Strategic partnerships for business growth

Strategic partnerships for business growth

Strategic partnerships can be very effective for business growth.

There are many interesting business drivers that make a strategic partnership an obvious choice:

• Vertical integration: where it makes sense for a wholesaler to acquire a retailer or a manufacturer so they can have more control over the ‘value chain’
• Horizontal integration: where a company wants to access new audiences e.g. when Facebook acquired Instagram
• Aligning with a company that has capabilities your business doesn’t currently have but would like to have so they can serve their customers better e.g. when a car wash aligns with a coffee shop so the customers can enjoy a coffee while their car’s being washed
• And on and on it goes

But here the thing:

It’s critical that you align your business with a business that has a similar culture to yours. If the values of the two businesses don’t align, then you’ll be fighting an uphill battle regardless of all the compelling financial drivers that make the strategic partnership viable.