Eps. 86 Licensing Series Part 2:  Using Master Licenses to Amplify Your Reach Through Strategic Partnerships Transcript

Erin Austin: Hello, ladies, welcome to this week's episode of the hourly to exit podcast. This is the second episode in a three part series about licensing your expertise. Now the kickoff, not the first part, but the kickoff of talking about the licensing. We're going to talk about Was my interview with Pamela smart, which was an episode 84.

Erin Austin: If you've had not listened to that, please go back and give that one a listen, because it gives a great overview of the different types of licensing programs and certification programs, as well as the benefits and some of the challenges. And so just to summarize it very quickly, while there are many benefits, the traditional licensing or certification program is not for everyone.

Erin Austin: You know, there are a number of reasons why that could be. It may be that your audience isn't large enough to make it profitable. It requires the development of infrastructure. And also you may not have like a fully. A fleshed process process that you could license to a 3rd party for them to deliver your transformation.

Erin Austin: Uh, so, uh, this series is talking about the edge cases, you know, Pamela's episode that very much covers the traditional cases. My last episode, episode 85, I talked about when you provide bespoke custom services, how do you create a licensing, how you license bespoke custom services. And then this week I'm talking about another edge case.

Erin Austin: So here I'm going to talk about what if you don't have a large enough audience to support a traditional licensing program. So when let's. Take you as an example. You are an expert with corporate clients. You have a service in high demand and you have neither the will nor the desire to work more or to hire additional experts in your business.

Erin Austin: However, you are confident that you can increase your impact and, and have more people benefit from the transformation that you provide. If. Other experts can use your materials and be trained to effectively deliver your material so they can get similar results for their clients. Currently, your marketing is focused where it should be on your corporate clients, you know, where they hang out, you know, the language that they use, you know what their pain points are, and this is especially true.

Erin Austin: If you have a well defined niche, which I hope you do, like, let's say you work with hospitals or banks or publishing companies, you know, you have your specific market that, you know, and like, and who knows trusts and likes you. But if you were to create a new market of potential licensees, That's a whole new ball game.

Erin Austin: They're not a bunch of hospitals or a bunch of banks Republic, a bunch of publishing companies, like you are accustomed to talking to. So are you up to the challenge of creating an entirely new audience and a new marketing engine to support, um, promoting licensing to that new audience? Some of you may be, but I'm guessing that many of you are not, especially if you really love the work that you're currently doing and the clients that you're doing it with.

Erin Austin: Why, you know, leave your love, your zone of genius to do something now. So what do you do in order to get your methodology out there? That is where other people's audiences come in. So I'll also refer to that as OPA. Some of you of a certain age may, may know OPP, but we're talking about OPA today. So. OPA means leveraging the audiences of others who can help you amplify your reach.

Erin Austin: You know, you can engage with new customers and clients that are already engaged, gathered, and trust the source. that they follow or an organization that they belong to. So OPA can be particularly effective in several, uh, scenarios, trust and credibility. The audiences have already have built in trust and credibility with the person or organization that they follow.

Erin Austin: When you gain access to this audience, you'll be able to piggyback on that trust, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates compared to cold outreach or marketing to a completely new audience, you have cost efficiency building an audience from scratch. It is time consuming and can be expensive by leveraging OPA.

Erin Austin: You can bypass some of these challenges, reaching a large engaged audience without the need for extensive marketing budgets or time investments. You have targeted reach the people or organization with established audience have usually done a significant amount of work to. Understand and cater to their followers, so their, their audience is already targeted and aligned with very specific interests and needs.

Erin Austin: And so when you access this other person's audience, that allows you to tap into that targeted, uh, group very effectively and efficiently. And mutual benefits engaging with someone else's audience provides value, not just to you, but also to the host organization and their members. You know, they are always looking for unique content, special offers, or access to exclusive access, in particular to products or services that genuinely Thank you interests or audience and provides more valuable.

Erin Austin: So no doubt you are familiar with OPA strategies, guesting on podcasts, posting on popular blogs, collaborations, which I've talked about, even tagging someone in social media is borrowing their audience as well. So these are all common OPA strategies to share your message directly To an established audience while also adding value, at least you should be adding value.

Erin Austin: The success of leveraging an OPA is finding the right partner, the partner who has audiences that are aligned with your offer. To create a win win scenario. So for our conversation today, I am going to use this example. You are the go to person for making websites accessible. Although the ADA, the American with Disabilities Act has required, uh, and it's been implied that the ADA requires that websites are accessible.

Erin Austin: Are accessible to people with all sorts of abilities for many years. Um, it is only recently that a number of lawsuits have gotten the attention of major corporations. And of course, it's starting to trickle down to everyone with the website. Uh, and so there is lots of demand. To, um, help people create, uh, accessible websites at a reasonable cost and you have cracked that nut.

