Forming a joint venture with your competition may seem like a crazy notion, but you’ve likely seen it happen even with big business. For example, many large corporations join forces to promote causes they care about, like childhood hunger or cancer awareness. But they also sometimes join forces in ways that aren’t apparent such as sharing manufacturing or outsourcing.
You, too, can benefit from forming joint ventures with your competitors, and here are a few of the benefits you’ll gain when you do.
Shared Investment and Expense
When you form a joint venture for a short-term product or even a long-term project, you’ll want to divvy up the investment and expenses in a fairway. When you share this risk, it automatically reduces your personal risk and increases your venture’s chances for success.
To host a virtual conference, you’ll have expenses for technology, contract workers, marketing materials, and so forth. One or more of you may already pay for the technology you need, meaning there is no new expense involved for some projects. But if you share this expense, you’ll reduce your cost while not decreasing your profit potential.
Shared Technical Knowledge and Expertise
When you join forces with someone else, you automatically gain their knowledge and expertise and vice versa. If you are good at organizing, you can take on that role. If they’re good with technology or creating marketing graphics, they can do that, and you won’t have to find outsiders to participate at all.
Penetrate New or Aligned Markets
If you work with someone who sells to a lookalike market to yours or one that is closely related or interchangeable with yours, forming a joint venture with someone who has already reached those markets can help you get a foot in the door even faster.
Create New Revenue Streams
By joining forces on a project with your competition, you can create an entirely new revenue stream. This may be with a mutual promotion agreement or something else, but it will give you an entirely new income stream to build your business fast.
Benefit from Working Together
When you work with your competition, you’ll get many more benefits than you may imagine, from shared resources to shared risk to having someone on the same page as you to brainstorm with. The benefits of working together will far outshine any downsides.
Increased Credibility
If you’re new to the niche, joint venturing with someone else who is not new can offer you automatic credibility with your audience. Plus, working with others in your industry makes the community stronger and therefore benefits the entire industry’s credibility.
Increase Capacity
If you can’t do it, they probably can and vice versa. If you’re good at writing marketing content and they’re good at designing the website, you can work together in numerous ways, whether on joint ventures or on individual projects that you agree to outsource amongst each other.
Working together is so much more fun and advantageous than always competing. You can still compete, but by being good citizens in your industry and your community and finding ways to collaborate and do things together, you’ll make the industry that much stronger and more resilient to threats known and unknown.
