dollars in a
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  restaurant on the New Jersey Shore during the year of medical waste.
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  And I had nothing else to do.
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  My wife was eight and a half months pregnant.
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  And so I hooked up with a guy named Brian Tracy, who's been now a forty year friend.
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  And I said, you know, if I can market your stuff, which basically was the kind of a
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  licensing deal sort of, really more certification, then I can get into business
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  right away.
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  And within a month, I had a contract with a major insurance company.
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  Then I realized I had my own IP.
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  So it all started with this little ad in life insurance selling in 1992.
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  But the precursor story, I wrote out a table of contents that anybody could do this.
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  This is how I actually got started.
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  I wrote out a table of contents and I called around five people that I had done work for.
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  And I said, Hey, I wanna run an all day seminar.
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  One guy said, Yes.
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  He paid me $4, put two fifty people in the room.
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  He said to me, before I could say to him, Can I record this?
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  Now you gotta realize back then no speaker trainer would ever let anybody record them
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  because why?
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  They wanted to sell their product.
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  He said, great.
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  One condition, I get the masters, I own it.
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  He said, No problem.
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  End of the seminar.
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  He comes out to me and says, Mitch, that was great.
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  We want it.
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  And I came up with a magic question.
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  What do you wanna do with it?
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  He said, I wanna give it to all my 4,000 agents.
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  How much?
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  The cassettes were still in the machine, literally, right?
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  So back then, Nightingale Conan was the biggest purveyor of audio programs, and they were
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  selling for 29 and 39.
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  Now I said to him, I want $10 a person with one condition.
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  You master it, you produce it, you package it, you ship it.
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  I just want the profit.
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  I just want the money.
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  He said, done deal.
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  And within literally two weeks, I had a check for $40.
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  I wrote him a letter, said, you can make copies.
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  And by the way, he said to me before we left, could we put our company logo on the product?
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  I said, Sure, that'd be great.
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  And rather than using my logo, so every time I went out to show that product, I showed that a
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  major insurance company already bought 4,000 and this is what, and that's when I realized
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  that private labeling product can also have value.
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  So that's how I got started.
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  I didn't have the program until I delivered it.
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  That piece of IP made a half a million dollars over the next three years.
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  And so that's how I started and I learned by just going out and making a deal.
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  So let's fast forward today.
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  Would you do the same thing today?
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  Like is that how licensing deals work now?
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  Absolutely.
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  If you're starting out, you have IP in your head, you get somebody else to pay you to
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  produce it and license it back to them.
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  So this same company that produced that, a year later came to me and said, You know, we're
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  looking for a new training program.
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  Your competition is Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, and Stephen Covey.
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  Would you like to throw your hat in the ring?
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  So I said, Yeah, what do I have to lose?
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  I created a table of contents.
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  Now this is such an important thing.
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  Table of contents could be worth a fortune to you even if you don't have it.
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  Now, if you already have it, that's a different conversation, right?
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  I made a deal with them that they couldn't resist.
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  So they had 4,000 people.
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  It was gonna cost them $250 to buy the other guy's products.
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  Year one, dollars one million, right?
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  I said to them, you know what?
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  Put me in a studio, record my program from scratch.
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  I'll license it back to you for a quarter of a million dollars.
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  You don't owe me any future royalties because every year they'd have to buy another five, six
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  hundred units based on attrition.
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  And then you just recommend me to five of your biggest competitors and I'll make the extra
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  money on them that I would've made on you.
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  And they said, what's the catch?
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  I said, you're gonna put me on the map.
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  You're gonna elevate my prestige.
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  Plus my program was more suited to them.
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  They said, yes, we signed the deal, quarter of a million dollars.
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  And that was my big onus.
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  So sometimes when you have IP, you can actually repurpose it and license it, or you can create
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  IP from scratch, get somebody who really loves it, make a sweetheart deal, and then you own
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  the IP.
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  And I've done that 20 or 30 times over the last thirty years.
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  So tell me something, how can a small business owner identify whether their product or service
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  or training is suitable for a licensing situation?
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  One word, use.
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  Use.
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  See, we create products and services, especially us who are in the educational field,
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  we sell them to a user.
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  When you step back and think about how can somebody use my IP, not necessarily the person
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  who's consuming it, but how can I deploy your IP on my behalf?
