Opportunity and Risk in Partnering

Partnership offers opportunities, to reach new markets, add new skills, enhance your brand through association, manage surges in demand, test-drive a deeper relationship, and so on.  Partnerships also have risks, such as mixed messages to the market, damaging your brand through association, additional complexity for your customers, intellectual property problems, employee retention challenges, revenue impacts, etc.  The point is to think carefully about all the potential upsides and downsides.  There can be a tendency to see most of the benefits and gloss over the risks.  This is not to say that partnership can’t offer great leverage; just look carefully and mitigate potential negatives.