- How to identify the right partnerships for your business.
That's what I'm excited to share with you guys
in today's video.
I'm gonna be talking about the four key
aspects of finding the right partners,
but before that, I wanna share a quick
story with you guys.
I'm gonna tell you, I had probably one
of the worst experiences ever partnering with a company
and at first, it was all great.
I think maybe if you've ever gone through this,
that's usually how it starts off.
They're great, they're fun, everything's awesome.
There's so much strategic alignment,
and you're like, yaay, this is gonna
be a great partnership, and then
a few months into it, you're working
with a few customers, maybe they promoted
your product or your services,
and you find out that their values were flawed,
and that's what happened with me.
I was working with this partner out of New Jersey.
It was great at the beginning.
We had like four or five people on their team.
It's when I was building my company sphere,
and it was a great growth opportunity.
People ask me all the time, well how did you
grow 150% year over year for four years.
Well, honestly, it was just really smart,
strategic partnerships.
Same thing with Flowtown.
If you don't know about Flowtown, we partnered
with, I think, 12 or 15 different companies
that had e-mail addresses and using this
strategy, that's what I wanna share with you guys today.
Eww, I said their name.
Anyways, the company in New Jersey was so bad that it
got to the point where we just had to stop working
together.
Their approach to business and their values and their ethics
made us look bad.
My team got frustrated and I just gotta tell you
that no matter what you do in business,
your word is the only thing that you have, right?
You might have people and revenue and money
and all that stuff, but is your word doesn't mean
things, it doesn't get you far and for what I did
and what I wanted to create, that was number one.
So, I wanna walk you through these four key areas.
Number one is shared customers.
Does the partner, if you're looking to partner
with a company, does that company have a shared
customer base, your ideal customer,
do they have a large majority because
many times, big companies wanna partner
with startups because they wanna get access
to your customers but if you look at their
customer base, it could be old, stoggy,
not innovative, not early adopters.
So, is that truly your ideal customer?
Probably not.
So I wanna challenge you to really ask
yourself, does this partnership, us partnering
with them gonna get us in front
of our ideal customer?
Not them get in front of your new, innovative,
smart, faster, bigger pockets type of customers,
but them because that is really the true value.
So that's number one.
Number two is do you have an early committment from them?
You know, when you're building your startup,
it's easy, especially if you're small and they're big,
it's easy for you to get excited about the opportunity
and start thinking about, oh, if we do this
and when this goes off great, it's gonna generate
so much revenue for us, but the true is is
they as a big company take a while to make decisions,
and at any point, and this has happened to me
many times, the person that you're working with
could change jobs, could get fired, could get
reassigned, and everything you've worked on
over the last few months will go south.
So what I always suggest to startup founders, as I advise
and I've invested in over 30 plus entrepreneurs
as an angel investor, I always tell them,
when they're looking at doing deals,
get an early, upfront financial committment
from that company cause it's just gonna
set the expectations because you're small
and fragile as a startup and they're big and established,
and if they aren't willing to throw down, $5,000,
$10,000 to set that relationship up
from the beginning, then you gotta
really question how valuable they see this
potential relationship being long term.
The third area that you gotta nail, okay,
to me if you sacrifice this, you can go in for
a world of hate is strategic alignment,
specifically around the product roadmap, right?
I don't know if you've ever ran into this,
but I've seen entrepreneurs all the time
get a call from a big company that wants
to use their product and we want to pay
you and we want to partner with you,
but it needs to change a few features.
For this to really work for us, we need
to add these two or three different things,
and it's totally kind of different than what
they've built so far, and if they go down
that path, there's potential that the roadmap
they've created is gonna get delayed
or that they're gonna have features if that
partnership doesn't really take off the way
you expect it to.
Those features and code base is something
you're gonna have to support.
So, I always suggest to make sure that the
alignment of what they need as a partner
and where you wanna go on your product
roadmap are in the same directions
because if they're totally left and right field,
you're gonna be asking for a world of hurt.
The fourth most important is make sure
that there's brand alignment, right.
That you would be, and here's the word,
proud to be associated with that partner.
I've seen many opportunities, especially
around distribution and marketing where companies
will allow another business to promote them,
and truthfully, when they ask about that deal,
they don't even want to talk about it.
It was just like this shady, underbelly kind of thing
that they did to just try to get their message
out there, to get their product used by more people
but there is nothing that they would be proud
to run home and say, hey mom, we just did a deal
with this kind of company, and they would be
totally ashamed.
So, make sure that you understand where their brain
values and ethics, like I made the mistake where
I should have dug deeper when I did that partnership
with the company out of New Jersey,
but I didn't and later on, months of effort
and time and my team involvement found out
that we were not aligned.
So, again, I wanna quickly review this.
The way to make amazing strategic partnerships
is a shared customer base, ideal customer, your
core customer avatar.
Make sure that that partner has that in spades.
The other one is an early financial committment
from that partner to make sure that they,
cause when you're small, you're gonna put
a lot of your eggs in that same basket, and for them,
it's one of a hundred different things they're doing
that year.
So make sure that they give you some kind
of financial deposit, committment towards
that partnership long term.
The third one is strategic alignment on roadmap.
So, where you're going on your product roadmap,
where they wanna go, they're aligned,
and then the fourth one is making sure that
you be proud to have them as a partner.
That is my four strategies for you to have
an amazing partnership.
I wanna ask you to subscribe to this channel
and also share this video.
If you know somebody that's about
making a big partnership decision,
share this video with them.
I wanna ask you, this is your opportunity to brag
a little bit, below in the comments,
leave a comment, let me know,
what partnership have you done in the past
that was just world-class, that you just,
it was instrumental in the growth in your business,
in the learnings, in all aspects of just
what we just talked about, it is an amazing
partnership.
I want you to take the opportunity to honor them.
Mention them below in the comments.
I wanna challenge you guys, as usual,
live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.