Collaboration for Success: Working with Big Companies

Di Di Chan, Founder of FutureProof Retail, continues her discussion on networking, focusing on interactions with big companies.

Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

Last week, in my last post I discussed how good collaboration can be a crucial resource in overcoming many early-stage hurdles that retail technology start-ups face This week, I want to discuss the second important element of networking for success: Strategies for successfully working with larger companies.

Collaboration with big companies: Big companies are already at scale. They have established resources, infrastructure, industry reputation, client relationships, and more. It is easy to see how a good collaboration can help a start-up grow faster. Working with big companies can also take up a lot of time and resources, so finding the right partnership arrangements with the right partners is key to success.

Here are the top five lessons I learned when collaborating with larger companies that helped my company, FutureProof Retail, grow into the number one scan and go platform in the market.

1. Treat every integration as a partnership opportunity. It takes an ecosystem of technology solutions to deliver a seamless retail shopping experience. Every integration is a synergistic connection to join forces and share more success. For example, at FutureProof Retail, our mobile checkout solution often integrates with the retailer’s point of sale system, payment system, loyalty programs, e-commerce provider, delivery service, and in-store hardware solutions. With a shared reference client in hand it’s an easy win-win to set up a simple referral partnership and target sales efforts to the partner’s existing clients.
2. Don’t waste time pre-integrating without a client. Timing is everything in retail technology. Don’t get spread thin working on “could-be” big opportunities in the who-knows-when future. Only a handful of clients in each retail vertical will be the early adopters for new retail technology solutions. Prioritize finding those clients and follow their integration schedule. With synergistic solutions that do not have a joint client ready to pilot, you can still partner and refer — just stipulate in the agreement that you will integrate after there’s real business in hand.
3. Partner with wholesalers and other technology re-sellers for your vertical: Understand the retail technology ecosystem in which your solution fits. For example, in the grocery industry, many independent grocers will buy goods and services from their wholesalers or a few trusted top resellers. Figure out who the best resellers are and form a deeper partnership to sell together.
4. Be VERY selective when it comes to offering exclusive partnerships early on. Just because a company is a big player does not mean they will make a great exclusive partner, prioritize your business relative to other partners and their internal projects, or that the exclusivity will bring you more business faster. Unless a partner company is willing to pay upfront for exclusivity and will commit to minimum performance metrics, it’s typically not worth it. Many times, exclusive partnerships too early on slow down growth and block other relevant opportunities.
5. Partnership to expand: New start-ups typically do not have a competitive advantage in scaling up their sales and support teams. Using a partnership model to expand into new territories or retail verticals cuts out many of the upfront costs (including the learning curve) of growth. By using a partnership model for business development, we attracted and supported clients on three continents across five retail verticals. We were able to invest the energy that would have gone into international sales and support into the product itself.

Through partnerships with other startups and established players it’s possible to access economies of scale, and collaborative resources, far beyond what could be accomplished even with ample VC funding.

Di Di Chan is a global entrepreneur that’s passionate about education, technology, and sustainability. Chan is Founder and President of FutureProof Retail, a company seeking to bring the convenience of online shopping into your stores with mobile checkout and more. Chan’s mission is to maximize human potential by removing friction in time, aligning profit with value, and paying it forward. Chan has a Bachelor of Arts in Global Studies from UCLA and a Masters in Economics from New York University.