The key to partnering up with big companies is offering something they don’t have.
When fishing to partner alongside those bigger, reputable companies, your bait is essentially your innovative services. There’s no point in a company hiring you if they can complete the work themselves; you need to prove to them that you can truly add value to their business. Tech startups are often renowned for their speed to market and their firsthand access to cutting-edge resources – therefore, these are selling points to capitalise on.
Alex Louey, co-founder and Managing Director of Appscore says innovation is a startup’s bait to attracting bigger fish to partner with.
However, for smart partnerships to take place, you need to seek out and solidify relationships that are grounded in mutual value. Before taking on any new project, it’s important to take a step back and assess where the value lies – for both you and for the bigger company.
You need to ‘pick and choose’ your battles.
As a startup, it’s tempting to say yes to all opportunities that arise and keep everyone happy, but in the end you will stretch yourself too thin. Although one of your chief goals is to indeed grow as a business and expand your clientele base, it certainly pays off to be selective when undertaking projects. What project can provide value to your portfolio? What can steer you in the direction you wish to explore? What can best contribute to your overall growth?
Unlike large companies that have massive resources, bigger legal teams and healthy funds to feed off, startups are much more challenged in these areas. They are often pressed for time, facing the pressure to deliver quality projects and fast returns in order to establish themselves as a prominent business offering highly desirable services.
Thus, there are going to be times where you have to politely decline opportunities. It’s about looking at where you can gain the most value as a business and from which companies – and making the most of those projects. After all, it’s far better to show selectivity than overload yourself with work and subsequently execute your projects badly.
It’s critical that you build healthy relationships with everyone in the team. Branching out to work with big businesses isn’t just a matter of getting the company’s seal of approval; you need to garner support from all departments in order to really propel your startup forward.
It’s a matter of picking the right people to network with: both executives and those at the coalface – for instance, you need to look at what is important to the sales team and how you can manage your operations to add value to them. Fruitful partnerships are not based on singular relationships; they feed off many different threads.
Preserving that startup culture is paramount to growth.
The reason companies engage you in the first place is because of those complementary services you can offer them, and the conditions under which you can deliver them. When you start to lose that, you begin to falter as a business. Your culture is a foundational pillar when you’re a small company – it’s what carves out your reputation and generates those highly-coveted streams of repeat business.
However, maintaining your company culture is not as difficult as you may think – it simply reverts back to that initial idea of placing parameters around which projects to undertake and which companies to work with. By holding onto that sense of agility and illustrating your versatility and value as a business, that next step forward is bound to prosper with success.
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