Partnerships For Growth

Unlikely Sources of Start-up Capital
March 07, 2007, 11:26 AM
I had lunch with a friend last week, the former CEO of a bio tech company, who decided to start another business--this time, she was going to "partner" with local business associates and/or trusted advisors and associates to raise capital, instead of going the traditional venture capital route. To readers of this blog, you might think she decided to hit up Friends and Family --but no, she clarified, these weren't family and technically, not friends either. They are individuals she respects, has had an existing relationship with at a business level, and want a solid return on investment. I asked ...

Getting Started? Get a Channel Strategy
March 01, 2007, 10:37 PM
Ok, I get it. Enough with the emails telling me to stop talking partners and start talking channel. For the uninitiated with this blog, my bias is towards partner purity. In other words, I use the word Partner when talking about an organization that impacts 2 or more departments within a company, such as marketing and distribution, or operations and finance. Forget that I wrote a book on this subject. I´m clearly in a minority for companies with less than 10 employees. A channel partner IS a partner, it just happens to impact a single area-sales. Not bad of course, ...

Top 10 Questions for Prospective Partnerships
February 28, 2007, 8:56 AM
My dad, the consumate entrepreneur, had a saying. It was more important to decline 1 bad business opportunity than taking on 10 good ones. When it comes to dating or potential partners, this holds true. The pain and agony is simply not worth the hassle. 10. What's the impact of the partnership to your business? Get metrics. This determines how you stack-rank against the other existing and potential partnerships. Press for quanitiable figures--% of growth, % of over all revenue for the quarter/year. It the answer can't ge quantified because they "haven't run the numbers", get a sense of the ...

Short Term Partnerships
February 26, 2007, 1:33 PM
Does such a thing exist? Absolutely. Short term partnerships are generally created to support a specific goal or event. A Joint Development fits into this category, when a new product is being developed, bringing 2 or more partners together for the initiative. When two small companies work together, the partnership is over once the product is completed. A Joint Development Agreement (JDA) is different from a Joint Venture, which is all over allbusiness.com. Small companies use a JV less often than a JDA because JV's are more time consuming to construct (read legal time), tend to have longer-term goals, and ...

Partnership to Press: Do it Yourself Partner PR
February 23, 2007, 10:30 AM
The best way to create new leads is through press coverage, and a zero cost way to accomplish this is by writing and submitting a case study to a magazine, be it an ezine or traditional publication. Partnerships offer new angles on a boring case study, so I´m going to delve into one consultant in the retail field who took on a partner, made money (3K a month within 60 days) and wrote a case study-all at zero cost to him. Case Study 101 A case study has 4 components: problem faced, options, solution and outcomes. When the case study ...

Increase Revenue Through the Local SBDC
February 20, 2007, 11:07 AM
About once every six months I end up writing a piece on the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC). Of the calls I take each week, I probably suggest this organization at least half the time. I do so because the mission of the group is to connect and grow small businesses. This is done by soliciting speakers and programs for their monthly (and sometimes weekly) forums. If you are in a services business, have a expertise to share and want to get new referrals, you need to check out your local SBDC today. Why the SBDC? When I first moved ...

Yours, Mine, Ours: Partnering to Win Big Accounts
February 13, 2007, 7:44 AM
When the CEO's of two small advertising agencies in the northeast found themselves continually competiting with one another for accounts--and losing out to a third party--they decided to consider a partnership to capture missed opportunities yet retain their unique identities. The solution? A Master Agreement. What is it? A Master Agreement (MA) has completely different definitions for different industries. In the context of Partnerships, a MA carves up a market for two or more companies; allowing the firms to protect existing clients, go after new clients together while communicating clear boundaries to partners, prospects and clients. Companies of all size ...

Partner Attraction 101: Improve Your Small Biz Web Sites
February 09, 2007, 8:18 AM
As a small business, you are hussling to leverage your assets so you can go farther with less. Hopefully a part of this is going after partners--a tried and true way to accomplish this goal. Have you slowed down enough to provide an opporutunity for companies to come after YOU? I'm talking about a partner section on your web site that filters, qualifies and provides you with interesting opportunities for growth--with less work! What's Involved Very little. Or rather, the presentation of what's involved is clearcut. Take MyBizHomepage.com's partner section. In less than ninety days, this relatively new start up ...

A Good Partnership Press Release Part 1
February 05, 2007, 9:58 AM
Writing a good partnership press release is not easy. So many releases use vague (or made up) terms, fail to identify what the partnership does or worse, leave out the benefits to the industry or consumer. I found a great example of a good press release that I'm going to walk through. I prefer take a good example than a bad since I assume that if you're reading this, you have a release you have to create. (Besides, it takes too much time to delete all the names, change the industries and products to protect the guilty.) If you have ...

Can MLMs Partner for Growth: Absolutely
January 31, 2007, 4:21 PM
MLMs- Multi-Level Marketing companies have come a long way in the last twenty years. No longer laughable organizations such as Amway or Mary Kay -but hip, well known and dare I say, beloved organizations like Lia Sophia and Silpada , whose jewelry grace the arms of Demi Moore and Jessica Biel. Presently, hundreds of thousands of independent consultants make lots money working from home, who look, act, walk and talk like the small business owners in any other industry. Personally, I've avoided MLMs like the plague, so it came as a shock that I'd been supporting this industry ...