Thinking of collaborating, partnering, or white labeling a service? This is a guide for understanding the symbiotic (mutual) benefits of business collaboration.
Adding a collaboration element to your business can help you reach your goals faster.
And sometimes?
Your best collaboration can be with a direct competitor!
Keep reading to learn about the power of collaboration for your small business and how to go about it for better brand development.
- What Is Business Collaboration?
- What Are Examples Of Business Collaboration?
- How Can I Find Great Collaborators For My Brand?
- The Bottom Line With Business Partnerships
What Is Business Collaboration?
Business collaboration (sometimes called co-branding) deals with 2 or more parties coming together to accomplish a business objective.
These two parties can be anything between 2 people or 2 enterprises.
The benefit of business collaboration is that you have more people working together towards a goal.
This creates a synergistic relationship, especially if each party’s assets complement one another.
Just look at Kanye West and Adidas.
Kanye’s deal with Adidas helped him boost the value of the Yeezy shoe brand to over 4 billion dollars.
Another (more common) example is an entrepreneur with excellent public speaking skills collaborating with a freelancer with fantastic videography and editing skills. Say they’re working on an education company — they could build something bigger than if they worked at it separately.
If you’re a small business owner, collaborating with others and even competitors can benefit your business more than you think.
Let’s look at a few examples of business collaboration to give you ideas on what you can adopt.
What Are Examples Of Business Collaboration?
Expanding What You Offer
Every business (no matter how big) has a finite amount of capital, time, employees, and resources to invest.
We know that means you can only offer so much to your customer base with this being true.
By collaborating with another business, you can expand your business’s capabilities to even additional services.
For example, you can white-label service under your brand’s name and give a portion of the sales to the white label partner company that fulfills the service.
By partnering in this way, both companies generate revenue and can even learn new things about their industry.
Serving Customers Better
Your customers are the backbone of your business because they bring in the revenue.
You can partner with another business to help improve product development or customer service.
For instance, you can hire a virtual assistant from an agency to handle your company’s customer service. You won’t have the expense of training this person from scratch.
If your business is a software-related product, you can hire an engineering company to create the code or platform your software will run on. This is known as outsourcing, but among smal business owners, it’s just another form of collaboration. It saves you time and money in implementing additional staff, since agencies often cost less and their people come with specialized knowledge.
Partnering in this fashion benefits your business internally (fewer costs) and externally (better customer experience).
Sharing Audiences
Combining audiences with someone in your niche can open your business to new customers.
This is especially the case with online-based businesses.
You can co-brand content, a product, or a service to expose your company to new customers and leverage the reputation of your partner.
Manufacturing Goods
If you sell products online or via brick and mortar, you can outsource the manufacturing and shipping of your product to a company.
And there are long-term benefits to this.
Often, as you build a relationship with your partner company, they can offer you lower manufacturing and shipping rates. This is an excellent way of lowering your operational costs, and it can compound significantly in just a single year.
All thanks to a strong business relationship.
Pretty cool, huh?
How Can I Find Great Collaborators For My Brand?
In this section, we’ll discuss how you can go about finding a solid partner in just 4 steps.
- Analyze your strengths – Where does your business excel? What value can you bring to another company, and how?
- Analyze your needs – What could you gain from an ideal collaborator, and why?
- Find companies – After you have your criteria, look for companies that match them. You can search social media portals like LinkedIn and Facebook groups. You can also email decision-makers of other companies or give them a call. Contacting enough potential collaborators increases your odds of landing the right partner.
- Collaborate – With everything in place and an agreement reached, begin collaborating. Offer as much value as possible. You’ll reap the advantages of partnering and learn valuable lessons you can apply to future partnerships.
The Bottom Line With Business Partnerships
Business partnerships make it easier for you to deliver more value to your marketplace since you’re adding business assets via your partnership.
Competitors don’t always spell competition…
Sometimes…they spell cooperation!
Keep this in mind as you grow your small business and work to expand on your business’s resources, leverage points, and capabilities.