Bill Solominsky

I’m in the process of forming a partnership for one of the businesses that I am involved in, and it struck me while discussing this how easy small business partnerships are to form. When I was younger, I always pictured business agreements involving lawyers and tons of paperwork, not to mention a lengthy, time consuming negotiation process. This is probably the case of multi-million dollar deals (of which I haven’t been a part of yet), but for small businesses, common sense and trust is basically all you need.

The easiest deals are ones where no money changes hands; you and your partner work together to cross promote your items. One of my first experiences with this was working with cleaning companies. For my event rental site, I contacted local cleaning companies and asked if they’d be willing to offer my customers a discount. Most of them were very receptive of this, being a win-win situation. I got a different marketing strategy and an item that could boost my product without costing me more. The cleaning companies got advertising on my site and additional customers.

You can consider early adopters of your product as forming a partnership with your customers, but it becomes tricky once you ask that customer to pay for your product. If you let some beta testers try your product for free, both sides win. The company gets valuable feedback and more extensive testing, the user gets to try neat new technology or services. However, if you ask that same person to pay, they probably will re-evaluate their end of the deal, and think twice about the value that they get from this product. The customer wants to ensure that their money is being well spent, and now you are competing for their dollar, not just their time.

Obviously the goal with any partnership is to make a profit eventually, but profit does not have to take the form of cash from the start. My experience has been to be as creative as possible, and it may be easier and more valuable to work with partners when dollars are not discussed.