Partner up and share the wealth

Yoga retreat promotion

I wanted to run a weekend yoga retreat on an island to generate some money and have a holiday on the island.

I just happen to love islands, and having holidays on them.

The downside was...

• I didn't have a database of people interested in yoga retreats
• I had no money for advertising
• I needed a way to receive cash and credit card orders from customers (I was on holiday already and didn't have any facilities of my own).
• I also had no phone because I was traveling at the time and it was before mobile phones were available en masse.

I adapted the promotion I had used for my health seminars to make it sound like a yoga retreat brochure.

Then I took that brochure down to the local New Age shop, and asked if they would help me put on this yoga retreat, and share in the profit.

The New Age shop was the place where yoga people went to buy their incense, yoga books, meditation music and so on.

They said yes, because they didn't have to do any work except take the cash and credit card orders (which they just put through their cash register or eftpos machine), and take messages on their phone for me if any customers enquired about the retreat by phone.

As a bonus, they also had a handwritten database of new age people who had bought stuff in their store.

My side of the deal was to type up their database (which took 2 hours or so), send the brochure to the people on the database, and teach yoga at the retreat (and have a holiday on the island).

The partnership worked well.

I got enough orders to pay for my holiday and make a bit of extra cash as well.

The new age shop owners got a nice commission for their help, plus a computerised version of their database, which they worked at building more after that.

Check out the yoga retreat brochure here