Partnering Beyond Other Technicians

In partnering, don't just look for people you can bring in on accounts. A lot of times other non-IT business providers like management consultants are in a position where they’re constantly being forced to be able to refer other professionals to their clients. This may be done as a favor to their client, or set up as a revenue sharing arrangement.

Partnering with Accountants

Accountants are in a really good position to refer you to other small business owners because they’re already perceived by most small businesses as a trusted advisor; the same way attorneys and management consultants and advertising consultants are also put into that same category. You ultimately want to be put in this category, too!

Take accountants, for example. If they do a lot of QuickBooks installs, chances are, they’re getting questions from their customers, on what should they do for backup? What should they do for virus protection? Most of the time they don’t want to get involved with that. This is where you come in.

Your Partnering Relationships Will Make You More Valuable

It’s really easy for you to use your relationships that you have and the relationships you’re going to build to knock the socks off of Dell and others like them. Don’t get scared into thinking that Dell is going to own your whole market share in six months or a year.

It’s not going to happen as long as you move up the value chain, as long as you move into providing these services that are tougher for people to compete with on a commodity level. That’s where your personality, your communication skills, and the relationships really mean everything.

Consider Several Partnering Options

A couple of years ago, back when DSL was first rolling out, a lot of people were getting set up as DSL agents for ILECs and CLECs and ISPs. That’s another interesting revenue stream. Some people act as web-hosting resellers, so they’ll buy a big chunk of storage space and bandwidth and parcel that up and sell shared hosting to their clients. There’s a lot of different ways you can do these things to add on incremental revenue. You can increase your business through many different forms of partnering.

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