Sunday, February 19, 2006
Long term partnerships - mirage or necessity?
NextLogic instantly looks for business partners, just like any other businesses I believe. Suprisingly, there are many responses to our long term partnerships initiative. Honestly, I thought it will be more difficult to get a real long term partner with integrity sharing your values and views for the business. So, where is the catch?
Long term partnership became another well sound business buzz word that is being misused in many unethical ways nowadays. It is sad but it is true. I still believe in every single entrepreneur that comes to me offering long term partnership and I trust them they really mean it, BUT we have learned our lesson too. Of course, not every partnership needs to turn to be a perfect one, but if too many of them end up in the same scenario, then we have a situation to think about.
From our own experience, we have learned that many "smart entrepreneurs" use long term partnership phrase to get certain products or services at a very cheap cost in the initial stage for a sake of long term partnership. It always sounds very nice and promising. Have you ever come across people promising you big projects and contracts in the future but first you have to prove how good you really are by giving them something for free or at your cost price? And how many times you invested hours and days coming up with solutions hoping for long term benefits and revenues, which never came at the end?
Long term partnership can only work, and now we know, if both parties are willing to share and invest equally all resources (time, money, knowledge, skills, etc.) from the very beginning. We still believe long term partnerships and partners are inevitable for the success of our business, we just have to be more careful in selecting our partners.
Our "selection process" is very simple. We "only" have few criteria our potential furure partners have to meet:
1. share the values that we share for our business
2. share the investments and outcomes equally from the very beginning
Long term partnership became another well sound business buzz word that is being misused in many unethical ways nowadays. It is sad but it is true. I still believe in every single entrepreneur that comes to me offering long term partnership and I trust them they really mean it, BUT we have learned our lesson too. Of course, not every partnership needs to turn to be a perfect one, but if too many of them end up in the same scenario, then we have a situation to think about.
From our own experience, we have learned that many "smart entrepreneurs" use long term partnership phrase to get certain products or services at a very cheap cost in the initial stage for a sake of long term partnership. It always sounds very nice and promising. Have you ever come across people promising you big projects and contracts in the future but first you have to prove how good you really are by giving them something for free or at your cost price? And how many times you invested hours and days coming up with solutions hoping for long term benefits and revenues, which never came at the end?
Long term partnership can only work, and now we know, if both parties are willing to share and invest equally all resources (time, money, knowledge, skills, etc.) from the very beginning. We still believe long term partnerships and partners are inevitable for the success of our business, we just have to be more careful in selecting our partners.
Our "selection process" is very simple. We "only" have few criteria our potential furure partners have to meet:
1. share the values that we share for our business
2. share the investments and outcomes equally from the very beginning
