Developing Your Market Niche Through the Development of a Strategic Alliance

One of the greatest challenges our team of independent consultants had to deal with was the development of a focused market niche. When your business model includes a large number of diverse specialists that can do a wide range of tasks, the question of “who is our customer?” ends up being “anyone you want it to be”. No one ever really “decided” to utilize one of our members as a strategic alliance for developing our initial niche – it just kind of happened that way as a result of a strategy meeting we held using a unique methodology called “Open Space Technology”.

It should have been obvious some time ago. One of our associates contacted me for assistance with an early-stage start-up that was trying to prepare to stand in front of a group of international investors and ask for start-up funding. This member was an investment banker that specialized in helping companies raise capital. The challenge he often faced is that many of these start-ups are missing some key components in their structure, business model or organization – components that must be in place to improve the probability of receiving the capital they desire. We worked together to develop their organization and their presentation, which resulted in an offer of funding with contingencies for the start-up company. My alliance with this associate provided me with consulting fees I wouldn’t have otherwise received. My participation helped to secure his client’s offer. We both won in our business relationship – which is exactly what strategic alliances are made of.

Since that time, this same member/strategic alliance attended our “OST Strategy Session” and heard our discussion about making “early-stage start-ups” one of our initial niches. He and I followed that session up with an in-depth discussion about how we can work together to help each other grow our businesses. I worked with people in career transition who were developing business plans that eventually needed funding. He worked with people who already had the business plan, were looking for funding, but often needed to do some additional homework before presenting to investors. There was a natural synergy between our businesses which allowed each of us to prosper more easily and fully.

Our team received 3 referrals from this strategic alliance partner – all early-stage start-ups that needed our assistance before they were ready to make presentations to investors. Several of our consultants have completed and been paid for projects secured through these referrals.

In case you’re wondering, our alliance partner turned out to be an awesome business relationship. He not only improved his relationship with his existing clients, and received referrals back from us, but also received a 10% sales commission on each of the projects our group received from his clients. The more wins each member of a strategic alliance receives in his/her business relationship, the more secure and profitable the relationship becomes.