Leveraging partnerships to grow your business

Having the right partner can get you far in life. They can help you develop your strengths, compensate for your weaknesses, and achieve your goals. The same can be said for business partnerships. The right business partner can help you better support your clients, reach a wider audience, and access resources that simplify your journey towards growth and success.

But how do you get started on leveraging partnerships to grow your business? Let’s get into it below.

Identifying a partner

Business partners can provide you with a variety of benefits, from exposure to capital. That is, if they’re a good partner! Finding a good business partner takes skill and wise judgement. The first thing you’ll want to consider is the type of partnership you’re interested in.

Types of partnerships

Partnerships come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but to get you started, let’s take a look at the most common ones:

Co-branding partnership

This type of partnership involves pooling your resources to create a collaborative product or two complementary ones. Think Betty Crocker and Hershey’s.

Sales partnership

Visit your local vet, and see them stocking a specific brand of dog grooming products, they only sell those shampoos and accessories. That, in essence, is a classic sales partnership: one partner’s products are sold or advertised in the other partner’s store. This can be online and can be applied to the sales of services (a hairdresser’s chair in a beauty salon for example) as well as products.

Service exchange partnership

Think of bartering. You provide your partner with a service they require, and in exchange, they provide you with one that you require. In exchange for exposure, you provide your partner with your product, for example. Or a writer and graphic designer may partner up, swapping their written and visual skillsets to mutually benefit one another.

Look locally

With the type of partnership you’re pursuing decided, you can begin the search for your ideal business partner.

Start local. This can be geographically, considering businesses in the area, or it can be ‘local’ to your industry and connections, utilising the network of current customers and suppliers. 

You’re likely to be more familiar with the fine details of their business, their strengths and weaknesses too. As such, it’ll be easier to assess how the pieces of your different companies fit together, whether a jigsaw or a square in a circular hole!

Branch out

If your local businesses aren’t lining up with your partnership vision, you can start to look elsewhere. Consider looking up companies that aren’t your direct competitors, but offer complementary services to yours. 

This way, they can add value to your business without directly competing with it.

I’ve found a partner – now what?

You’ve looked locally and beyond, and you’ve found a business you believe would add value to your own. What to do now? Let’s go through it!

Be honest about resources

You’re excited to be partnering with a business that can help you. They are too. Yet business partnerships aren’t one-sided: if they’re holding up their end of the bargain, you need to be able to do so as well. If you aren’t able to but had agreed to, your business and reputation are at risk.

As such, before you enter into a partnership, be honest about the resources you have available. These resources aren’t strictly fiscal: they include people, leadership, time, energy, and services.

Establish clear and concise goals

Businesses need achievable and measurable goals to succeed, and to be successful, a partnership needs clear and concise communication. The two come hand in hand. Before you take any big steps, you need to establish both businesses’ goals and objectives, how you’ll get there, and how you’ll measure all steps along the way.

By having a solid understanding of each other’s goals, you can work in unison to get there with clarity. Setting benchmarks as a way to measure your journey will make it significantly easier to track your progress and see if any adjustments need to be made.

Stay cautious and clearly defined

Whilst many partnerships go well—like CoverGirl and Lucasfilm ‘star-studded’ collaboration—some do not. In the event that yours leans towards the latter, it’s better to stay safe than sorry. That’s why it’s vital to put everything in writing. That’s right, everything. The responsibilities of both parties, the amount of allocated time and resources, and most importantly, an exit strategy.

If the partnership goes bad, you’ll want a clearly defined route to dissolution. In the event it goes well, the agreement will give you clarity, and ensure you can maintain equal control over the partnership and products being created.

Get excited!

Starting and maintaining a partnership to grow your business can feel daunting, but more than anything, it is exciting. 

After all, you’re engaging with another business for the purpose of working together to scale and achieve success! Whilst there are a lot of careful steps to be made along the way, by leveraging these partnerships, your business will be better placed to grow. Lean on one another in tricker times because done right, together we are stronger and better placed to meet our objectives on the way up, towards the light.

Written for Empowering a Billion Women, August 11 2021