Growing Small Business.

There is a difference between job development for yourself and building a real business. While it is not possible to completely eliminate competition, you can increase your visibility and demand through collaboration. This will lead to an increase in your bottom line sales and revenue. As an entrepreneur, you cannot expect that you can build the business if you push yourself to be the only employee in your company. In such a case, you are an entrepreneur, manager, business developer, and employee. Your job as an entrepreneur is to build the business, not the product and not the job for yourself. Yes, you are building the product because your company must sell something. But, it is not the one and only task for you. The question is how you can deal with this problem.

Collaboration, when used as a tool to grow and create demand in your business, can be an effective business strategy. Here are few ways in which collaboration boosts the growth of your business:

Increasing Scale

Collaboration produces innovation as well as amplifies success by increasing resources through joint ventures of time and brainpower. In the world of design-thinking, collaboration is an esteemed means to an end. We have always been told that two are better than one. And this is exactly what collaboration does. Reaching to new markets that is enabled through sharing and leveraging resources in a collaboration, increases and re-energizes the connection you have with established customers. It makes your firm a bigger part of the greater whole, and that there is power in that. It brings together the resources in talent, experience, finances and infrastructure from two different entities, leading to more effective problem solving. Collaborating with other businesses is a great way to grow your market share, build momentum and broaden your audience.

Sharing Vulnerability

Another important point to be remembered when employing human workforce is that sometimes sharing and supporting people through difficulty, challenge and change may be required and provided open heartedly. Showing our vulnerability is part of our authenticity. While this cannot be done with everyone around, a common platform for employees to come together is a great way for them to express connection in someone’s good or bad times. This is a wonderful way for two companies to grow together in a collaboration.

 

Self-awareness

Nothing crystalizes what you bring to the table more than when you’re forced to articulate your competencies. Collaboration challenges you to articulate and distil your strengths and weaknesses. It makes you more aware than ever before of what you are great at, and what you do poorly. This understanding of your strengths and weaknesses can force you to ask for help when necessary and be brazen about how you can help others.

Creative Abrasion

Abrasion is a process of wearing down through friction. While friction is typically associate with something negative, it is actually the purest form of energy. Collaboration converts energy from working with people who are different from you, into something positive. Two companies come together in collaboration to leverage the differences and work to identify what can be complementary about them.

Now, the question arises, while collaborating isn’t necessarily easy, can it get your firm to a more interesting position to innovate, over a period? As discussed above, all of us look out for certain qualities in people that we mix with. In this situation, it is a good idea for the collaborating companies to bring everyone on a moderated common platform, to share their views, events and opinions on. A great way to do this is to get an internal social networking platform for your company. HyperEffects can assist you with creating and maintaining a website. If you have specific requirements for a customised feature such as an internal social networking tool for your employees, connect with us for a free consultation on how it works and how you can benefit from it. We are always here to help and advice. We may not always share the same point of view with everyone, but we can always share values.

In my next post, I am going to discuss some more points that make a collaboration successful. So do keep checking back!