Either you just started your business or running a fortune 100 company, a question that you face every morning when you wake up is how to grow your company. There isn’t a typical strategy to scale your business and recommendations include focus, prudent financial management, operational excellence and growth hacking; while all of these are true but we believe that building partnerships is key to growing faster. Not only that it’s critical to small-scale businesses, but its also essential for large-scale organisations; and applies to all categories of businesses, however this article focus more on technology, digital advertising companies and gaming studios.
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Tech & Digital Company Development
This companies are unique because they need to innovate faster, heavily rely on human capital to deliver and require closer interaction with end consumer. Unfortunately, human capital is not easy to scale. On average, it requires 3-6 months to get someone on-board and up-to speed; but unfortunately fast growing Tech & Digital companies cannot afford such a lag. This is exactly where partnerships come in handy, and allow you to scale faster.
Still not convinced? Let me elaborate few situations that we all go through in our daily routine that remind us how can we take advantage of using partnerships. The concept may be slightly newer to technology sector, but partnerships were supply-chain lifeblood and were considered key success contributor in automobile industry in late 90’s.
Enhancing Offerings
Have you been in position where your client just got excited about something innovative but you don’t have an expertise in that space? E.g. If you are digital advertising company, your client may asked for you a game or VR experience; If you are mobile game development company then your client may have asked for HTML5 game?
Well, finding and investing in partners help in serving existing clients by enhancing your offering, leveraging on your existing relationship. Acquiring new customer is expensive whereas retaining existing clients and offering them more services always provide optimal returns. Investing in partners that can help you expand offerings can help in scaling faster.
Innovation – is the key to a successful Digital company
This is really interesting topic and most readers will be able to relate to this. One of my favorite quotes of Mark Zuckerberg is “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough”. We need to experiment, build expertise in new areas faster & cheaper, without really facing the outburst of “breaking”. How many times you wanted to leverage innovative technology to gain competitive advantage over competition? Have you thought about using games to market your services, evaluate how can you leverage Facebook new cryptocurrency libra, leverage the power of artificial intelligence in your product, or build innovative VR experience for brand activation. We all came across various ideas, and perusing few can really help our business grow exponentially.
Contractual staff or partners can help you experiment faster and cheaper. A trusted technology partner, especially if he has an offshore team, can help converting ideas into realities and few may add significantly to your revenue stream.
Limited Capacity
How many times you had to let go off a project because your team was already busy and you didn’t have excess capacity? Ahh! again, Human Capital really constrains our growth ability and is hardest to scale. It’s always a great idea to invest time and money in building partnerships that can help you scale. Any organizations requires human resources with various skills that contribute to successful delivery of the project e.g. game development studio requires concept artists, digital artists, UI/UX designers, 3D modelers, texture artists, animators; and unity developers, unreal developers, HTML5 developers, backend engineers, database engineers, testers, marketers and devOps resources. Most of these skills are required for a specific duration of the project, and having partnership model helps in hiring those, as you need them during the project. Investing in partners can help in delivering a project faster and cheaper.
Project Management Nightmares
How many times you got into situation when one of your key members left in middle of important project, or team realized they won’t be able to deliver the project due to creeping requirements of clients? Again, you just realized you don’t have excess staff to deliver the project; and ended up spending more time on delivering project as oppose to identifying growth opportunities. Building partner network assist companies to leverage partner’s staff in crunch time, while you can continue focusing on company growth. While this looks least important and natural, this is most detrimental to growth of the company.
How to Nurture Business Partnerships
While partnerships look like a simple solution, however forging a successful partnership requires resource investment and thorough planning. In-fact at times this is more complicated then other short-term alternatives available. We have listed few ingredients to successful partnership model.
Building relationships is important for Digital companies
Start to invest in finding and procuring partners before you actually start using them. It takes time to build working relationship, understand partner’s capabilities and processes to utilize them optimally.
E.g. if you are planning to expand your game development resources, it may be a good idea to start with smaller team before you hire larger team. If you are planning to do a mobile game project on tight schedule, it may be a good idea to start with a side project, so as invest in building relationship that you can leverage when you need them.
Keep Relationship Active
While you always expand and shrink your team with partners like GenITeam Solutions, its always-good idea to keep minimum engagement or team so as they can be scaled, as you need. Keep discussing your plans and schedules so as your partners can manage your demand accordingly. Its usually easier for partners to adjust to HR demand, since they are able to forecast demand across multiple customers like you.
Offshore Resources
It’s extremely important that your partner is able to provide you with the cost advantage usually available with offshore resources. This allows you to keep your costs low for experimentation, but still utilizing global talent pool.
To be honest, a skilled partner should also have a strong partner network to serve your needs better.
GenITeam Solutions believing in working with clients to help them scale faster, better and cheaper and works with digital agencies, game development studios, and software companies working on cutting edge technologies like block-chain, AI. We believe in forming partnership with companies like you and help scale as needed. We are just a message away! Contact Us.
