Although it doesn’t happen much anymore, last week I was approached with a UC50 deal. Here is how it works; an entrepreneur comes to me or someone at my Internet marketing firm and inquires about our services. They are dressed well, speak intelligently, and ask intelligent questions. All of the signs point at this person being a possible new client, and THEN it happens! They want us to do market research, invest resources (money, time, man hours, etc.) into determining the best plan of attack for marketing their product, and then implement the plan. After months of work, trial and error, and data collection, if any sales are made, they are willing to split the revenue from the sales of the product they were so gracious to tell us about.
“I bring you the idea, and you do all the work, then we can split the spoils down the middle!” they say to you. A close friend of mine named this a UC50, or a “Utah County 50/50″. It seems that whenever I or one of my associates gets approached with such an unbalanced offering, it has come out of a Utah County based business. Anymore, it is entertaining to watch the people that come in with such proposals try to justify such an arrangement, and then to flat out say, “NO!”