The Importance of Collaboration
As an entrepreneur collaboration means the ability to work with different people or business entities in order to foster growth, obtain a specific objective, promote scalability and strength in your organization.
When working to scale a business, partnerships and collaboration are essential if not required to generate sustainable growth both in brand and profit.
The ability to properly scale a business consistently is indeed challenging because as a brand begins to grow new obstacles are encountered during each step which require new, unique or more sophisticated elements of understanding, planning and resources to overcome them. It’s why so many businesses hit a plateau and stay there sometimes for years. This can be dangerous as the inability to innovate opens the door for competition to make new advances in your industry or encroach upon your client base. This is where collaboration, sharing and forging partnerships, leads to triumph over these circumstances and allows for a business to truly grow sustainably.
Take a small bakery business as an example, say they have one location creating delicious baked goods sweet and savory. With the holiday season approaching they face large orders and need more space to produce and store their products. They could stay stagnant, overwork their staff and turn away orders they cannot handle, missing the chance to service all their potential customers. Or the business could forge a partnership with say a neighboring company or facility capable of handling those heavy orders, profits are retained and new capacity and a resource gained.
Another example could be something like a tech company working to sell their digital products for download; however their business utilizes a website that can’t handle a high demand of traffic. They could stay closed-minded and let the customer go without the product or opt to collaborate by hiring a firm specializing in the IT space to resolve the potential roadblock, that collaboration and the addition of a resource will now allow them the ability to scale and grow their brand.
This may seem like common sense, however so many business owners miss this and shy away of collaboration for two main reasons:
1. They believe they can take care of everything themselves or internally
2. There is often a cost, or sharing in revenue associated with collaboration
With the first objection, often times the business owner or founders are unaware they are making this mistake. It’s easy for someone who has created or founded a brand or business to get caught up in doing most of everything themselves. That’s fine at the immediate outset of a business launch, however as an individual, you cannot be an expert in everything and in order for your business to truly scale, you have to get comfortable with handing the reigns over to someone who has more experience and qualifications in a particular field or talented at carrying out a specific task.
Collaboration like this not only gets a job done in a more efficient and precise manner, but it also frees up more time for the CEO and executive staff to focus on more pressing issues. Time is money. It’s certainly more efficient to hire someone who’s an expert to create a website for instance, as opposed to taking the hours to learn and build one by yourself.
The second most prevalent reason many business owners lack the vision to see the value collaboration, is that it often comes with a price tag. Whether it’s payment up front for a service or some form of revenue sharing via a partnership.
The mindset here needs to change. Frame collaboration as not an expenditure but an investment, a valuable opportunity to add potential revenue through growth, by strengthening your business’ network and overall value.
Companies have a great opportunity to become stronger and provide more value to their clients through collaboration. By bringing on partners, whether internally, by a direct hire or contract, or external through referrals or other agreements. You create the ability to broaden your business’ network and allow for customers to gain access to a variety of resources, products or services outside your immediate prevue whilst keeping them under your business’ umbrella.
Addition is key to growth and the only way to scale, try to think of a hire or onboarding of a partner as an opportunity to grow your team. All the most successful companies do this and do it well, some go as far as completely acquiring other businesses to bolster their own output or amplify an area in which they are lacking ability or expertise.
There is no such thing as a self-made man, neither is there a solopreneur who has been able to truly scale a business sustainably. Growing a business is not a solo mission, your network and partnerships is what will add value to you and your brand. Teamwork and collaboration are at the heart of every true success story.
To gain personalized guidance for your business on this topic and others contact us.
- Vince Calace
Founder - Venture Business Development