You can’t succeed on your own! To succeed you need other people.
Sometimes that means other people inside your team, other times it means ‘Collaborations’ with external people or organisations that have a vested interest in working together to achieve a common goal.
I am a small business, there is me and my wife Melinda, and 5 part-time external people we work with when we need them as part of our team. But I also have a collaboration with John Paul Mitchell Systems and it’s a true ‘collaboration’ where we both are working together to achieve a common goal.
Collaborations are a business model that we will see more of as they fit with the technology available and more importantly with the ever-changing working model and the values of people today.
The most important thing is that when you collaborate with others that they understand your vision and most importantly that you share common values and goals. When that happens it brings a synergy and momentum that benefits everyone.
So from a salon perspective who could you collaborate with?
Well from a recruitment point of view you could collaborate with your local high school careers department. Whereby you might provide opportunities for your team to talk to students at careers days about the opportunities in hairdressing, and perhaps offer work experience opportunities for students.
Or you could collaborate with your local beauty school or hairdressing college whereby you offer your services to present a regular class and in return, you are creating opportunities for your team who perhaps aspire to work in the education area of the industry. This could also mean that you get the opportunity to get the first pick of graduates.
From a marketing point of view, you could collaborate with other stores in your community whereby you cross-promote to each other's client base whether it’s via newsletter or email or social media.
From an HR point of view maybe you could collaborate with businesses in your geographical location who employee people that are a fit with your target market and offer a promotion directly to their employees through their internal communication channels.
I’m sure you get the idea. The point is, don’t try and do everything on your own, find people and organisations to work with whereby both of you benefit from the collaboration.
I hope today has been of value to you…
If you haven’t read my Book GROW 4 Marketing I recommend you do as there is more in there about collaborations.
Thanks for watching…
Have a great week!
