I didn't pay a single Cent for this or this or these or most of this or this and in fact I actually get paid to use and enjoy a lot of those things that I just showed you and paid well enough that Beth and I have been able to run this Channel and do these things fulltime well at the same time moving to one of the most beautiful and quite literally one of the most expensive mountain towns on the planet and you can do this too I'm going to show you how show you how we
created Partnerships and sponsorships within categories and sports that we had no previous experience in how we went from companies just providing product to proper well-paying long-term sponsorships we're going to chat with actual marketing managers and hear from them exactly what they look for in people who they sponsor we're even going to talk to a lawyer who specializes in Partnerships and sponsorships but before we dive in I just want to say that one everything involved with being sponsored is one heck of a lot of work and two when it comes to getting products and services from
businesses there is no such thing as free all right let's dive in here let's pretend you are a marketing manager and you have a product that you want to get in front of the right people now there are a whole bunch of different ways that you can go about doing that but it's your job to make sure you get it in front of the most amount of people for the least amount of money time and effort so really you're just looking for Value all the way around no matter who we're talking about or what part
of this whole situation we're talking about value is the key for there to be a successful sponsorship the number one goal is to bring the viewer or the person that goes and actually buys the thing value they're number one don't let anybody tell you anything different I'm just going to call them the viewer you have to bring value to the viewer the viewer gets value marketing manager gets value and therefore you get value out of it that's how it works and that's how you have to think about it all right here we go I'm going
to tell you exactly what won't work and then um the three things that actually will work to help you get sponsorships so here's what won't work um sending a message on Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever and saying I'm like really good in stuff so can I have a fre bike that will never I promise you that is that will never work ever that is a Lone Ranger gearo te but here are the four things that you should do that will work and I'm going to make this quick because it is unbelievably cold out here
number one you have to have a great idea that you are very very excited about whether that is a video that we're that you're putting out uh that could be on YouTube or Tik Tok or Instagram whatever could be a series of videos it could be a race series that you're going to be a part of you need to have a specified project that you thought through all the reasons why this project or whatever it is is going to be awesome you need to have that great idea on loock number two you need to know
exactly which audience is going to get the most value from this awesome idea that you have and so we're talking about demograph it's fall here and so we're talking about demographics here what is what are the age of the people who are going to be viewing this either in person or online or whatever what are their location what are their interests what is the platform that they interact with most on is that YouTube is it Instagram whatever and what are the likely amount of viewers how many eyeballs do you think are going to be viewing
this project and where did you come up with that number so you've got the idea and the audience who will be stoked about this idea and who will get value from this idea number three what do you need from this potential sponsor to make this project a success do you need funds do you need products or services do you need access to something like an event make sure it is very very very clear what you need from the sponsor and number four take the last three things and compile it all in a really nicely written
pitch that very clearly covers what the sponsor will get out of being a part of this project this is the exciting project this is the audience that we're making the project for and this is how they're going to experience or view that project and most importantly this is how your company can be involved in this and this is what your company's going to get out of it and lastly It's always important to have some kind of a timeline having an open-ended Anything Is Not Great on the marketing manager side of things they want to know
when the project starts what's going to happen throughout the project and when it ends because Marketing Manager are always working within typically yearly budgets and so if they're spending a certain amount of money on a project they need to kind of know when and how much of something they're going to get over a certain amount of time cuz if not they're not likely to get that kind of expenditure approved without knowing by June whatever they're going to get this out of the project so that is the list right there so that is the list right
there oh my gosh I'm so cold my mouth isn't working properly if the marketing manager decides to sponsor you or put their trust in you you've got to deliver or that's it now as far as getting getting the attention of that marketing manager this is Pierre from the inside line and the inside line is an online and in store bike retailer and Pierre I know you guys do uh ambassadorships and some paid sponsorships and so I just wanted to ask a person like yourself directly what are you looking for out of somebody who who wants
to be an ambassador for a brand like inside line typically we'll look for people who are members of the community people who volunteer for the Trail Association uh the younger folks who are racing we do see a lot of that they have a good online presence um you know good Instagram Maybe on YouTube or something like that so we find Value in different places from different people so long as you're a good person you're a member of the community that's a a good place to start yeah make yourself kind of known say hello to people
