Doing business with big brands
You have established that the product you have can help a big brand build a market to their customer. You have got through the first few meetings, it is all going well, but you need to consider very carefully, the way bigger companies work and how their suppliers fit into their ecosystem.
If you are working with an agency on a project with a big brand, you are almost certainly within a much larger team and possibly not the person responsible for the overall relationship with the big brand. How does that affect your own company. Cash flow, management and focus are probably the things that you are worrying most about.
These are hugely important in a small company and you have a lot of moving parts in any project or campaign you are involved in with bigger brands and companies.
Often the agency you are working with is itself a middleman. You need to know early on who is in control, not only of your destiny within the project but also how your input gets reflected.
Who is making the decisions, how do you impact those, can you impact them? This is very important to know when there is potential for someone to make decision on your behalf or even that has a major impact on your company where your concerns can be a lot more immediate than perhaps a larger company.
This follows on to who manages the timelines, dependencies, deadlines. How and when do payments get made, or budget released. All these variables can affect whether you and your team are even still around by the end of the project. With big companies, decisions and milestones can be stretched out because of many things out of your control. Big companies have many moving parts, approval layers, procurement processes and an abundance of other things that control so many things. How will that affect you?
Not only the systems, but you will encounter lots of administration and bureaucracy: Legal; Contractual ;Ownership and accountability.
As with anything that brings together many people with different intentions and motivations, it will be like herding cats. You need to understand that you want to be front and centre when it comes to being responsible and accountable for as much as you can within the project, you may feel that it will be hard work, but it is better than being part of a long chain of moving parts and a simply a supplier that gets informed along the way.
You need to be able to have as much control over your destiny as possible with clear agreements in place to protect your small shoot of a company before the bigger plants take over and stifle your growth.
Questions needing an answer:
Are they going to be the middleman
Who is in control
Who makes the decisions
Who manages the timelines, dependencies, deadlines
How and when do payments get made, or budget released
In the simplest terms, I support people to prepare to profitably scale. What you do with a room full of people is very different to how you do it when they cross cities, continents or oceans.
I am happy to spend a few minutes working through a challenge you have, as an advisor on officehours.io (Officehours connects you with amazing people, for 10 minutes of free 1-on-1 advice).
Check out my available slots here
