Human Resources:

Making the Right Alliances

Growth can also be translated to mean more money in the owner’s pockets. But sometimes money can cloud your judgment and you could end up making an alliance that closes down your business. That’s why you need to look at the many different reasons an alliance would be beneficial to you. A good alliance can bring you profits that you have never seen before but it needs to be based on valid attributes of the company that you partnered with.

Never underestimate the value of good research. By going into a company’s public records and learning the behavior of their stocks in recent years, you can attain a lot of information about happenings at a particular company. Look at the company’s financial situation to learn how it would affect yours. By partnering with a company knee deep in debt you are not getting a bargain, but are leading your company down the same lane. Try looking at recent growth in the company plus their gains and losses. See if their recent ventures were successful or not. Based on this you can judge whether a potential alliance will be beneficial to you or not.

Try to pick a company with compatible goals and desires as your own. Don’t try to mix grunge and jazz. By joining with a company that doesn’t share the same vision, you can hinder your company’s growth in the future. It can also handicap your chances of pushing products that you own because they might conflict with the interests of your partner.

A potential alliance can always benefit from looking at the policies regarding your partner’s marketing of the products that they own. See how well they are doing and how much they put aside in the company budget to spend on marketing their products. Do they have good marketing strategy that can benefit you?

An alliance with a competitor brings to mind the question of how much market share does he have? Can his market share and yours combined be beneficial to you? Obviously the more share he has, the better and bigger product you can have. Another thing you need to look at is the quality of the products being offered to you. You won’t buy a toy for your kid again from the same manufacturer if the toy craps out on you in the first week. For the customer, the toy was a waste of money, and the same can be true for you except the consequences can be a lot more fatal. Always try to partner with a company that has the same quality of product and customer service as you. Also, try to look at the operations at a company. Usually the quality of the product and operations are directly related. Unhappy employees and incompetent management can cause millions a month for a company. Many people believe that one of the reasons that Apple computer had started to slide towards oblivion was because of bad management. In 1997, with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple computer, the change in operations is quite visible. He got rid of the whole upper management and started anew with competent managers and the result is quite clear. Today the emergence of Imac and powerful computers that come in a cube have once again made Apple a global player in the PC market.