kind of shake some hands and and meet people okay so one of the biggest things for you guys is people just showing up being there in person making that introduction showing that they are already like themselves getting a lot of value from the inside line totally I think it's just important that we get a sense of who we're going to be you know bringing on as an ambassador let's take things from the very beginning cuz like I can I can share my experience where I am right now but I think it'd be a lot more
helpful for most people for me to take it back to when I was just trying to get my foot in the door with all of this so about 10 years ago I had made the decision that I wanted to use the skills that I have as a photographer and videographer to Branch out from the more like commercial side of things that I was working on at the time and into a sport that I really really loved which is mountain biking I'm I was ready to 100% dive in right then and there but I didn't have
any portfolio I had never shot anything mountain bike related for photo or video but I saw an opportunity where a gold level FMB event so like like a free ride uh mountain bike a World Tour event was coming to my hometown which is like a city in the middle of the Prairies in Canada for whatever reason FMB decided to bring in like tons of riders from around the globe build like a four pack of jumps and have that be a gold level event hey I'm not complaining I was just a little surprised and I knew
that this could be a big opportunity for me to break into things but I needed access and so I reached out to one of the biggest online Publications for mountain biking they're called pink bike I told him that hey I know I don't have any kind of portfolio for this but I'm already in Edmonton which is where I was being held I have photo skills if you guys were able to get me access into this event I will shoot photos and I will write an article so that you can publish it on your website and
they said um uh maybe like if it doesn't suck and that's all I needed to hear I had access let's go and so I threw everything I had making sure that I did a great great job at this event getting lots of solid photos and and and writing a good article on it and when I submitted that article to the editorial team they put it on the main page pretty stoked about that and so I was able to bring value to the viewers of pink bike by having this photo and written article out there that
could keep them up to date on this gold level event which brought pink bike value because well they could provide that for for their viewers and I got value out of it in the end because now I have something tangible within the mountain biking sphere fast forward 2 years and we knew that we wanted to start a YouTube channel there were barely any mountain bike YouTube channels out there at the time and we wanted to do things a little bit differently and over and above all that I wanted to dive more into storytelling and video
work within the mountain bike space and I saw an opportunity to do a photo and a video piece for pink bike there was a place on the west coast of Canada called Coast Gravity Park and the only thing out there that I had seen at at that point we're just pro riders doing Pro Rider things at the park and so I wanted to answer two questions for myself is it possible to stay within Canada to go on an incredible mountain bike vacation and two can normal people ride Coast Gravity Park and still have fun without
doing back flips and stuff so I pitched this idea to pink bike once again using the work that I had shown them beforehand and telling them that if I get a yes from them I'm going to start reaching out to other people to try and put this really cool project together and they said uh pretty much the same thing they said the first time uh yeah we would post it on the main page if it doesn't suck and that's all I needed to hear so I took that tentative yes and I leveraged the viewership numbers
of pink bike and got Coast gravity on board and from that I got tourism BC on board and from there we got an incredible incredible Resort on board so we had somewhere to stay and a bike shop on board where we could get rentals and even a float plane company to fly us from Vancouver over to seashel BC and then guess what same thing as before well we've now got ourselves way in over our heads and it's time to swim up to the top Beth and I put a massive amount of time effort and work
into making this project a success I love the video that came out of it and the photos got published onto the pink bike homepage and it brought a lot of value to their viewers and so you can kind of see where I'm going with this and that's coming up with interesting stories and things that I would personally like to see happen or try to discover questions that I want to have answered and things that I want to try that I know my audience would find Value in as well and if those two things are locked
in that means that I can go and start pitching this to the right people and the right marketing managers to help try and make it happen rinse and repeat and it adds up to a decade worth of incredible life-changing experiences doing what I personally love to do every single day and bringing a lot of value yes to my sponsors but most importantly to my viewers we have Kate here and she is a lawyer who specializes in sponsorships and Partnerships on your end of things for somebody who is just starting out and looking to add sponsorships
or Partnerships what are sort of the main key things that that you would recommend to them to look out for or keep an eye out for kind of starting right off the bat is making sure that you're identifying a legitimate sponsorship or partnership opportunity versus opportunities that are just effectively scams I'm a Creator myself so I get a lot of inbound partnership requests that aren't necessarily partnership requests sometimes it's an an active scam where it's a brand it's someone pretending to be a brand and that's not actually the brand reaching out yeah she makes a
