Strategic partnerships can help your company, especially if it is still in its early stages. However, if you do not choose these collaborations wisely, you may wind up doing more damage than good.
Four real-world instances of excellent ideas gone wrong owing to poor partnership selection are shown below. These aren’t the only errors you may make when picking a spouse, but they are the most common—and definitely the simplest to avoid.
Continue reading to find out how billion-dollar companies like NASA and Quaker wasted millions by not thoroughly screening prospective business partners. Then go out and make certain that your company does not make the next list!
Table of Contents
Failure to Ensure That Everyone Is On the Same Page
Whether you’re speaking in operational terms or talking goal direction, in order to have a successful business relationship, the parties must all be on the same page. Things must come together nicely, because if they don’t, the variances might generate a slew of little issues, some of which could evolve into corporate killers.
Here’s an illustration…
NASA joined up with Lockheed Martin aeronautics specialists in 1999 to create a $125 million orbiter that the space agency intended to circle Mars to gather data in preparation for future visits.
What could possibly go wrong with this collaboration? On the surface, you have two air and space pioneers with decades of experience in their respective fields collaborating to boldly go where no man-made machine has ever gone before. Unfortunately, the plan fell apart because the engineers in charge of the orbiter’s design and operation were not thinking in tandem from the outset.
NASA, on the other hand, employs the metric system (which some consider to be a more scientifically oriented method of measuring), while Lockheed Martin employs the more ancient English system. While this discrepancy isn’t usually a deal breaker—one may convert from one system to the other and back again—it was in this instance.
The satellite was doomed by the employment of two separate measuring techniques because the ground workers were unable to appropriately communicate navigational coordinates between laboratories in Colorado and California. As a result, the orbiter was lost, and NASA was out $125 million. Oops!
While you may not want to launch anything into space, the lesson here is to make certain that your spouse is constantly on the same page as you, even in the slightest things. You don’t want small disagreements to become deal breakers or business killers.
Investing at the End
Purchasing a trendy product may be an excellent method to increase your company’s income as well as its social status. However, you should always properly investigate the product and make accurate projections for future sales, since things may occasionally be too fashionable for their own good.
Investing in Substandard Products
In the mid-1990s, Sharper Image was at the top of the retail sector. Its items might be found on celebrities, in movies, and pretty much everywhere else. The company’s relationship with straight-to-infomercial product Ionic Breeze, on the other hand, led it to disaster.
After merging forces, the corporation discovered that Ionic Breeze did not only not cleanse the air, as the fast-talking media guys stated, but actively poisoned the air. Many expensive lawsuits followed, sucking the Sharper Image dry. The firm went out of business in 2008, permanently banished to the shadows of corporate lore.
Obviously, your items and services must be of the greatest calibre. It’s advisable to walk away from any collaboration that might undercut that quality in any manner.
The Opposite Side of the Coin
The goal of this post isn’t to frighten you away from partnerships; they may be really beneficial. Consider one American legend who, for better or worse, has become a household name throughout the globe…