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  And that's no longer a selling conversation.
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  That's a collaboration.
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  That's a profit partnership.
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  And you sit down and you say, How can you utilize what I have, all of what I have, some
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  of what I have, a piece, a part, doled out over time?
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  And you can arrange any deal that works as long as it's profitable for both parties.
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  So it's a it's just an exciting creative game, and every conversation is different.
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  And so you've gotta get out of your typical mindset of pitching or presenting or
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  demonstrating and really roll up your sleeves and say, you know, how can we make money
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  together with my IP?
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  Whether it be a process.
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  There's a guy named Joe Polish, you may have heard of him.
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  He started as a carpet cleaner.
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  He was a carpet cleaner, but he developed a marketing process that was so good, he built it
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  into a million dollar carpet cleaning business.
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  But what he realized one day was that his method of marketing was worth more than the
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  market, his business.
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  So he starts to sell a thousand dollar or $500 package to other carpet cleaners.
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  And little by little, he got rid of his carpet cleaning business, made a fortune on the IP,
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  and now he runs a $2,000,000 a year mastermind.
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  I actually
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  know of someone else in that same business that did something very, very similar.
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  So that brings me to my next question.
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  Are there industries that are better suited for licensing type of stuff than others?
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  Well, it depends on what you have.
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  You have to look at what you have.
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  If you have a hard good, a product, all right, you have, obviously, you have to target it
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  toward industries.
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  You know, I do a presentation on what I call the five Bs of multiplying your customers.
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  And one of those Bs is borrowing.
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  And the example I use is McDonald's.
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  When you go into McDonald's, you see those toys that they give for the kids?
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  The kids don't care about the happy meal.
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  They want the toys.
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  So McDonald's will have an arrangement like Disney to license the toys to appeal to a
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  section, a big section of their audience, right?
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  So if you're in a hard product business, you think about who could utilize your product
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  either as an add on, as a lure, as a premium.
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  If you're in the educational informational software business, you think about who could
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  deploy my IP.
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  So for example, I had an accounting firm who came to me and they said, You know, we hate to
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  market and we suck at referrals.
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  They were stuck at a hundred clients, but each client was worth $10.
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  So they had a million dollar business.
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  I said, How about you use my IP every month for six months?
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  I'll give you a model.
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  You send it out to them with this objective.
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  If you can make $10,000 on the IP that Mitch is giving you, you're basically paying for our
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  service.
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  So now our service becomes an investment, not an expense.
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  Every single one of those people, their clients made more than $10.
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  They started cheapestly asking for referrals.
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  And in about a year they doubled their audience and they went up to a tune.
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  And that's a significant improvement by just utilizing somebody else's IP to enhance the
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  relationship capital that they had with their clients.
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  So tell me this though, how do we have to protect our IP prior to doing one of these
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  licensing deals?
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  Well, that's a good question.
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  And I'm not a lawyer, I don't play one on TV as they say.
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  So you always gotta consult your lawyer, but essentially you're always protecting your IP
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  based on the agreement.
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  And if you're dealing with a partnership where it's a long term venture, they're not
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  interested in stealing your IP, but you gotta protect it.
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  So the easiest way I would say is you give them a right to do what they can do and everything
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  else they can't do, right?
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  So if it's utilized one piece of IP a month, that's all they can do.
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  If they can resell it and make a profit, that's all they can do.
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  So you stipulate the terms based upon the collaborative conversation that says, Hey,
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  here's how we want to deploy it.
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  And you list those terms and you get a lawyer to memorialize it.
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  The deal I did with that big insurance company, my legal bill was $500 because they had a legal
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  department who wrote the agreement.
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  And then we just stripped out what we didn't like, put in what we did like, and it was bing
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  and a bang and boom.
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  So that's usually the easy part.
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  The harder part is making the deal.
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  But if you understand a few basic shifts in thinking and you get out of the selling mode
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  and you think about how can we make money together, the sky's the limit.
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  So let's talk about some common mistakes people make when they are negotiating the money,
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  right?
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  With these kinds of deals.
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  What kind of mistakes have you seen people made or what are some you've made?
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  Well, I think there are two or three that are common across the board.
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  The first is getting out of your typical conversation, which you may be used to, a
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  selling conversation or strategy, and now really rolling up your sleeves to say, How can
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  you deploy what I have?
