5 Reasons to Go Strong…Make that Smart

November 28, 2009 | Comments Off

  1. The world is a global mar­ket­place, period.
  2. The veloc­ity of change is accelerating.
  3. Customer’s expec­ta­tions have become increas­ingly precise.
  4. We don’t know it all, and more impor­tantly there’s not time to learn it all.
  5. Suc­cess only comes when oth­ers embrace your efforts and pull with you.

Why this, why now.
The one sta­ple that has demon­strated supe­rior power through­out my career — and yes this most cer­tainly includes my finance, strat­egy and tech lives — has been strate­gic col­lab­o­ra­tions. The power of part­ner­ing allows orga­ni­za­tions to grow faster and do more prof­itably than if they go it alone.

A great exam­ple of this was when Show­time Net­works was look­ing to exit the C-band satel­lite –you remem­ber those big dishes many sub­ur­ban and rural homes had in their yards – pro­gram­ming pack­age sub­scrip­tion busi­ness. Ini­tially viewed as a dying ven­ture — SNI’s per­spec­tive — despite the fact that a cohort of sub­scribers loved the ser­vice. In fact they were buy­ing large pack­ages, ones much larger than cable house­holds and the then nascent DBS sub­scribers. For them it was all about a great video expe­ri­ence. Not only did they spend thou­sands on the pro­gram­ming they invested many thou­sands of dol­lars on tele­vi­sions, stereo equip­ment, and a ded­i­cated enter­tain­ment room. From this per­spec­tive it is easy to see that the con­tent pack­age sale was only one slice in a much larger pie.

Now do you think that these indi­vid­u­als and their ‘home the­ater’ expert had a close rela­tion­ship? Absolutely, and more impor­tantly for SNI the experts valued:

  • the abil­ity to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive package
  • the oppor­tu­nity to pro­mote their brand on a monthly basis in an unob­tru­sive man­ner through pro­gram­ming guides and updates

The nat­ural strate­gic part­ner was a national video equip­ment retailer. And, that’s exactly whom we approached and ulti­mately struc­tured a deal with. A deal that secured $19 mil­lion of quan­tifi­able value. Not bad for a busi­ness ini­tially con­sid­ered to be a finan­cial drain.

I get that, so what is this.
This is an infor­ma­tional blog, one that focuses on help­ing you build­ing your vision through strate­gic partnerships. Hopefully it equips sev­eral of you to think about your own efforts dif­fer­ently or to do new things. The busi­ness shape of this blog is to make con­nec­tions, build com­mu­nity, and trans­late some level of per­sonal con­nec­tions into career value for me.

Before we con­tinue our jour­ney I want to wel­come you. It might seem that I’m new to this but as my grand­mother would of put it, I’ve been watch­ing and lis­ten­ing to this con­ver­sa­tion for a month of Sundays.

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Posted by Donald McMichael | Filed Under Blog