Erin Austin: So there is more demand that you can meet, and you don't want to work more and you don't want to hire more experts. So. Where do we start? We start with who your, I hesitate to use the collaboration partners, having put the bug in your head that collaborations are, um, are legal arrangements that involve copyright, but I'm going to use the, uh, kind of, uh, A common use of the word collaboration.

Erin Austin: These are just people that you work with, um, and that you partner with to, um, work with your clients. So if you have people that you are often working with, that's the place we want to start. Maybe you're invited into projects with marketing agencies who part of their services that they provide are creating websites, but they don't have that website accessibility expertise in house.

Erin Austin: So they often partner with you to help deliver the complete project to their clients. Also, you may be approached by D. E. I. consultants and they, they want to add that a for accessibility into their service offerings. And so they bring you in. So they can bring a complete suite of D. E. I. A. services. To their clients, and you believe that you can take your methodology, bundle it with some training and you could license that to web designers or marketing agencies that do websites, or you can bundle it with, um, DEA consulting agencies.

Erin Austin: And then they can bring in that expertise in house, you license it to them and they can bring it in house. So rather than creating an entirely new marketing machine for this new audience, which actually in this case, if you were to serve both the web designers and the DEI consultants would be two separate audiences and two separate marketing machines.

Erin Austin: Wouldn't it be much better to be able to reach the large group of them all at the same time. So that is where the OPA comes in. Where are web designers hanging out? Where do they get new skills? Where do they talk about the latest things? innovations and developments. Same with your DEI consultants. So let's look to the organizations and the networks where they are members.

Erin Austin: Organizations and networks with paid members are always looking for ways to provide more value to their membership. Not just by providing conferences and events, which are very valuable, but providing specific opportunities to acquire new skills to become more profitable opportunities that are not readily available outside of the membership that enhance the members credentials and marketability.

Erin Austin: They love exclusive access to cutting edge research or publications or insights. So for our example, I found a real life organization called webprofessionals. org. And it offers actually the largest number of certification programs I've ever seen for membership. I think there's easily a dozen different types of certifications you can get about different elements of.

Erin Austin: Uh, webmasters, this is mostly webmasters and they talk about the benefits that you can get from their certification programs. So they describe individual benefits as being increasing your value and income, developing the skills necessary to be aware of issues and implement solutions in today's world.

Erin Austin: growingly complex computing environment, keeping up with ever changing technologies and differentiating themselves. So this would be a cool place to license your website accessibility compliance with ADA methodology. For a new certification program to web professionals. org. So how do you do this? You do this with a master license.

Erin Austin: So instead of individual licenses with each licensee, you have a master license with each licensee. The organization, which in this case would be the licensee and you give them permission to sub license the license materials, which we'll talk about in a second to sub licensees, which are the members of the organization.

Erin Austin: So the beauty of the master license with an organization is. It's efficiency. So instead of negotiating dozens or even hundreds of licenses, you have the one instead of tracking payments from many licensees that may be on different schedules and they have different license fees. You have the one. And instead of confirming compliance and auditing a bunch of different licensees, you have the one license agreement that you need to monitor.

Erin Austin: So yes, you may leave some money on the table. Maybe you could get more money doing what I'll call retail licenses with every single licensee versus a distributor master license. Um, because you're going to lose something with the middleman, right? But think about how much easier your life is, how much less.

Erin Austin: Infrastructure you need to do that master license versus doing dozens or hundreds of individual licenses. So, you know, we leave money on the table whenever we introduce a middleman, but there are some benefits that come along with it. What does the master license look like? Well, it is a complex legal agreement.

Erin Austin: So it's not It's not a simple document because there's lots of elements we need to consider, but we do enter it, you know, once or maybe in our example twice, um, and not dozens of times. So, it has to cover various legal, financial, and operational aspects to protect, you know, all the parties involved. The key provisions.

Erin Austin: The definition of license materials, that's where we're always going to start our license agreement. And I had this conversation with my clients. What are the materials that will be licensed to the licensee? We need to clearly define what is required. For the licensee to create the same transformations that you provide with your clients, whether that's software, whether that's workbooks, whether that's facilitation guides, whether that's PowerPoints, maybe there's some 3rd party materials in there, whatever it is, those need to be included.

Erin Austin: Um, you know, of course, making sure we own the rights to them, which is an. Different, which is a different podcast, but we're going to assume for our purposes that you have the rights to include these license materials in your master license. So, clearly define the license materials. And specify, you know, what versions they would have access to.

