How can collaboration help grow your business?
Over the last four weeks I have focused on why collaboration is important in the workplace, why collaboration is hard, why collaboration doesn’t always work, why collaboration is better than competition, and now I am tying things together with how collaboration can help grow your business.
What’s the bottom line?
One of the things you have to ask yourself, is do you want to grow? If you want to maintain the status quo, while your competition is growing, you are in fact losing market share. Knowing that you are losing customers, if you even want to remain the same you have to grow. This seems obvious, but not everyone wants to grow. I was on a recent webinar with over one hundred call in lines. We were asked a question of whether or not we want to grow and over 50% said no. I believe what they meant was that they wanted to maintain the status quo. I am arguing that to even maintain the status quo you have to grow. With that how can collaboration help grow your business.
Collaboration with the Great Wealth Transfer
Last month I spoke to an estate planning council about “Collaboration with the Great Wealth Transfer”. I shared with them a very good course on collaboration offered by their national organization that I took on line. In a nutshell that course points out that instead of a trusted advisor, attorney, financial planner, chartered life underwriter, certified public accountant and a business valuer working independently with a business owner looking at estate planning, what the benefits would be of working together. In short it involves educating the client and the client’s trusted advisor of what could be done to maximize return, minimize taxes, and ensure the legacy wanted by the client when these parties met collectively without the client as a first step. Then collectively they could develop a plan, bring it back to the client for consideration and hopefully implement a plan that would require periodic review based on their creative solution to deploy a strategy that would be optimum for the client. Ultimately this has the potential to grow the business of the collaborators too.
What can collaboration do for you?
In an article by Alyssa Gregory she suggests five reasons collaboration can grow your business. These are:
- Collaboration can inspire you – isn’t great to work as a team that collectively produces great results?
- Collaboration can help grow your network -think of who else you are reaching out to when you work together.
- Collaboration is educational – think about what you can learn from those that are experts in other areas.
- Collaboration can save you money – by potentially working together with another party and jointly marketing or in other ways work together to minimize costs and maximize revenues.
- Collaboration solves problems – this is why crowd sourcing is so popular – there is power in numbers.
The bottom line
The bottom line is that collaboration can save you money and generate additional revenue. The series of blogs earlier this month address both concerns and opportunities. Consider each and determine what might work best for you.
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