The Secret to Building Powerful Business Partnerships

I want to talk a few minutes today about partnerships and the value in partnerships.

So when you think of a partner, what does that mean to you? To me, that is someone who I choose to do business with day in and day out.

And I'm going to talk about business partnerships right now, not necessarily like life partnerships, relationships, but business.

We're going to strictly focus on business partnerships today.

Someone that I choose to do business with that has good intentions in mind for myself as well as good intentions in mind for them.

And we all want to win, right? We want this to be something that we can all learn from.

We all want to be able to look at each other and say, hey, this business relationship positively affects me and it positively affects you.

And building those early on may be new to you.

You may not have ever done business with someone before or done transactions together.

And you may not know or understand what happens.

And I'm still learning these.

I'm still learning what it means to have good business partnerships.

Because in a business partnership, you get to... ask questions and you get to ask favors and you get to make sure that, again, that business is looking out for you and you in turn looking out for them.

But you got to be careful.

And I think that when you're building a business partnership in the beginning, there's all kinds of partnerships, right? Like we could talk about business, true business partners, like 50-50 in the company, ownership wise.

I am more so talking right now of the individual business-to-business relationship, so you and a vendor, you and a supplier, that looks like for you.

For me, where those come in to play the most is like our irrigation supplier, our plant supplier, our sod supplier.

Those are all fantastic vendor relationships as opposed to business partnerships that we have.

And they truly value your business if they're a good partner.

And I think that when you build a company and you're starting out, you're young and you have to build some rapport with that company.

If you're going into a relationship with a vendor that they're big, they're established, they have lots of companies that they serve, and you're the new kid on the block, well, you do have to build some rapport and you have to build a relationship there and you have to build some status.

But at the same time, you are automatically bringing value to them because you're bringing them business, right? You're putting money in their bank account.

And so they should value you pretty well.

And are you going to get the same treatment as someone who spends a million dollars a year with them? Yeah, probably not.

But you should still get pretty good treatment.