Strategic Partnering and Effective Collaboration Benefit Small Businesses

Small businesses can benefit from strategic partnering and collaborating efficiently with other complimentary small businesses. Choosing suitable partners and working smarter, not harder, are the key to reaping the benefits.

Identifying the need for a partnership in your business

This is the easy part, in most cases, but shouldn’t be taken lightly either. There are certain products or services that you currently offer or want to offer that jump out immediately in your mind. Evaluate your options and choose a direction that you want to go.

Choosing a strategic partner and testing the waters

Finding a suitable partner to assist you with jumping into a new product or service offering is the second step. Although this step is a critical point, you are really looking to find like minded companies, get to know them and maybe test the waters with a single project. After an initial project, you will be able to evaluate whether the partnership is a good fit.

Five tips for choosing a strategic partner

• Evaluate your current contacts for possible partners
• Talk with others you trust to find possible partners
• Once potential partners are identified, talk to potential partners
• Evaluate potential partners knowledge and experience
• Lastly, after talking and review the possible strategic partner—do you feel comfortable testing the waters with them?

Collaborating Effectively

There are lots of tools available at low costs to help you and your strategic partners work more effectively and efficiently. Email is great and it has its purposes (think notifications about new issues, etc), but email should not be used as the sole means of collaboration between two partners.

Recommended collaboration tools

1. Time Tracking – Harvest
2. Issue Tracking – Sifter
3. Lightweight Project Management – Basecamp
4. Instant Messaging, Voice Communication and Video Conferencing – Skype

Benefits of Strategic Partnerships and Effective Collaboration

As laid out earlier, successful partnerships and collaboration can reap many benefits for your company, agency or firm. Identifying, finding and testing the waters with a partner is critical to the process and helps ensure successful partnerships. Here are a few benefits of strategic partnerships.

• Quicker time to market for your service or product via effective and efficient collaboration
• Better deliverables because both sides of the partnership are focused on areas they are most comfortable with
• Eases the burden on staff to learn or perform a task that they have little or no previous experience with
• Positions you to tackle bigger and better projects