super good point and I want to add one thing in here real quick it doesn't matter what size of following you have very quickly you will start to get emails from scammers who are pretending to be sponsors and the number one thing I can tell you is never ever ever click a link within any of those emails it doesn't matter how legit it all sounds what I do instead of clicking links that take me to supposed information about the product or the company that wants to sponsor us just go and manually type in that business
or that product or service into Google and do your homework in that way never click a link never download an attachment because the likelihood of it being a scam and them being able to take over your computer and your social media accounts is pretty dang High nowadays scary stuff more than once um I have read through some giant contract and hidden in there somewhere they've said that anything I shoot during the contract term they just straight up own there's kind of two parts to the usage rights equation there's the intellectual property right and this will
cover who actually owns the content that you're creating and it should be you and then the licensing terms and that's where you see those usage rights come in so how can the brand then use that content can they post it on their social medias can they run ads behind it can they put it on a billboard in Time Square so that's kind of both of those Provisions are equally important when you're kind of going through the contract just to make sure both parties are clear what can be done with the content versus what can't be
done with the content anything you ever shoot that is yours you can allow usage rights for for companies but don't don't let them own the stuff you shoot so there are a few different ways to get support from companies and it really kind of boils down to are you receiving money or are you receiving product or both um if you are providing something especially if you're making content for a company there really always should be money involved because you were putting a lot of time and effort into it um but every now and again like
even with where we are now we still accept some agreements that are either an experience or a product or whatever if it grants us a certain amount of access whether that's access into uh a new discipline or sport or whether it's opportunities that could be really really big in the future and so to cover this and a whole lot more I'm going to kind of Step you through this trip that I literally just got back from involving Chevrolet bringing Beth and I out for an unpaid trip to experience their new Silverado EV truck which I'm
personally very very interested in um so that's that's one type of partnership uh and two while I was down there it just so happened that I need to be down in the United States anyways to get out to a shoot with one of our long-term paying sponsors insta 360 well at the same time throughout it all I brought a pair of headphones with me which I don't have on me right here but I brought a pair of headphones with me that I wanted to get a lot of use out of and get a really good
Tes in on for a video that I'm making for our Tech channel that has a single video sponsor attached to it so in this one trip it was a big old blend of an experience or product based partnership a paid partnership with one of our long-term sponsors and putting together content so that I can create a video that I can attach a single video sponsor to and on top of all of that we had a massive logistical Nightmare on our hands with me being able to get my own personal bike to this one hotel out
in the middle of the Arizona desert for the morning of this very important insta 360 shoot for one day and immediately packing it up and shipping it back home again and I wasn't able to take it with me from flight to flight to flight to flight so this company called bike flights saved our butts on that trip and got the bike there safe and sound no problem at all and part of the deliverables for them helping us out and doing that is including them in this video and so if you are buying or selling a
bike and you need to ship it or you just need your bike there waiting for you at a hotel and you either can't or don't want to bring your bike with you through the whole flight process especially if you have like quick layovers which the bikes never make it through using bike flights for in those scenarios really comes in clutch uh go and check them out links in the description thank you bike flights I really appreciate your help on this one and so with Chevrolet one I told them a while back we've done one of
these experien things with them before and I told them like guys I'm really only interested in in the new EV truck because I had heard really good things super long range and all of that and so when they offered to bring us out to San Francisco hop in a truck and drive it to Lake Tahoe for a couple of days and drive it back again Beth and I said yes one we love San Francisco and haven't been there in a decade and so heading down there a couple days early to hang out just two of
us was great two it allowed us to try this truck that we're actually like truly interested in three it put us in front of people from Chevrolet once again because working with a company like Chevy in a more official capacity in the future is something that we want to work towards and after that trip Beth went home and I flew into Nevada grabbed a rental car and it drove out into the Pitch Black Desert for a few hours out to a lake called Lake havu where we were doing a shoot with insta 360 and this
is a uh a larger production shoot there was a full production team there and I'm one of the presenters for something cool that's coming out later on that I can't really show you anything about yet very soon though and I've been working with insta 360 in various capacities over the years but they are one of our yearly sponsors and they've been really great so yeah so there are some important distinctions there between what we did and and the expectations for us between these different companies that we were working with with Chevy they were providing a
