Today I went into a seminar about forming Strategic Alliance Partnerships.
I had been giving a lot of thought to what it is like to be a Sole Trader, especially after receiving Business Coaching in the summer. Working for yourself may be attractive because you don’t have to answer to irritating bosses, put up with annoying colleagues and perform mundane projects that give you no satisfaction or don’t allow you to show what you really can do.
But as a Sole Trader it can seem that you are totally alone; there’s no-one to bounce ideas off, discuss new projects, back you up in your ventures or pick you up and analyse things when they go wrong; even the smallest thing can seem enormous and get out of proportion and nobody can guide or prevent you from going off on the wrong track. The learning curve is huge, mistakes can sometimes be disasterous, challenges are real challenges and simple things like writing a business plan and working out a marketing strategy can be very daunting.
I learnt today that forming a Strategic Alliance Partnership can provide many advantages. By combining firms or people’s businesses they can add value by making each other aware of their services and products; combine resources to jointly attract new clients; create an increased profile and marketing awareness; lighten each others’ workload by delegation; motivate each other’s businesses; provide a bigger response, larger discounts and a faster service; increase marketing penetration; enhance competitiveness; recommend others as consultants and work with multi-suppliers on a project; develop new business opportunities and expand marketing developments; diversify the businesses and skills; and hone in and challenge any existing ideas.
The next thing I have to do is to think about this and do some more research. And look at my business and see if what I have to offer so it will be attractive to another company or person and whether it would be possible to combine to offer a particular package or service in addition to their existing ventures.
Watch this space!
Alice
Alice Elliott's blog 
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I have been reading up on this myself recently and it does seem to be the way forwards, for sharing and bouncing ideas around and the possibility of reducing costs and overall providing a better service to the customer, which in turn would increase profit.
I own a small business and know of others who agree that Strategic Alliance Partnerships are the ‘safe’ wasy forward to growth.
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