E86: Licensing Series Part 2: Using Master Licenses to Amplify Your Reach Through Strategic Partnerships

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Hello, ladies, welcome to this week's episode

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of the hourly to exit podcast.

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This is the second episode in a three part series about licensing your expertise.

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Now the kickoff, not the first part, but the kickoff of

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talking about the licensing.

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We're going to talk about Was my interview with Pamela

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smart, which was an episode 84.

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If you've had not listened to that, please go back and give that one a listen,

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because it gives a great overview of the different types of licensing programs

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and certification programs, as well as the benefits and some of the challenges.

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And so just to summarize it very quickly, while there are many benefits, the

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traditional licensing or certification program is not for everyone.

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there are a number of reasons why that could be.

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It may be that your audience isn't large enough to make it profitable.

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It requires the development of infrastructure.

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And also you may not have like a fully.

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A fleshed process that you could license to a 3rd party for them

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to deliver your transformation.

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this series is talking about the edge cases, Pamela's episode that very

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much covers the traditional cases.

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My last episode, episode 85, I talked about when you provide bespoke custom

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services, how do you create a licensing, how you license bespoke custom services.

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And then this week I'm talking about another edge case.

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So here I'm going to talk about what if you don't have a large enough audience to

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support a traditional licensing program.

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So let's.

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Take you as an example.

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You are an expert with corporate clients.

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You have a service in high demand and you have neither the will nor

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the desire to work more or to hire additional experts in your business.

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However, you are confident that you can increase your impact and

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have more people benefit from the transformation that you provide.

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If.

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Other experts can use your materials and be trained to effectively

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deliver your material so they can get similar results for their clients.

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Currently, your marketing is focused where it should be on your corporate

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clients, where they hang out, the language that they use, you know what their pain

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points are, and this is especially true.

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If you have a well defined niche, which I hope you do, like, let's say

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you work with hospitals or banks or publishing companies, you have your

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specific market that, you know, and like, and who knows trusts and likes you.

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But if you were to create a new market of potential licensees,

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That's a whole new ball game.

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They're not a bunch of hospitals or a bunch of banks Republic, a

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bunch of publishing companies, like you are accustomed to talking to.

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So are you up to the challenge of creating an entirely new audience and

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a new marketing engine to support, promoting licensing to that new audience?

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Some of you may be, but I'm guessing that many of you are not, especially

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if you really love the work that you're currently doing and the

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clients that you're doing it with.

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Why, leave your love, your zone of genius to do something now.

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So what do you do in order to get your methodology out there?

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That is where other people's audiences come in.

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So I'll also refer to that as OPA.

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Some of you of a certain age may know OPP, but we're talking about OPA today.

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So.

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OPA means leveraging the audiences of others who can

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help you amplify your reach.

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you can engage with new customers and clients that are already engaged,

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gathered, and trust the source.

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that they follow or an organization that they belong to.

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So OPA can be particularly effective in several, scenarios, trust and credibility.

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The audiences have already have built in trust and credibility with the

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person or organization that they follow.

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When you gain access to this audience, you'll be able to piggyback on that

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trust, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates compared to cold

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outreach or marketing to a completely new audience, you have cost efficiency

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building an audience from scratch.

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It is time consuming and can be expensive by leveraging OPA.

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You can bypass some of these challenges, reaching a large engaged audience

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without the need for extensive marketing budgets or time investments.

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You have targeted reach the people or organization with established

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audience have usually done a significant amount of work to.

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Understand and cater to their followers, so their audience is

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already targeted and aligned with very specific interests and needs.

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And so when you access this other person's audience, that allows you

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to tap into that targeted, group very effectively and efficiently.

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And mutual benefits engaging with someone else's audience provides

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value, not just to you, but also to the host organization and their members.

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they are always looking for unique content, special offers, or access

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to exclusive access, in particular to products or services that

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genuinely Thank you interests or audience and provides more valuable.

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So no doubt you are familiar with OPA strategies, guesting on

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podcasts, posting on popular blogs, collaborations, which I've talked about,

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even tagging someone in social media is borrowing their audience as well.

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So these are all common OPA strategies to share your message

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directly To an established audience while also adding value, at

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least you should be adding value.

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The success of leveraging an OPA is finding the right partner,

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the partner who has audiences that are aligned with your offer.

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To create a win win scenario.

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So for our conversation today, I am going to use this example.

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You are the go to person for making websites accessible.

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Although the ADA, the American with Disabilities Act has required,

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and it's been implied that the ADA requires that websites are accessible.

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Are accessible to people with all sorts of abilities for many years.

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it is only recently that a number of lawsuits have gotten the

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attention of major corporations.

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And of course, it's starting to trickle down to everyone with the website.