flight to a place we wanted to go to a truck we wanted to try out and put us in front of the right people in front of a company we wanted to work with and to top it off there were no talks about deliverables they just said come on out so between all that we found that it was worth it for us to go on that trip despite not being paid versus on the insta 360 side we were getting paid not only are Ina 360 one of our our long-term paying sponsors but also there were
additional payments just for me coming out and doing this and so the Chevy side of it was super super chill the insta 360 side of it because there was so much travel involved and this big production being out in like plus 44 degree heat or like 113 degree heat and getting everything organized the insta 360 side of things was a massive massive amount of work it was a huge effort to get out there get all that stuff filmed and back home again and which is also perfectly okay because they're a big part of us putting
food on our kids table and so what they were asking of us despite being a huge heck of a lot of work was perfectly reasonable and I was happy to do it here's a question that I know I had in the beginning is there a difference legally between receiving money versus receiving products I'm assuming you're talking about a situation where in a gifted situation the brand sending you a product and you're also responsible for then sharing the product and then that's that's what's known as an in-kind collaboration or partnership so technically your compensation in that
situation is the product that you receive you're not getting paid on top of it now personally I think that creators should always be paid when there are content deliverables that's just my opinion but I also recognize there could be circumstances where an in-kind collaboration makes sense if we're talking like a high ticket product or an expensive service or an ongoing service the biggest legal concern is the tax considerations I've seen stories of influencers they're taking on a lot of in kind collaborations and then come tax time now they owe taxes on the value of all
these products and they weren't paid for it so now they're kind of losing money from working with this brand because they weren't compensated fairly from the get-go writing a good pitch or having a a nice looking pitch deck is massively massively massively important um fortunately for me I've always been half decent at writing and so I lean on that like crazy it still takes me for absolute ever to write these custom emails to a specific marketing manager because I never send a blanket email out it's always very custom tailored to the person I'm sending it
to super important and so once I'm ready to send that pitch I do a massive deep dive on the people in the company who I'm likely going to be sending this email to or the people that I'm going to be sending this email to to who are they what do they like I do a a full-on LinkedIn deep dive might even go find their Instagram profile I will leave no stone unturn when it comes to building a really nice complete pitch for somebody now one thing I would caution against is writing an absolutely enormous novel
of an email as your first email to that person I've made that mistake plenty of times and you know what when anybody gets an email that that's that long just out of the blue when you already got a busy day you're probably not going to look at it because just overwhelming so over the last couple of years I have begun sending a much much shorter email just like a maybe a paragraph or two just kind of explaining very very quickly what we're doing just asking them hey can I send a more complete pitch to you
cuz if you do that one it primes them for the giant novel that you're about to send and then two if you're sending a massive email with links and attachments and all this kind of stuff 99 times out of 100 it's going to get sent right to the junk folder because of those links because of the attachments and all that and so you kind of need to get a conversation going with with that person so that when you send the big email afterwards it's going to go to their inbox and not straight into the spam
folder another example is all of that Sim racing gear that you saw earlier that is a lot of very rad stuff for Sim racing we are entering once again into a category or sport that we have never been in before we have nothing to show Automotive wise except for one video that I made last year about our Land Rover which is a whole another project that I pitched out to a ton of different companies so that we can at least have a little shred of something to show people this year when we dive into the
rally Channel and so what we needed was to get at least one company on board just like what we did with pink bike if we can bring one bigger company in within the world of sim racing into the fold then we can show other companies that hey Sim magic trusts us or MSI trusts us or saw Bel Sim racing whatever it might be so that you can give other companies and marketing managers a little bit of confidence in the direction that we're going in this series and then again you've got to fulfill those promises and
put in a massive amount of work now after five videos into this brand new series we're at half a million views and like 50,000 hours worth of watch time people are pumped on the series the products that we're showing and using make sense for the audience and everybody wins what does that Ambassador need to provide what do you need from them we look for different things in certain people the really important thing to realize for any Ambassador whatever form they wanted to be is their salesp people they are primarily there to sell product we do
