I’ve been thinking about this question recently. As a consultant, I fully believe in the power of partnerships, or else I wouldn’t have risked the last 2 years on trying to support my family on building a business on helping companies succeed through partnerships.
And over the time working with multiple clients—mature and startup, I’ve learned a lot. One of which is timing.
In building a business, timing is everything. There’s so much that goes into building a business that is completely out of your control. Markets. Politics. Economics. Public sentiment. Ecosystem. Technology. Business licenses. Taxes. States. So. Much. Going. On.
And partnerships is the same. Partnerships is a force multiplier for your business, both in growth and, well, not growth. Partnerships are the great revealer of where your business is. Partnerships will tell you clearly if you have a product market fit, or if your market even knows that your product exists.
But partnerships can’t create your product market fit. They only reveal if it exists.
I was recently working with a startup client to help them navigate through building and working with partners. At the beginning we had a hunch of how they could go to market with partners. After 3 months we learned something extremely valuable, they actually wanted to pursue their partners as customers.
PIVOT!
Through all our partner outreach and discovery, here’s what we learned, our product wasn’t ready for partners. And the product we wanted to build would actually be better served as a tool for those partners, rather than their customers. We learned our partners were our customers.
So, we pivoted away from building more partnerships, and pivoted towards building a product for these agencies.
So the partner conversation was put on hold. We ended our contract, and they're off to continue the adventure of building a business. True startup. Building, learning, iterating, pivoting.
Partnerships couldn’t “solve” their problem of not growing their business. The partnership motion revealed they weren’t ready for partnerships, yet.
There’s a lot going around about how to grow your partnership program from 0 to $XX million, or $XXX million. The content is great. And the celebration is real. But something keeps nagging on me—those companies also expanded exponentially more during that same timeframe. In those stories, the partnership influence and growth exploded at the same time as the company grew. It wasn’t 100% partnership led growth.
Your partner influenced/sourced revenue will grow in proportion to your company.
Did partnerships accelerate the growth? Most likely, and quite possibly. But it’s good to remember that partnerships is not the hero, it’s an accelerator and a revealer.
Partnerships work when your company is working.
So when is too early, too early?
Check your current company growth. Are you growing at a forecastable and scalable rate? If your answer is yes, then I think it’s worth exploring and beginning to discover your partnership motion.
If your answer is no, then partnerships will only confirm that fact.
Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash