Having a sustainable business partner is almost similar to having the right marriage with the right person. Decide first if you and/or your sustainability-driven business need a partner at all or not. The partner could be a person or persons or it could be an organisation also who would complement each others’ strength. Here I will be focusing on the individual as a partner. You can follow the 8 effective strategies to choose a sustainable business partner for your business.
If you and your business does need a partner, it is important to find the best match person(s). Once you become partners, it is vastly more difficult to undo the partnership than it is to create it. So the 8 effective strategies to choose a sustainable business partner for your business will provide you with some tools to utilize.
Having the right business partner is almost similar to having the right marriage with the right person. The 8 strategies will help you as a tool to choose the right business partner for your business.
You can assess your need for partnership using the Business Model Canvas. You can take this online course of mine to learn how to better use the Business Model Canvas to do the partner assessment.
As a business developer, I have helped lots of companies to establish partnerships across the borders. Some partnerships were good, started with one business but expanded to others soon. But some were really horrible. When it works out good, it gets going.
End of the day the partnership is built with the human being because human beings consist of a company/organisation. You need the right strategies to decide on the business partner.
The biggest problem to choose the right business partner is “not-knowing” the person very well. Often we tend to rush focusing too much on the business without doing due diligence on the person as an individual who is about to be the partner himself/herself.
The important fact is to how do you predict a partner to be the right business partner. An impossible task indeed.
However, based on my vast experience from working in several continents and cultures, we shortlisted these 8 strategies which you must consider to choose the right business partner:
Trust by intuition to choose the right business partner
Trust is very common yet the hardest job to measure. You have to rely on your intuition after spending time with the person; I see no other shortcut there. This will help you to understand the person’s trustworthiness instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning. Most entrepreneurs fail to listen to intuition neutrally. Often they get biased and do not follow the intuition thus makes the wrong choice.
Valuing the effort while assessing the right business partner
I personally like this point. If I get to understand that the person and/or the organisation is valuing my already put the effort in the business, it indicates a positive lead towards finding the right person. In many cases, the effort is valued for the sake of valuing without having true conviction.
This never sustains in the longer run. If the valuation is converted into a tangible asset for example currency and if that is well accepted, it leads to a happy partnership with win-win propositions.
Shared vision with the right business partner
The business must have its vision as an individual entity. But as the founder of the business, you must have your specific personal vision which must have a direct connection with the business vision.
The partner you are looking for must have a similar personal desire. It may not be 100 per cent similar but it has to be in the same direction at least. This eventually leads to having the common shared vision for both from business and personal front.
A shared vision will keep fuelling both of your race in building and growing the business. If you are in two different directions, the business will struggle badly so as you to follow the right direction.
Kitchen talk to assess the right business partner
This is one good approach to identify and assess the earlier said points. In order to understand the trust level, intention to value the effort, even to communicate & understand the vision you have to spend time with your probable business partner.
Taking them at your kitchen is the best way to spend quality personal time. This kitchen talk always leads to the most informal setup and brings up lots of non-business discussions which will help your intuition to do the right judgement.
Once you have this kitchen talk, then it is up to you to listen carefully to your intuition to do the right assessment.
Complement strengths with the business partner
Apart from your own assessment about the softer elements, you also need to assess from the point that the probable business partner’s skill should complement the strength in the overall team to serve the business.
You can have someone whose skills might become your competition. You should not feel threatened rather try to see how you could make that skill more complementary.
Being consciously aware of this fact will lead you to reach the right person.
A higher sense of responsibility
Once you have your partner, the responsibility has to be shared. This is common that most of the cases the approach towards fulfilling the responsibilities will be different. But the important part is whether the sense of responsibility in the person is as high as of yours.
You have to be sure that you can not make somebody responsible for obligations, especially in the startup scene. It has to come out naturally and that is the tricky part most entrepreneurs often miss out.
Monetary transaction
You can generalise but I believe you should see the cues with small incidents. Do some spontaneous test of the prospective partner by lending or spending some small amount of money from your own side.
Maybe he or she will not ask for it but still, try to create such a situation where you pay which is to be paid back by him/her. Take an example of giving a restaurant bill once or give a loan of a small amount or pay for something full and wait for him or her to come back with his or her part of the payment.
I bet it will give you strong cues which you can use to assess the earlier checkpoints.
Agreed trial run with the right business partner
This is something I have experienced that many entrepreneurs do not even pay attention to. No matter how you have got your business partner – co-workers, friends, network etc. , both of you must agree on a trial run for a specific period of time. The objective is just to see and assess what are the challenges and benefits you can count on because of this partnership.
This will give both of you the indications whether you can continue with it, or you can solve to continue or you should split knowing it will not work out at all in future.
You can also check out the article which will help you how to find the best fit business, partner. Extremely important to try this out if you truly need a sustainable partner for your venture.
No matter how many tips we give based on experience and expertise, it has to be your luck even if it is 0.5%. But without following the 8 effective strategies to choose the sustainable business partner above mentioned, you truly can not expect the 0.5% luck to workout.
If you need to do the assessment of the business partner, reach out to me to book a free 50 minutes consultation. We can help to assess based on our proven digital tools with a human touch
