An Entrepreneur’s View to Partnerships

Being laid off was the greatest opportunity for me to learn about partnerships.

In January 2023, I was part of the hundreds of thousands of people in the tech sector who were laid off. After the explosive growth in the post-Covid years, many companies retracted their exorbitant spending on new hires and “growth at all costs” mindset. Some succeeded during this season, others did not.

And finding myself out of a job, was the greatest opportunity for me to take ownership of my career and work within partnerships of my life.

I’d grown up in my career learning how to manage and work with partnerships. My first partnership role included trying to figure out how to motivate and navigate through the legal complexities of a major US telephone carrier. I’d never done this before, and my manager saw something in me that I didn’t see. I’m forever grateful for that opportunity. I grew and learned so much during those early years of partnership development. Over time we handed off that budding partnership to another team and I moved over to technology partnerships. Our software solution integrated with many different tools, and we had an opportunity to grow our awareness in our market through these differentiated integrations. It led me to some incredible relationships that I’m still so grateful for today. Finally, it gave me an opportunity to take another job leading the technology integration go to market at another company, where I finally got laid off.

And like I said, I don’t regret a single moment. Because it was here that I learned my most important lesson in partnerships—ownership.

As an entrepreneur, we are held responsible for every area of our business. When it’s just you building a business, there’s no one else to blame, ask for help, or delegate responsibilities to. It’s not for everyone, but an incredible journey if you take it. Building a business from zero requires you to work on marketing, sales, legal, accounting, customer success (if you can get to your first customer), product development, long term strategy and so much more. It was the perfect place for me to learn about the importance of prioritization. We only have so many hours in the day, so much space in our brains for problem solving, and only so much space to make decisions.

Decision fatigue is real.

So you learn to prioritize. You learn to make decisions ahead of time for you, your business, and the sanity of your family.

And it’s here that I’ve learned the most about partnerships.

There’s always an opportunity to figure out, dream up, and discover new partners. There’s so many different types of companies out there that potentially could work well with you and your business. We could build MSPs, technology integrations, reseller relationships, distribution partnerships, affiliates, referrals, agencies, etc. There’s no shortage of possibilities. The question becomes, how do I build the partnerships that make a difference for my business? How do I take ownership for the results of our partnerships within our ecosystem? How do we make the greatest impact with the partners that we do have?

If we only think about our partnership program as a number of integrations or number of resellers, we’re cutting ourselves short and missing out on the greatest impact of partnerships—building our business.

That’s why entrepreneurship has been the greatest impact on my journey as a partner leader. Every decision I make for my business comes down to, will this help move my business forward? If it doesn’t, I say, “not yet” and move on to something that makes a difference right now. I say not yet, because I’m not saying no to bad things for my business, I’m learning to say no to the good things that will get done eventually. Just not today.

As partner leaders, we need to do the same. We need to think about building our partnership programs as an entrepreneur thinks about building a business.

How do you do that if you’ve never built a business? The good news is, we don’t have to build a business to learn how entrepreneurs build theirs. Here’s some steps for you to consider:

1. Create a vision.

Every entrepreneur has a vision for what they are doing, where they are going, what they’d like to accomplish. If they didn’t, they would have kept their idea a side project or just that, an idea. It’s when we catch a vision of what’s possible with our ideas that could turn into a business that we start moving. I often quote Yogi Berra here, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” If you want to give you and your partner program, and ultimately your business, the best chance of success, you need to create a vision. It’d doesn’t have to be polished and perfect, but you do need to define what success looks like. Otherwise you’ll have nothing to align to.

2. Align your work to your vision

When we create our vision, then we need to do the work of aligning our every day work to the vision. We need to constantly remind ourselves that what we’re doing is the right work because it helps us get to the vision we’ve created. Otherwise, we’ll get distracted and easily wander off the path. I’ve known this to be true. There was a time when I was told to build a partnership with a company that had nothing to do with our core business. There’s a balance between expansion into new markets and walking around aimlessly to new markets. We had no business going into that market, it didn’t make sense with our customer base, nor our company’s vision for the future. We did it anyway. And a year later, we had nothing to show for it.

3. Do the work.

The last piece of thinking like an entrepreneur, which will help us with our partnerships, is doing the work. An entrepreneur shows up everyday and does the work. Here’s what I mean. Because there’s no one else on your team, because you haven’t hired them yet, there’s no one else to do the mundane tasks of running the business. Every Friday I have to go into Quickbooks and update our accounts, reconcile expenses, and pay our bills. There’s no one else to do that. But if I don’t, then the business wouldn’t last. So I build a system to make sure I’m doing all the work that needs to get done. The fun, and the not so fun. Partner leaders, we need to do the same. Sometimes we just need to show up and put in the time with one partner over a long period of time to get to the success we’ve envisioned. It’s Alex Hormozi who says something to the effect of, the only difference between a successful entrepreneur and someone who doesn’t make it is that the successful entrepreneur just kept showing up. (He probably would say that more eloquently, but I hope you get the picture.)

If you’re ready to give you and your company the best chance of success with partnerships, which is why I believe you even considered continuing to read this blog, then do this one thing. Start thinking about your partnership program as a business. When you and I start taking ownership like that, then there’s no end to what we could accomplish with our partners. So, set the vision, align your work to the vision (constantly) and then do the work.

Because our companies win when our partnerships get better.