Browsing through the list of jobs, looking for my next contract… This one is out, can’t do this, can’t do that one either. Why? – well, my set of skills is pretty much limited to one category and I have only so much time in my day. This contract is rather demanding: Demonstrated experience in the whole list of disciplines, with examples of past work and number of staff available to work simultaneously. Project owner wants guarantees with backup and redundancies, that his project will be done on time and up to standards.

I can’t provide all this as a self employed individual. Do I have to give up then most of the contracts? The answer is : Partner up.
Take for instance Value Added Resellers: those who work together, make more money.
That’s according to a new survey of IDC, that looked at peers collaboration among Microsoft Certified Partners and found a key trend in growing revenues—they collaborate.
“There’s a whole body of research around network theory - the notion of being able to increase value as you increase the number of nodes in a network,” said Stephen Graham, group vice president for IDC’s software business strategies group.
In 2006 partner-to-partner transactions exceeded $6 billion, and small companies accounted for half of this money.
Partners see collaborating with other partners as a way to expand their businesses and perhaps work in new geographies.
IDC named the rise of the peer network among VARs as one of its top predictions for 2007.

Partner offerings have definitely more value for the consumer. Let’s take a website for instance as a product: If you are a star designer, chances are you never developed technical skills to upload that design to the server, and you don’t have time to go out there and market the newly developed website to the target audience. But if you partnered with a techie, marketer and sales strategist, your quad can offer a pretty powerful product to your consumer.

The most commonly known partnerships of self-employed are medical doctor’s offices. Three or more doctors can share an office to provide full time care coverage and benefit from space and equipment sharing.

The same goes about bidding for government, municipal or national bodies jobs. Did you see this questionnaire? Inquisition about number of past projects, interdisciplinary experiences, bios of your staff, number of people available and so on and so on. You will never get through, even if you’re brilliant in your little area. But what if you had organizational and project management drill and were able to glue together a temporary ‘team’ of professionals, that can solidly account for all the experiences and powers required? – This next contract can be yours.

Because the truth is: it does not matter how many people work for you. In global contacts made possible by professional and social networks and information to be found at a snap of a finger: you are the boss of your dream project if you make an effort to create strategic partnerships with other self employed individuals.

Such a partnership can obviously span one project or years and years of successful business relations. Maybe even without a spare overhead burden. Would it eventually put out of business some well stuffed (I know… no, I did not mean ‘staffed’) corporations?

Partnering pays. But don’t ask me how to do it – this is something that I still have to learn.

Because a customer only cares about what you are going to do, before when and for how much.

Do you have a successful partnership story to share? Comment here.

hg@minibizweb.com