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Well-planned Partnerships
Can Forge a Winning Strategy

by Robert A. Wood

While the term "partnerships" has been worked to death, it may still be the best word (along with alliances) to describe the collaborative model followed by many small businesses.

In the case of our company, 8020Info Inc., our entire focus is on helping small businesses to make better decisions and design their way forward to success – especially with decisions related to marketing, HR, information/communications technology and management planning. Since we use the Internet, e-mail and interactive tech-oriented tools in our work, you might think of us as "digital" small business consultants.

Although we have considerable core expertise on staff, we're still a small company. We cannot possibly afford to hire cadres of full-time experts, project managers and consultants for every conceivable topic that might one day be an issue for our clients. Nor would our clients want to pay for those overheads. Still, we want to have the capacity to meet their needs quickly and effectively. At the same time, the range of skills and expertise required for our more traditional types of consulting projects may vary immensely from contract to contract. We have had to find a solution to these challenges.

A Network of Expertise

8020Info's response has been the development of an expertise network – alliances with specialist advisors, other businesses, and consulting partners – available to work in virtual teams on the development of our own interactive decision tools and small business services, or on projects for our clients.

Some of these partnerships involve experts paid on a fee-for-service basis. Others are strategic: we share mutual business interests and help each other in turn. In certain cases, service providers coordinate their work with us but may invoice our clients directly.

Some allied businesses and consulting firms are just great companies that complement the work of 8020Info; we're glad to hook them up with our clients to solve problems with skills, experience and expertise outside our domain. In turn, we appreciate it when they bring us in to help their clients in areas of our special knowledge and expertise.

So, in our daily operations, we function in many ways like a virtual company. We coordinate expertise and quickly coalesce around any particular task, project or program. The system may sound great – it is adaptive, flexible, time and cost efficient – but it also involves a lot of complexity and hard work.

Partnerships succeed when…

In our experience these partnerships succeed best when certain conditions are in play:

The partners have a commitment to collaboration and respect each other's expertise.
They trust each other and put the interests of the project ahead of their own narrow or short-term interests.
Their business interests coincide rather than conflict; the benefits for each partner reinforce the alliance rather than weaken it. Sometimes there are legal issues to be clarified or resolved (best done in advance of the project).
Since there is little or no past tradition to guide a newly minted virtual working relationship (as there would be among people and departments who have worked together for a long period of time), partners must be very clear on their roles, objectives and tasks. They must also learn them quickly. In the absence of hard structure, the need for clarity and fast action also applies to issues of authority, project control and task coordination.
To work well together, all partners need to understand each other. It helps to share a common set of professional values, augmented by first-rate interpersonal skills and an appreciation of differences in communication and work styles.

To date we've had good results with virtual teams and our network of partnerships. If you need to harness a wide range of just-enough just-in-time resources to serve a dynamic market, they may offer you a winning strategy too.