Erin Austin: Maybe you have 1 version that's for. Um, uh, you know. Public companies in a different version. That's for nonprofits. Maybe, maybe you have different languages. Um, you know, maybe, you know, what would happen if you update it? Do they get access to the updated materials? What is excluded? Maybe there's some things that you only want to use internally, and you don't want to have part of your license.

Erin Austin: So those things are all going to be defined in your license material provision. You know, the grant. Of license itself so that license is when we give permission to someone to use our materials that is the grant of license and there we define exactly what the extent of the permission is. You know, is it an exclusive license?

Erin Austin: It hopefully, well, if you're still using those materials to serve your clients, it cannot be an exclusive license because you're going to also retain them. But maybe it is a sole license, so you're retaining the right to use it and they're the only licensed party to use it. Or it could be non-exclusive, you know, in the, in the event you wanna license to, you know, web.

Erin Austin: Professionals dot org and then you also want to license it to a, um, consulting organization. That would be a non exclusive license because you have more than 1 license out there and what purpose they can use it for. It would be restricted. You can only use it. You know, with your membership, um, whatever restrictions would be there, you know, you might want to restrict where in the world they can use it.

Erin Austin: Maybe the, you have one where they can only use it in the U S and maybe there'd be a separate license for web professionals in Europe. Another major provision obviously would be the sub licensing rights. What are the Parameters around their ability to sub license your license to their members. You'd want to put any conditions or limitations in there.

Erin Austin: Maybe there's some approval requirements. If we go back to the web professionals. org, maybe you only want people who have an advanced level of certification to be able to add this on. Maybe there's different levels of membership, so they can only do it with their premium members and not with their.

Erin Austin: basic members, um, and then what their responsibilities are to monitor the sub licensees use. So all those things would go into your sub license provision. Of course, you're going to have your financial terms in there where we are doing this. An exchange for a license fee, what will the structure of that license fee be?

Erin Austin: Will it be just an annual flat fee? You know, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year, whatever it is per year. And, uh, and then they get to use it. Is it royalties? So they you get paid per licensee. So every time they license it, then they have to pay you some portion of that. Um, or is it based on, you know, the number of times that.

Erin Austin: Uh, a license is used that's considered royalties. So you'd have to define what that license fee looks like, how often it will be paid. Maybe it is an annual license, but it's paid monthly or quarterly. So all those things would go into your financial, uh, Um, provision as well as any reporting and auditing provisions, reporting and auditing is very simple.

Erin Austin: If it's just a flat annual license fee, and then they can sub license it as much as they want to that's obviously much simpler than if they have to report to you. We have this number of sub licensees, and this is the revenue that we got and this is our revenue split. Well, then you need to have reporting and auditing to go with something like that.

Erin Austin: Intellectual property rights, of course, so confirmation that you retain ownership and all the license materials. And this is just a license. And also, what happens if there are some improvements? Let's say, uh, you license it to the web professionals dot org and then go. We like to have this type of, uh, Um, a format for all of our programs.

Erin Austin: So we want to take materials and put it in our format. And how does that affect the ownership of the rights? And maybe the DEI consultants organization thinks it would be more. valuable to their membership. If you tweaked it in this way, what happens with the ownership of those things? So we want to make sure that those things are not left to chance.

Erin Austin: And that that's very clear, clearly spelled out what happens with any modifications, what happens at the end of the term, if it's an annual license and they don't renew, how do you make sure that they aren't continuing to use your materials, um, specifically state, you know, what if, uh, If there is some sort of breach, you know, they're just giving it away in some way, and you don't like it.

Erin Austin: How do you terminate in the middle of the term after you have accepted their license fee? Like, what will happen in those circumstances and what the obligations will be? Uh, in the years to follow termination and that brings us to dispute resolution, you know, if there is an issue, do you want to, you know, require some sort of mediation or arbitration before, um, a lawsuit can be filed.

Erin Austin: So, this is just a very high level overview of what a master license is, um, but I do, I did want to. Kind of, uh, introduce the concept to you, because I know everyone I talked to, frankly, thinks that licensing is kind of going out into the market 1 on 1 to get licensees or do that certification program directly with the.

Erin Austin: Um, the licensees and that can be pretty overwhelming for a lot of people, the idea of putting all the infrastructure in place, putting, uh, all the auditing in place, negotiating agreements with everyone that can be a lot. It's not a simple process. And so, uh, this is another way to think about getting the transformation that you provide out there into the world in the hands of more experts without you having to do all of the work yourself.

Erin Austin: So if you have any questions about that, I will welcome them and thank you again for joining me. And so, uh, we'll have another, uh, Edge use case for licensing next episode, where we will talk about what to do. If many of your materials are licensed from a third party, does that mean that you can't have a licensing program?

Erin Austin: So we will talk about that next time. Thanks for joining. Bye guys.