Build Strategic Partnerships

​Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a full army to build a business.  One of the most common and fatal mistakes business owners and leaders make is to try to do it alone.  It’s impossible.  Trust me… IMPOSSIBLE.  Look at the organization chart of any successful business. It’s full of people who are an integral part of the business’ success.

Let’s look at this from the top down.  If you’re a business owner, the absolute best thing you can do is to surround yourself with people who are good at the things that you are terrible at or simply don’t like doing.  Today we’re talking about strategic partners.  That means these people/businesses are outside of the organizational chart of your company.  These are people who share your ideal client and are regularly talking about the problems your products and services solve.

Your strategic partners are businesses who can refer clients to you and vice versa (don’t forget to be a giver first).  If you’re just starting out, a strategic partner may also be someone whom you can trade services with.  An example would be that someone does your marketing for free if you do their bookkeeping for free.  This is the ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours model’.  This is not a bad place to start if you’re just starting out.  Don’t trade everything tho… you’ll find yourself busy doing all the trade work and won’t have any time left to build your business or serve your clients.

If you’re a department or team leader, your strategic partners are other department leads.  Ask yourself, what other departments does my team need to be successful every day?  You need to get to know the other department leads.  You need to understand their work rhythm.  It could be extremely different from your work rhythm and could cause problems.  Get ahead of that now.  Don’t wait for a missed deadline to learn how others are working.  What works for your department may not work for someone else’s.  It doesn’t make either right or wrong.  You have to function in the best manner for your immediate team but that doesn’t mean you get to be closed off from other business rhythms.

 

Get to know people on a deeper level

 

The more you know about those that you rely on, the better you’ll be able to plan for your interaction with them and your ultimate success in interacting with them.

Take your strategic partners out to lunch… regularly.  Get to know them.  Get to know their business rhythm.  Get to know how to best interact with them.  I promise you that it will change and ease the manner in which you work with others.  Adopt a people first mentality and those people will surely take care of you.

Schedule at least one lunch with a strategic partner every single month.  Put it on your calendar now. Reserve the first Friday as your day to go out to lunch.  You have to eat anyway.  You may as well make a friend and partner while you do it.

Need More?

 

Need a little more guidance planning for the success of your business? I'll let you in on a secret - I need guidance all the time!  Really!  The absolute best thing I have ever done for my business was to decide not to do it all alone.

That's why I built the DoverDrive Experience.  I know what it's like to carry the weight of a growing business on your shoulders and feel the pressure of having to know everything at all times.  It's exhausting and impossible.

Inside the DoverDrive Experience, you're getting learning/doing content shared with you EVERY week.  That means you create a cycle of business development.

You see, the biggest mistake that business owners make is that they only work ON their business when something isn't going right or when they don't have enough business to meet financial goals.  The truth is, if you work on yourbusiness continuously, you'd have less problems and less periods of feast or famine.

Join us inside the DoverDrive Experience and let's get started GROWING your business.

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