an exchange there are different incentives either you you know you get paid or you get discounts but at the end of the day uh you are there to sell stuff so if you're out riding with your friends and one of them is complaining about their bike not shifting well well that's a an opportunity where you say Hey you know go see my friends over at the inside line we'll take care of you it's those little things that they have to be looking for and um sending people our way that's when it becomes extremely important to
make sure that the the the brand that you are representing is the brand that you would be talking about anyways and people can read that whether it is truthful and honest or not from a mile away for us we know that the inside line is a place that we'd be sending people anyways so it all just works just to add on that too like anybody who does a good job of it we we want to support and we'll make those next connections for them so if they want a helmet sponsor if they want to be
in touch with one of the bike brands that we carry uh we'll take those steps for those people so that they can you know further their career or make a bigger Network for themselves we'll make those introductions we're always happy to do that if your ambassadors are helping spread cast that net a wider net for the inside line then yeah it only makes sense that you would now feel comfortable to share those people with the other brands that you work with yeah it's great makes total sense some of our ambassadors are still pretty new to
biking um we want to share everybody's experience the whole journey is is exciting to us if you can share that effectively with people um share the the enjoyment The Stoke that translates into some value and so for me personally The Sweet Spot for a company that I want to work with is one that makes a really cool interesting product that has some feature sets that put it in general over and above some of the heavy-hitting companies that are putting out products within the same space so like the thing that they make has to be great
there's no way I will ever promote something that sucks that would be terrible so they make a good product and they're right on the cusp like they want more market share they have the product to do it and they just need some more eyes on it for it to happen that's a sweet spot that's where I come in and I have a list of all sorts of companies that I I would really really like to work with on the mountain biking side of things and especially on the rally racing side of things that are going
to be getting some emails from me pretty shortly and the only reason why those specific companies are going to be getting emails is because I know that I know I know for a fact that I can do an incredible job telling the stories that I want to tell and incorporating those products and I know for a fact that everyone's going to get a lot of value out of it if I can't say any of those things and mean them I'm not reaching out to the company simple as that now there are a lot of things
to keep in mind when it comes to sponsorships not least of which is the legal side of things so for some people just getting into this um when is a is a contract always needed U and when when should a person have a contract yeah so I think anytime that both parties are responsible for providing something so the brand is going to either pay you or they're just providing product and your responsible for creating certain deliverables then you need to have a contract in place just to outline the obligations of both parties and again the
contract's designed to protect both of you in that situation but anytime that both parties are Prov are responsible for providing something got to get that contract in place where do we get these resources are there template contracts are there are there like things out there that can help lead us through making a contract what does that mean do we always have to be reaching out to an attorney and they situations most often when you're working with a brand they're going to have a contract that they can s that they're going to send over to you
and in that situation you want to make sure that you're reviewing the terms in detail making sure that there's nothing no surprises in there that the terms accurately reflect what you already discussed with the brand you may also be able to provide your own contract I actually have contract templates for creators I also have a free guide It's called The Brand deal contract checklist and that just has 10 different contract terms that should be incorporated into your contract that you get from a brand and so that's just an easy resource to kind of go through
make sure that all of those points are covered in the contract just so that you're addressing these potential issues upfront and if anybody wants to go and check out those templates you can go to the legal influence.com and Kate thank you so much for shedding some light on probably one of the most if not the most important aspects of sponsorships so yeah appreciate you yeah of course this video could be hours an hours long it really could be maybe I should do a whole fraking course on this but I want to leave it here because
if there's one thing I can stress it's the value side of things and I think I got that across I hope that I got that across well enough it's just sincerity like just just being sincere about what you can bring to the table what you will bring to the table being sincere with the audience and not just like pushing pushing whatever and whoever will pay you a couple of dollars or send you some free things there's so much opportunity waiting out there there's so many incredible things you can go and do with the help of
Partnerships and sponsorships that it is well worth your time looking into as somebody who has these big ideas and these big goals and dreams understand the value that you can bring to everybody put yourself out there and put the frigging work in to make it all happen because I can tell you from experience it's well worth it thank you so much for watching if you have any questions whatsoever please put them down in the comments but thank you so much to everybody who contributed to this video and we will see you on the next one
cheers
