Growing our business is a goal that we all have – helping our clients and customers, supporting our families, and feeling fulfilled with our careers. SME owners often feel like the weight of all of this growth lies directly on their or their teams’ shoulders. This doesn’t have to be the case at all.
Building synergies and collaborating with people and businesses outside of your business has the potential to grow and achieve your business goals faster!
What are synergies, and why are they important?
Synergy
n. The interaction or cooperation of two or more companies or people to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
A synergy is a business relationship where two or more companies work together to create something better than what they could do alone. A great example is how a builder, electrician, and plumber can work together to create a fully functioning house. There’s no way they’d be able to do that by themselves!
Synergies allow you to make full use of expertise, experiences, and ideas that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. By working together, companies can leverage each other’s strengths, access new markets, and create innovative solutions.
How can collaborations and synergies benefit your business?
1. Expanding into New Markets
Working with other businesses can help you to reach new customers by being able to access each other’s customer bases. This means you can increase your brand exposure without having to spend a fortune on marketing.
Look at different projects or offers that you can offer to your customers that fairly feature all organisations. Think creatively. There are many ways you can collaborate with others, and they’re not always obvious. For example, in 2024, the car manufacturer Lamborghini collaborated with the audio brand Technics to release a turntable. Not an expected collaboration, but one that works given their commitment to excellence in their respective fields.
It’s not just large organisations that have this power. Collaborations like this work at the grassroots level, too! Think about it. A property manager needs their tradies for property maintenance to keep their tenants happy. A real estate agent needs a good mortgage broker to support potential buyers. A marketer can work with a graphic designer to ensure their clients have great visuals for their branding. And a florist can collaborate with a chocolatier for a great Valentine’s Day offer.
Businesses can also use collaborations to expand into new geographical markets. Working alongside already well-established businesses can help to integrate them into the new business community. This can help navigate regional consumer preferences, build local credibility, and avoid costly market-entry mistakes.
2. Boosting Productivity
Working closely with other businesses can boost your productivity. Being more productive can help individual businesses get their tasks done faster, saving them and their clients both time and money.
Partnering with other like-minded businesses may be able to help improve your time management with projects. By sharing your workload with other experts in their field, you’ll find that your projects go by much quicker! Instead of trying to figure out how to do all of the individual parts of the project, you can hand off parts to experts who already know the best practices and can finish it up much faster than you can!
As an example: Every business needs a great website! Where do you go to get that great website? A web developer.
Their expertise is coding up websites that look and work fantastically! But they don’t always know how to do some of the other aspects of what makes a great website that showcases a business and converts visitors into clients.
So, instead of trying to do it all, they can work with other experts! While they focus on coding up the website, they can hand off other parts of the project, like Search Engine Optimisation, content writing, graphic design, and photography. Together, they can create a wonderful and effective website in record time.
3. Innovation and Creative Thinking
Synergies with others can often result in some awesome innovations. When you put your heads together you can combine your expertise and experiences to create and innovate. Collaborations by design foster a creative environment. Instead of working by yourself or with your team, you’re working with people that have outside perspectives and knowledge. It won’t necessarily mean creating a new product or service to go to market, but it could just be a new way for you to tackle a shared problem.
Collaborating with someone on your internal processes, procedures, and strategy forces you to look at things from a different perspective and learn from them. It can help inspire your marketing, streamline your customer relationships, and create cohesive teams. It helps to have an outside perspective with these things. You don’t know what you don’t know, and it’s common for small business owners to be great at what they do, but not always great at the other stuff like strategy or marketing.
Businesses that are in similar industries can also work together to find new solutions to their common challenges. This can be done by engaging in a new collaborative pursuit or using each other’s knowledge to educate their customers. For example, a real estate agent and mortgage broker can collaborate on First Home Buyer seminars.
They can also work together to refine their systems and processes, or even develop new products and services.
No matter how you do it, synergies and collaborations enable businesses to achieve creative breakthroughs that would be difficult—or even impossible—to accomplish alone.
4. More effective marketing
When you think about your marketing, you probably think about advertising your business on Social Media, Radio, Print, or even on TV. Marketing is more than just advertising, it’s the part of your business that is focused on finding new customers and converting them into customers and clients. Your website is part of your marketing, so is your social media presence, and even your networking group is part of your marketing!
By collaborating with other businesses, you can support each other in your marketing efforts. You can take advantage of a wider audience by cross-promoting each other. You can also share your marketing costs, as they can be quite expensive. You can split costs on advertising, collaboration events, or even your content creation. By sharing these costs, you can create marketing campaigns that might be cost-prohibitive if you were trying to do it yourself.
When companies work together and link to each other’s websites or share each other’s content, it can help with Search Engine Optimisation and online visibility. SEO can help your website rankings on Google and other search engines, which means that when people search for your business online, they’re more likely to find it.
Working together is surprisingly good for both businesses’ marketing. Cross-promoting each other’s marketing material, sharing marketing costs, and linking to each other’s websites are incredibly helpful for your marketing!
5. Strengthening Brand Credibility and Trust
Another surprising way that collaborations can benefit your business is by significantly enhancing your brand’s credibility and industry standing.
The audience of the company that you’re collaborating with is more likely to view your company positively simply because you are associated with a company they already trust. Even a recommendation or endorsement from the business can help! It feels more authentic and trustworthy to consumers because it comes from a source they already know and respect. If your collaborator is highly trusted by their audience, some of that credibility rubs off on your brand. It’s a form of social proof that strengthens your reputation.
Creating a synergy with another reputable business can uplift your brand’s credibility. This is great for your business as your potential clients and customers are more likely to trust your business if it aligns with one they already trust. It’s a win-win situation.
6. Overall Business Growth
Because of all the above points, synergies are a fantastic way to promote business growth. By expanding into new markets, boosting productivity, helping with your marketing and allowing you to think more creatively, your business can evolve and grow much quicker.
When you have a referral synergy, it can help to grow your business by introducing you to new clients who are ready for your services. For example, a mortgage advisor can refer mortgage clients to insurance advisors who can ensure that they can cover their mortgage. A real estate agent can refer investors to a property manager to help them manage their investments.
A collaboration synergy can also help you to grow your business. When you collaborate with other businesses in similar industries, you can pass work between the two of you so you can both focus on what you’re individually good at. This can save you time and energy because you’re not spending time doing things you don’t like or aren’t good at. Instead, you can focus on onboarding more clients that you can both work on!
You can grow your business through synergies and collaboration with other businesses. By leveraging the strengths of other businesses, you can expand into new markets, boost productivity, strengthen brand trust and help with your marketing. A great place to find your synergies and collaborations is a networking group!
Sound like something you’re interested in? Get in touch with us!
