The “Shiny Things” Disease
The kryptonite of Business Development and Partnerships is something Nicole Cook, Dwolla’s BD lead on Financial Institutions and Government deals, and I spoke about last week (note: this was a few years ago when it was originally written). I told her to write this post, but she said I should, so I here goes.
What is the “shiny things” disease, and why is relevant to BD?
The “shiny things” disease is when your BD team can’t focus and continues to follow the newest and shiniest thing whenever it arises. This could be a big company that wants to work with you, but it will take all of your attention away from the task at hand and 4 months of your time. Even the best BD people fall for this constantly. It’s shiny! And really, it’s hard not to. The allure of a new shiny thing is a difficult one to fight. But if you don’t fight it, and continue to jump from thing to thing, you will accomplish little and there will be no one to blame but yourself.
This happens at startups and big companies, but I’m mostly talking about Business Development and Partnerships at startups. I’ve experience the “shiny things” disease myself. It is a great feeling when a big company that sorta, kinda is someone you want to work with reaches out (happens a lot with digital agencies and the brands they work with) . But when dealing with startups, once you figure out what path you want to take, you need to stay hyper-focused. If you decide that you are going after a specific type of deals, then you stick to it until it either works out or you decide you need to change up your strategy. Chasing one-offs never ends well.
How do I cure myself of the “shiny things” disease?
There are two ways to cure yourself of the “shiny things” disease.
The first is to straight up ignore shiny things. It will take time, but you should work on training yourself to ignore (in a nice manner) shinythings that come your way. This means ignoring emails and calls from “shiny things”. Saying things like, “We are focused on X for the next few months,” will help put these companies at bay. You need to work your best on staying focused on the uglier/more dull things that will actually make your business more successful. This is obviously easier said than done.
The second is to put a major stumbling block in from of “shiny things”. This allows you to see which ones are really serious about working together and which ones are going to waste your time. A stumbling block could be that you need them to sign some sort of binding Letter Of Intent that if you do what they are asking for, they will 100% use/integrate it. Some people might be of the opinion that the only way to cure yourself fully is to follow the first way. I’ve seen some success with the major stumbling block strategy.
Either way you go, if you don’t cure the “shiny things” disease it can have a major negative effect on your BD team, which will subsequently hurt your company. Make sure you try to identify “shiny things” opportunities and make the conscious effort not to fall in that trap.
This post was originally published on October 10th, 2013 on my personal blog, Alex’s Tech Thoughts.
