Whilst growing a business is a challenge in itself for many of us, the decision of whether to hire or diversify services, to speed up or assist growth, can also increase the burden of managing the day-to-day business.

An increasingly appealing alternative is collaboration; partnering with other businesses who have similar objectives. Here are 6 great reasons where collaboration could help grow your business:

Strengths and Weaknesses

Working with people in other organisations is a great opportunity to fill skill gaps in your business as well as learn new skills and share best practice. Consider building a SWOT analysis of skills in your business to identify the right organisations to work with.

Extend Reach and Awareness

Collaboration naturally extends the reach of the involved organisations to each other’s customer bases. Strategically this may be a more cost effective way of reaching new audiences than traditional marketing routes and it’s a natural extension to networking (an approach I use and works well).

Customer Care

Naturally, as your clients successfully grow their business, they will need additional resources and skills to help them. Listening to your customers and anticipating their needs will help you understand the right goods and services to offer and which collaboration can help you achieve this.

Larger Projects

Pooling resources can help your business seem more attractive when pitching for new business as you will be able to offer a richer range of skills and services, potentially helping you manage larger projects you previously may not have had access to.

Communication

Working with others can inject new energy and fresh ideas into the workplace, whilst challenging the everyday norms which if too heavily relied upon - can quickly go stale.

Share Costs

Partnering with other organisations brings the opportunity of sharing costs on projects and potential access to new resources for your business such as marketing channels, industry specific software and skills, which your business may struggle to acquire otherwise.

I hope you found this article useful and inspires you strike up a conversation about collaborating on a project with an individual or organisation. Let us know how you get on!