When negotiating Michael Jordan's famous shoe deal with Nike, his mom Deloris “made an additional demand: Her son must receive not only a $250,000 fee, but also a cut from every sneaker sold,” as retold in the movie Air via The New York Times article ‘Air’ and the Argument for Letting the Talent Share in the Profits.
She made her case with a powerful mic-drop statement:
🎤💥“A shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it.”
That, my friends, is the power of licensing :) Today’s Free Time episode is the first of a two-parter — an in-depth addition to 140: How to License Your IP (Intellectual Property), thanks to a set of wonderfully thorough follow-up questions from BFF member Al Dia, founder of MBASchooled.com and host of the MBA Insider podcast.
He asked a series of questions across five categories: product development, go-to market strategies, selling and packaging, delivery and legal.
A caveat, as always, when it comes to this notoriously opaque arena: what I’m sharing is not the way, it’s just what I’ve learned along the way in nearly a decade of building out licensing as a revenue stream.
💌 This Week's Roundup
📆 Upcoming Event — Certification and Licensing Workshop on 5/11
Join us in the private BFF community for a related workshop coming up next week! We’ll be diving deeper into Certification and Licensing on Thursday, May 11 at 1pm ET. Even if you can’t make it live and/or if you’re listening after that date, you’ll get instant access to the entire private podcast feed with years of special content archives.
In this special BFF bonus workshop, my longtime friendtor Pamela Slim—who taught me the early ins-and-outs of licensing—will walk us through:How to know if/when adding a certification to your business makes sense (B to Small B)
How to know if/when adding a corporate licensing offering is a fit (B to Big B)
The first steps involved in creating an IP certification or licensing program
Ways you can work with her and her team of instructional designers on the build-out
. . . and anything you can think to ask and would love to know during Q&A!
❤️ Learn more and join us at http://itsfreetime.com/bff
🎉 Featured
In super exciting news, the Free Time podcast was nominated for a Webby, the "Oscars of the Internet!" The Webbys celebrate the best and most innovative online content across websites, podcasts, games, apps, and videos.
Even though we didn't win in our Business category, the nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered. I did a double-take when I saw the other nominees, as we were by far the smallest show and the only indie that's not part of a larger network!
⚙️ Tip:
From my recent conversation with my creative coach, Jay Acunzo, “Don’t be the best, be their favorite.” The audience relevance pyramid is a way to determine how well you are resonating with your audience.
Start with the base: how relevant you are in topic and theme. Moving up, your content should be enjoyable and entertaining, then impactful, where you are helping people reflect or take action. At the top of the pyramid is personal, where you (and your content) truly becomes irreplaceable.
📣 Brought To You By
The Free Time Operations Dashboard. It’s time to stop working full time and start working free time instead. Get the done-for-you business dashboard »
💬 Quote:
"It is necessary to quote [Cristóbal] Balenciaga's observers because he did not grant a single interview during his fifty-year career, pursuing a recondite vision of beauty with an intensity that left room for nothing else."
—The New Yorker's Button-Pushing Impresario of Balenciaga
💭 Question
What radical "no" rule would you add to your business practices if you could, if no one would judge you for it (including yourself and the Business Best Practices Police)? For example, consider Free Timer and BFF Jacqueline Fisch's video-free business
📝 Permission
Say no to your biggest should this week! Bonus: Look ahead to the next three weeks in your calendar: what else can you decline or renegotiate? Can you move any meetings from video to phone, or even better to an asynchronous tool like Voxer?
🎙 Recent Free Time Episodes:
182:🏚️The Challenges of Renovating a (Business) House while Living in It
180: 📉 Diminishing Returns and the True Costs of Shiny Shoulds
Access machine-generated transcripts for all Free Time episodes »
Thank you all for being here reading and listening!
❤️ With Gratitude,
💌
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