A growing international business needs new staff and lots of them.
It needs to have tried-and-tested suppliers to provide the products and services that it can’t deliver itself and it needs them fast.
And it needs strategic partners to help extend its geographic reach and to build a network of customers that will deliver on the business plan.
What these three categories have in common is that every growing business is reliant on people and partners to deliver its strategic growth plans.
For start-ups and developing businesses, having the right team around us is critical to our growth success and it’s definitely not the time to cut corners.
As managers it is likely that we are busier than our peers of 10 or 20 years ago and the speed at which we are required to make important business decisions is accelerating. When we are working in start-ups, this pressure can be ten-fold.
It's time to call in the experts to support us.
It's time to call in the experts to support us.
However busy we are, we must appoint any new relationships with care, whether they are our staff, suppliers or strategic partners. This is because our own success is ultimately reliant on the partners that we choose to represent us.
Our partners success is our success and their failure is ours to own.
It’s tempting, but we should never make our decisions based solely on the candidate that we know best or is closest to hand. In the rush to start-up and grow our businesses we often quickly grab our former colleagues and partners as a short cut to establishing a new team. We have to be careful here.
Once established, it's also critical to review our partnership arrangements regularly to ensure that they remain effective.
We regularly work with businesses who have set up partnerships to manage their interstate and international operations. On closer review, we discover that they are not always delivering the maximum contribution to our client's business. We recommend an annual review and health check for all partnership arrangements to ensure that they are performing to expectation. There's always room for improvement.
We don't achieve something different for our business, simply by replicating an old model so it’s important that our partnership appointments are regularly given due-diligence and tested against alternatives in the market.
No decision is a valid decision until it can be compared against alternatives. A choice of one is not a choice at all.
It's always wise to properly review alternatives as the 'sanity test' to your preferred partnership choice and it's is time worth investing as it provides clarity, validates your decision and defends your position in the event of any conflict. Most importantly, you develop a balanced approach as you are forced to consider the negatives as well as the positives of your preferred partnership choice.
When we take the time to fully review and make informed decisions on our business partners there’s every chance that growth will come stronger and faster than if we select solely from our inner circle.
Once established, it's also critical to review our partnership arrangements regularly to ensure that they remain effective.
The pressures of establishing, growing and maintaining your business are tremendous but be careful to take the time to establish the right partnership network as part of your business development strategy.
Be open minded to change.
Be open minded to change.
The Advisory Partnership assists its clients with business development and operational strategy, delivering outputs that are scalable to meet the challenges of technological change and International growth.
