The Benefits of Choosing Collaboration Over Competition: A Win-Win for Everyone

Blog Post
Jon Brown Mar 29, 2023

How can we work together as consultants and consultancies and I think that there’s a kind of economy of scale as we partner. . What’s been your experience with partnering with other local consultancies or individual consultants? I’ve tried hiring in the low end and training and investing time to get that person up to a point where I can consider them more or less an expert. It’s a rewarding experience. You end up working really hard to make sure that your image and the product that you’re putting out there, the service offering is at the quality that you’re hoping for. I’ve tried it on the other side where I wanted to break into a new segment. So we we started offering cybersecurity services two years ago and we didn’t have anyone on the team that was even remotely interested, but we knew it was something that our clients wanted.

So we started partnering with contractors and consultants who were doing cybersecurity work, but had no real technical background. So we partnered together and we formed our own new vertical within the business. And now we can say, Hey, we’re Mac consultancy, but we offer real cybersecurity services.

We partner with this company. They come in as As a member of Grove, our clients don’t know the difference, but we’re pretty transparent and we just tell them, look, you’re dealing with a contractor or a consultant that is a subcontractor to us, and the experience has been pretty good.

What we have been doing even more recently is reaching out to other ACN members within the space too, and trying to form partnerships where we would say, Hey we just got a client and we’re too busy to handle them. , would you be interested in taking them on?

And then we just refer back and forth. So it’s like a friendly referral. That’s about as far as I’ve been able to get the partnerships within the acn. I think everyone within the Apple community is pretty willing to like help and collaborate from, but from a brass tack, like I need help for my business.

People are still pretty close to the vest. It’s been a challenge to break through that and say let’s partner on a project or let’s partner together. , it’s been done, but I sometimes feel like in certain situations people tend to walk away feeling like they didn’t feel got the best end of the deal.

It’s hard to negotiate those kind of ad hoc types of arrangements. That’s been my experience anyway. Yeah, that’s such an interesting point. I think that one of the challenges here is the difficulty in as you mentioned collaboration. It’s much broader than just our little individual vertical or consulting in general.

Collaboration is really tough societally, and I think that we know more how to. Compete with each other, like com competition is a thing that we’re like more experienced doing. Cooperating is not so much something that we’re trained to do very much. On an individual basis is one thing.

With collaborating with our individual teams and things, but also collaborating between organizations is also a challenge. There’s a whole continuum to think about this. I’m not sure if this is a proprietary thing, so I may not mention much more detail about it, but basically it’s a white paper about people, tools, and processes that build collaborative capacity.

Talk about this sort of continuum, like it starts with networking, we’re all familiar with that term, but it’s like a little bit of information exchanging for mutual benefit. No trust required, limited time commit. Share some information and there’s no like necessarily ongoing relationship.

You’re not sharing each other’s turf. Then you can go to this level of coordinating where you have ongoing information sharing for your benefit. Of course, each organization or each person alters a little bit of their activities to achieve like some kind of shared purpose with the other collaborators or coordinators.

Rest of the organization slightly increases their involvement, some degree of trust involved. Therefore, because you are making some modifications and things, and then the next level gets even more extensive. know, You get to the level of cooperating, you start to add in some formal kind of commitments between organizations.

More of a substantial time commitment, a higher level of trust significant sharing of turf. These are some of the criteria for these different levels. And then at this stage it may involve a, some written agreements. And then finally you get to a level of collaborating or have a really formalized organizational commitment.

Very high level of trust, definitely having written agreements and things like that. So we can use some of these tools. I’ve had great success, specifically partnering with vendors and /companies. Outside of my main focus group is the internal portion where it’s I’m a Mac consultant, you’re a Mac consultant.

We’re both going after the exact type of same type of client, right? So it’s not even like your residential, I’m business, let’s partner together. I think that would even be more acceptable. In a lot of ways it’s oh, you’re going after the exact same clients that I’m going after. That’s where it gets a little bit like, I feel like you might be stepping on my toes a little bit.

So I, I totally see where the trust comes into play. But the way that I of approach it is, look there’s more than enough business to go around and the proof is in the pudding. I wouldn’t still be here, and you still wouldn’t be here together if that wasn’t the case. So the reality also is that I can’t scale indefinitely, neither can you.

And once we get on the same page about that it becomes easier to at least have those conversations.

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