Penguins, Monkeys and How to Leverage Your Business
When it comes to managing finances and investments, over-leveraging can lead to a pretty sticky situation. Europe knows what we’re talking about. But, in a totally different context, leverage can be the key to your company’s success and the success of others. We’ve labored over the benefits of collaboration, but this takes it a step further and makes impossible problems not only surmountable, but also exploitable. (In a good way.)
Ask yourself the following question: What is my number one goal? You remember, it’s tucked somewhere in the mission statement you wrote ten years ago. It should be less monetarily motivated – depending on what you’re doing, money should be a secondary goal, not the reason you do what you do. For instance, you’ve been a fan of frozen bananas since you were a kid, and after watching every episode of Arrested Development in one epic sitting you decided to start your own frozen banana stand. Seems reasonable. Your goal is to sell lots and lots of frozen bananas.
What next?
Leverage your relationships. So you’ve got your banana stand, and your friend is a professor at the Theater Arts School for Primates. You ask your friend if a troop of dancing monkeys would be willing to perform outside your stand on a busy weekend afternoon. They can wear their school t-shirts and pass out flyers. You get attention, the monkeys get attention. Win-win.
Leverage your customer base. You do some research, and you figure out that 85% of all people who are fans of roller derby are also fans of frozen bananas. You call up your local roller derby owner and offer to give away frozen bananas to the first 100 attendees. You offer a special discount to everyone else. When they come to your stand, you give them the chance to sign up for tickets to the next roller derby event. Your existing banana customers will then hear about the roller derby, and the roller derby folks who didn’t know about your stand will now eat there. Done and done.
Leverage your goals. After running some numbers you figure out that you need to increase your sales by 10% to make your business solvent. This means you need to sell 100 extra bananas. There’s a non-profit charity down the street that makes sweaters for Antarctic penguins. You tell them that if they help you sell 150 bananas, you’ll give them 30% of the proceeds. They help you reach your goal, you help them buy more yarn for penguin sweaters, and the world is a little bit better.
The idea is not to think solely about who can help you, but who can benefit from your goals and whose goals you can benefit. Arrangements should be fair, and ideally, equal in scope – not to mention obvious to the consumer. Again, transparency is key!
Keep in mind, as you network, not everyone needs to be a customer. The opportunity for partnerships should not be dismissed – in this economy, we can all use a few extra hands, a couple more monkeys and a little more fashionable penguin attire.