November 5, 2017
Don’t partner up with anyone until you ask yourself these 10 questions. Strategic alliances: They’re great when used effectively to expand the range of your product or service offerings; they’re not so great when you collect them like Manolo Blahnik shoes, merely because, well, everyone else has them. “Strategic alliance” is a chic but vague term people use to refer to a spectrum of business relationships. At one end, you have referral relationships–getting and giving client leads. Toward the other end, you have joint ventures, where two companies form a separate entity for a specific purpose or discrete project. And then, in the fuzzy middle, lie strategic alliances that bring two or more parties together contractually, like in preferred trading partner arrangements. In this type of strategic alliance, the companies remain financially and structurally independent but commit to using the other regularly–sometimes exclusively–for particular kinds of projects or work. A marketing strategy consultancy might align itself with a graphic design firm. Each can function happily on its own and isn’t a competitor; but in partnership…
Continue ReadingThey say that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” and the same applies to raising capital for your business from friends and family. The personal relationship should act as an extra warning flag…
Read MoreFrom the other side of the globe, I came across an interesting post on “Mixing Business with Friendship,” which adds a slightly different nuance to our earlier friends and family post. It agrees that “[n]o…
Read MoreAuthor and entrepreneur Michael Gerber was quoted as saying, “Businesses fail not because their dream is too big, but because their dream is too small and too realistic to sustain the life they want.” Simply…
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