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and so there is lots of demand.

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To, help people create, accessible websites at a reasonable cost

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and you have cracked that nut.

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So there is more demand that you can meet, and you don't want to work more

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and you don't want to hire more experts.

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So.

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Where do we start?

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We start with who your, hesitate to use the collaboration partners, having put the

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bug in your head that collaborations are, legal arrangements that involve copyright,

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but I'm going to use the, kind of, A common use of the word collaboration.

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These are just people that you work with, and that you partner

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with to, work with your clients.

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So if you have people that you are often working with, that's

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the place we want to start.

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Maybe you're invited into projects with marketing agencies who part of their

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services that they provide are creating websites, but they don't have that

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website accessibility expertise in house.

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So they often partner with you to help deliver the complete

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project to their clients.

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Also, you may be approached by D.

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E.

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I.

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consultants and they want to add that a for accessibility

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into their service offerings.

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And so they bring you in.

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So they can bring a complete suite of D.

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E.

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I.

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A.

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services.

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To their clients, and you believe that you can take your methodology, bundle it

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with some training and you could license that to web designers or marketing

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agencies that do websites, or you can bundle it with, DEA consulting agencies.

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And then they can bring in that expertise in house, you license it to

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them and they can bring it in house.

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So rather than creating an entirely new marketing machine for this new

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audience, which actually in this case, if you were to serve both the

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web designers and the DEI consultants would be two separate audiences and

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two separate marketing machines.

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Wouldn't it be much better to be able to reach the large group

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of them all at the same time.

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So that is where the OPA comes in.

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Where are web designers hanging out?

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Where do they get new skills?

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Where do they talk about the latest things?

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innovations and developments.

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Same with your DEI consultants.

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So let's look to the organizations and the networks where they are members.

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Organizations and networks with paid members are always looking for ways to

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provide more value to their membership.

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Not just by providing conferences and events, which are very valuable,

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but providing specific opportunities to acquire new skills to become

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more profitable opportunities that are not readily available outside

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of the membership that enhance the members credentials and marketability.

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They love exclusive access to cutting edge research or publications or insights.

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So for our example, I found a real life organization called webprofessionals.

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org.

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And it offers actually the largest number of certification programs

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I've ever seen for membership.

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I think there's easily a dozen different types of certifications you

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can get about different elements of.

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, webmasters, this is mostly webmasters and they talk about the benefits that you can

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get from their certification programs.

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So they describe individual benefits as being increasing your value

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and income, developing the skills necessary to be aware of issues and

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implement solutions in today's world.

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growingly complex computing environment, keeping up with ever changing technologies

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and differentiating themselves.

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So this would be a cool place to license your website accessibility

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compliance with ADA methodology.

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For a new certification program to web professionals.

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org.

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So how do you do this?

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You do this with a master license.

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So instead of individual licenses with each licensee, you have a

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master license with each licensee.

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The organization, which in this case would be the licensee and you give them

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permission to sub license the license materials, which we'll talk about

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in a second to sub licensees, which are the members of the organization.

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So the beauty of the master license with an organization is.

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It's efficiency.

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So instead of negotiating dozens or even hundreds of licenses, you

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have the one instead of tracking payments from many licensees that

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may be on different schedules and they have different license fees.

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You have the one.

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And instead of confirming compliance and auditing a bunch of different

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licensees, you have the one license agreement that you need to monitor.

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So yes, you may leave some money on the table.

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Maybe you could get more money doing what I'll call retail licenses

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with every single licensee versus a distributor master license.

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because you're going to lose something with the middleman, right?

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But think about how much easier your life is, how much less.

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Infrastructure you need to do that master license versus doing dozens

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or hundreds of individual licenses.

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So, we leave money on the table whenever we introduce a middleman, but there are

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some benefits that come along with it.

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What does the master license look like?

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Well, it is a complex legal agreement.

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So it's not a simple document because there's lots of elements we

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need to consider, but we do enter it, once or maybe in our example

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twice, and not dozens of times.

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So, it has to cover various legal, financial, and operational aspects

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to protect, all the parties involved.

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The key provisions.

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The definition of license materials, that's where we're always going

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to start our license agreement.

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And I had this conversation with my clients.

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What are the materials that will be licensed to the licensee?

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We need to clearly define what is required.

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For the licensee to create the same transformations that you provide with

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your clients, whether that's software, whether that's workbooks, whether

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that's facilitation guides, whether that's PowerPoints, maybe there's some

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3rd party materials in there, whatever it is, those need to be included.

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of course, making sure we own the rights to them, which is an.

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different podcast, but we're going to assume for our purposes that you have

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the rights to include these license materials in your master license.

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So, clearly define the license materials.

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And specify, what versions they would have access to.

