Over the past two years, you’ve given us two thumbs up in so many ways. You’ve made us one of the regularly featured business career podcasts in iTunes. You’ve helped us grow the number of people who visit our site every day.

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Bigg Success is not a two-seater. We love to hear from you. We’re so happy that you’ve been here to share your thoughts with us over the past two years.

Because it takes two to tango. We couldn’t do this if it weren’t for you. We thank you so much for all your support.

Bigg success is life on your own terms. It’s two for the price of one here. We feel so fortunate to be able to work together. That’s life on our own terms!

Now on to the topic of today’s post.

There’s a two-step in selecting your partner or partners. We got lucky on this one, even though we had two left feet! It naturally happened for us.

But don’t follow our lead. You probably want to be more intentional. There’s a dichotomy at play – your partnership must be two-faced.

The first face: You and any partner should be like two peas in a pod.
Partners must share the same vision and values or they will constantly be at odds with each other. For example, business partners must agree on whether you’re in business to create current income or to build long-term wealth. Your strategies will be quite different with these two different visions of success.

You also have to share core values. You will face some tough decisions on the path to bigg success. Partners with different core values may respond differently.

The second face: Two heads are better than one.
It’s important to have a shared vision. It’s important to have the same core values. However, if you share too many characteristics, your partnership will likely fail.

You want a partner with complementary skills. If you both have the same talents and strengths, you would probably be better off with a different partner. There won’t be much synergy in your relationship.

You also want a partner with a different point-of-view. You want someone who takes a different approach. Otherwise, neither of you gets a critical review of your ideas. You needlessly waste time and money because your bad ideas don’t get filtered out before you take action on them.

We think these principles apply to any partnership.
You can extend it as far as you want. It may apply to your partner in life, a partner in business, key employees or a joint venture partner on a specific project.
 
The key to building partnerships that aren’t two-dimensional is to understand this dichotomy when you select a partner. It’s critical for creating synergy which multiplies your results more than two-fold.

Get this right and you’ll get two tickets to paradise … partnership paradise, that is. And that’s bigg success!

Put in your two cents worth anytime. Review our show in iTunes. Leave a comment. E-mail us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com. Call us at 888.455.BIGG (2444). However, whatever, wherever or whenever … we love to hear from you!

Thanks so much for reading our post today. Please join us next time when we look at a killer combination – that’s two things – that lead to bigg success! Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00520-111209.mp3

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That’s a long intro and it’s not even everything!

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That’s good … we wouldn’t want to bore people right off the bat!

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John, I have to tell you. You’re the guy we wanted to come to because with everything going on with the economy, small businesses are struggling right now. A lot of the money that they might have had for advertising and marketing just isn’t there right now. So we want to talk with you about how to promote yourself on a shoestring budget.

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A lot of small business owners have done that. The headlines are that the Dow is down. Big companies are cutting back all kinds of jobs. The newspaper industry is in turmoil because of losing advertisers. But the typical small business owner is not putting out hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising. In many cases, they have gotten to where they’ve gotten because they worked on a shoestring anyway. I wrote a column this week for a publication and talked about the natural competitive advantages of small business. I think that we can have this tendency to get in this “the sky is falling” mode and quite frankly, my experience at least is, that it’s not falling on the small business owner. The small business owner is now finding that the market momentum, sheer momentum, is perhaps not carrying them and that they have to get better at doing some of the things that maybe they should have been doing anyway. But my current soap box right now is to say, “Hey, everything is okay. Let’s just buckle in and do some things right.” So that was my long-winded intro to answer your question. Right now is the best time ever to get closer to your customer.

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So what are some customer-building strategies that don’t require spending a lot of money?

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Your customer, whether it’s a business or an individual, is feeling some of this economic pressure as well. This is a great time to huddle up and say, “What more can we be doing with you, for you? How can we get together and help each other?” Strategic partnerships have always been a great way to go for folks who are strapped for making the phone ring. Go out and find other people that have your ideal customer in mind. Find ways to co-brand some of your marketing materials, put workshops on together, or maybe just literally pass out each other’s materials. One of the greatest partnerships I ever put together was a plumbing contractor. They were going into people’s house every day. So we said to them, “Let’s find an electrical contractor, a roofing contractor, and three or four other people who treat their customers the way you like. Why don’t you all start going in and recommending each other?” You know how that happens – once you develop trust with a customer, they’ll ask you for every resource you can give them! So doing things like that – things people should be doing, good times and bad. It really does put the spotlight on them now if you haven’t been doing them.

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Thanks for reading today’s post. Next time, we’ll continue our conversation with John. He discusses ways to add value for customer loyalty. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00308-011409.mp3

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