Are you seeing a full spectrum of partnerships in your independent professional career? Here’s how you can make the most out of them!

Tuesday: Return Driven Strategy FROM THE DESK OF MILES EVERSON: Good partnerships are critical to the success of every business, even in the independent sector. These relationships will help support your firm’s competencies and usher you towards achieving your goals. But do you know that there are all different types of partnerships that you can establish with other businesses or your fellow independent professionals? Keep reading to learn more about these setups and how you can identify the most appropriate type of partnership for your brand. CEO, MBO Partners Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute

Are you seeing a full spectrum of partnerships in your independent professional career? Here’s how you can make the most out of them! Business partnerships range from being very open to being very exclusive. By “open,” what I mean is that these partnerships include basic transactional relationships. Meanwhile, “exclusive” partnerships include legal joint ventures between two firms. Allow me to enumerate some types of partnerships under these two categories: OPEN PARTNERSHIPS Basic vendor-customer models Bid-ask models or auctions Simple buy/sell transactions EXCLUSIVE PARTNERSHIPS Joint ventures Partial ownership stakes, minority interests Exclusive license contracts Outright mergers and acquisitions In between these categories, there are a few types of partnership arrangements that are tighter than open partnerships but less strict than exclusive partnerships. These include: Industry mutuals Long-term outsourcing arrangements Shared intellectual capital Licensing arrangements These are quite a lot of arrangements, right? Even so, despite the existence of these different setups, as an independent professional, you must keep this one thing in mind: Whenever you partner with another business or another independent professional, you must first consider whether or not the relationship you’ll build has a specific purpose that fulfills the other higher tenets we talked about in the past few weeks. This is because you always have to partner deliberately to make sure you’ll not only cultivate good business relationships but also develop partnerships that help you achieve your personal, career, and organizational goals. Let’s take a look at some partnerships between big companies as examples… Takeda and Abbott, both pharmaceutical giants, formed the TAP Partnership to leverage each other’s sales distribution networks. While it’s true that they both could’ve just built their own networks, they also both knew that partnering was a better move because it would help them create equal opportunities for their businesses. Because of the TAP Partnership, Takeda and Abbott were able to provide consumers with drugs they would not otherwise be able to get if they didn’t join forces. Another example is between Amazon.com and Toys R Us. After a debacle in attempting to build its own online business, Toys R Us partnered with Amazon.com to find more efficient ways to sell toy products to customers over the Internet. See? The right partnerships will help improve how your business operates. The right level of partnering depends on the importance of the partner’s assets in the creation of unique offerings for fulfilling the unmet needs of target markets. For example, if your partner’s assets are only essential to the creation stage, then you may go for open partnerships. On the other hand, if your partner’s assets are essential to your business’ overall performance, then you may opt for the exclusive partnership arrangements. Knowing who to partner with and how to partner with them will help you ensure your strategy’s long-term viability. Hope you found this week’s insights interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn.     Stay tuned for next Tuesday’s Return Driven Strategy! Learn more about choosing the best type of partnership for your brand and what happens when a wrong partnership is chosen on next week’s Return Driven Strategy!