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  So let's bring our brain trust together.
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  And you don't have to figure everything out.
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  Sometimes I got great ideas from other people who wanted to use my IP.
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  Second thing, and this is common for me as well as everyone else, undervaluing your IP and
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  underpricing it.
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  And part of that is procedural process.
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  You don't ask the right questions and you don't dig and really understand the way they wanna
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  deploy it, how it's gonna impact them both quantifiably and qualitatively, and you really
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  don't get a projected return of investment.
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  If you do that, then you can price it accordingly and you could come up with a fair
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  amount.
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  And more often than not, employed people, people with IP, underpriced rather than
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  overpriced.
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  So if your tendency is to underprice, then let the other party tell you what they would be
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  willing to pay or offer you.
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  And then you can work from there.
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  The third thing is, is not seeing the value.
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  If you're an educational or informational type of IP holder, not seeing the value of the
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  pieces, the parts, the sections, the frameworks, the models within your program that
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  might be extracted and separated out either individually or in a bundle and be able to
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  offer those one at a time rather than offering a big thing, half of which you're never gonna
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  use and a third of which they might use, only have to license what they need.
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  And then you can take like one big program and literally break it up into two, three, four
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  phases of licensing and get paid maybe three or four times for the same IP.
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  That's a really interesting point.
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  So tell me if I wanted to get started with this, is not thinking, wow, I'm sitting on all
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  this training I've developed and I'm raising my hand going, yes, I'm talking about myself.
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  If I wanted to do this, where should I start?
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  Like, how would I even start thinking about, you know, trying to have these conversations
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  about this?
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  Well, I like relationship capital.
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  You can go to strangers for sure, but I've gotta believe that within your amazing network,
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  all you've gotta do is come up with a language.
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  So I'm gonna give you three things that I coined thirty years ago and just as good today,
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  I've turned 100,000 people.
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  And it doesn't matter if you're IP or selling yourself, whatever.
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  I call it rejection proof networking.
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  Here's what I do, not what you sell, what you do.
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  The outcomes, the results, the improvement, the transformation and transportation.
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  And you get to find out what you do by asking your clients, why did you buy from us?
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  Why do you patronize us?
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  What do you get from us?
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  And that's what I call your USA, your Unique Service Advantage.
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  That's what you do.
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  Second, why do you do it?
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  All right, I already heard in your introduction, commitment, your passion about
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  why you do what you do.
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  You don't have to go any further than that.
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  Third, and this is the biggie.
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  Who are you looking for?
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  Now you can have more than one who, for example, but who are you looking for?
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  So if I said to you, Melinda, I help people attract, convert, multiply more customers.
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  Why I do it is because every single company has gold in them there are hills, past customers,
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  dormant customers.
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  They also have IP they can license, all right?
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  Untapped riches.
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  And who I'm looking for are either individuals or companies that wanna increase their top line
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  revenue and do it through better service and capitalizing their IP.
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  Who do you know?
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  Where should I go?
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  That's the whole But you've got to get very clear on what you do and who you're looking
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  for.
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  And boom, then you enter into a conversation.
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  I have a training I do called the Ultimate Licensing Formula, it's six steps.
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  And if you just learn the steps and you're probably doing more than one of those already.
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  So sometimes it's just learning one of these steps and boom, I didn't know what I was doing.
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  I just kind of did good business sense that it made sense for me to license something rather
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  than have to create it myself.
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  So that's what I would say.
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  And here's my mantra of life.
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  Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time.
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  Right?
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  Imperfect action.
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  You just gotta get out and do it and you'll be surprised how easy it is.
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  All right, Rich.
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  Miss, last question.
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  What is the best business advice you've ever been given?
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  Don't dwell on your mistakes.
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  You gotta, no regrets, learn, move on, learn, move on.
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  I came up with a saying, there's no such thing as failure.
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  You either succeed or you learn.
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  I love that.
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  I love that.
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  Thank you so much for being here.
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  You've really given a lot of great, great information.
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  Thanks for listening to the Small Biz Chat podcast with Melinda Emerson.
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  Subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us next Wednesday for
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  more fantastic information and interviews.
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  You can find more sources and small business success strategies by visiting Melinda's
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  website, succeedasyourownboss.com.
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  Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.