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Maybe you have 1 version that's for.

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Public companies in a different version.

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That's for nonprofits.

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Maybe, maybe you have different languages.

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what would happen if you update it?

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Do they get access to the updated materials?

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What is excluded?

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Maybe there's some things that you only want to use internally, and you don't

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want to have part of your license.

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So those things are all going to be defined in your

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license material provision.

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the grant.

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Of license itself so that license is when we give permission to someone to

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use our materials that is the grant of license and there we define exactly

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what the extent of the permission is.

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is it an exclusive license?

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It hopefully, well, if you're still using those materials to serve your

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clients, it cannot be an exclusive license because you're going to also retain them.

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But maybe it is a sole license, so you're retaining the right to use it and they're

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the only licensed party to use it.

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Or it could be non-exclusive, in the event you wanna license to,

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Professionals dot org and then you also want to license it

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to a, consulting organization.

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That would be a non exclusive license because you have more

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than 1 license out there and what purpose they can use it for.

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It would be restricted.

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You can only use it.

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with your membership, whatever restrictions would be there,

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you might want to restrict where in the world they can use it.

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Maybe you have one where they can only use it in the U S and maybe

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there'd be a separate license for web professionals in Europe.

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Another major provision obviously would be the sub licensing rights.

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What are the Parameters around their ability to sub license

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your license to their members.

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You'd want to put any conditions or limitations in there.

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Maybe there's some approval requirements.

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If we go back to the web professionals.

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org, maybe you only want people who have an advanced level of

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certification to be able to add this on.

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Maybe there's different levels of membership, so they can only do it with

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their premium members and not with their.

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basic members, and then what their responsibilities are to

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monitor the sub licensees use.

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So all those things would go into your sub license provision.

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Of course, you're going to have your financial terms in

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there where we are doing this.

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An exchange for a license fee, what will the structure of that license fee be?

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Will it be just an annual flat fee?

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You know, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year, whatever it is per year.

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and then they get to use it.

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Is it royalties?

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So they you get paid per licensee.

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So every time they license it, then they have to pay you some portion of that.

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or is it based on, the number of times that.

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a license is used that's considered royalties.

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So you'd have to define what that license fee looks like, how often it will be paid.

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Maybe it is an annual license, but it's paid monthly or quarterly.

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So all those things would go into your financial, uh, provision as well as

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any reporting and auditing provisions, reporting and auditing is very simple.

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If it's just a flat annual license fee, and then they can sub license

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it as much as they want to that's obviously much simpler than

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if they have to report to you.

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We have this number of sub licensees, and this is the revenue that we

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got and this is our revenue split.

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Well, then you need to have reporting and auditing to go with something like that.

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Intellectual property rights, of course, so confirmation that you retain

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ownership and all the license materials.

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And this is just a license.

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And also, what happens if there are some improvements?

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Let's say, you license it to the web professionals dot org and then go.

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We like to have this type of, uh, format for all of our programs.

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So we want to take materials and put it in our format.

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And how does that affect the ownership of the rights?

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And maybe the DEI consultants organization thinks it would be more.

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valuable to their membership.

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If you tweaked it in this way, what happens with the

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ownership of those things?

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So we want to make sure that those things are not left to chance.

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And that that's very clearly spelled out what happens with any modifications,

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what happens at the end of the term, if it's an annual license and they

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don't renew, how do you make sure that they aren't continuing to use your

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materials, specifically state, you know, what If there is some sort of

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breach, they're just giving it away in some way, and you don't like it.

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How do you terminate in the middle of the term after you

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have accepted their license fee?

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Like, what will happen in those circumstances and what

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the obligations will be?

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in the years to follow termination and that brings us to dispute resolution, if

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there is an issue, do you want to, require some sort of mediation or arbitration

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before, a lawsuit can be filed.

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So, this is just a very high level overview of what a master license

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is, but I do, I did want to.

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Kind of, introduce the concept to you, because I know everyone I talked

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to, frankly, thinks that licensing is kind of going out into the market

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1 on 1 to get licensees or do that certification program directly with the.

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the licensees and that can be pretty overwhelming for a lot of people, the

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idea of putting all the infrastructure in place, putting, all the auditing

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in place, negotiating agreements with everyone that can be a lot.

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It's not a simple process.

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And so, this is another way to think about getting the transformation that

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you provide out there into the world in the hands of more experts without you

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having to do all of the work yourself.

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So if you have any questions about that, I will welcome them and

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thank you again for joining me.

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And so, we'll have another, Edge use case for licensing next episode,

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where we will talk about what to do.

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If many of your materials are licensed from a third party, does that mean that

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you can't have a licensing program?

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So we will talk about that next time.

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Thanks for joining.

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Bye guys.