The companies growing fastest right now aren’t the ones doing the most on their own. Three out of four senior US business leaders told KPMG that partnerships with other organizations are central to how their companies grow. The finding comes from a survey of 258 executives at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.
We often think of success as a single company with a good idea executing well. But if you look at how these companies reach their customers or fund their research, there’s often another company involved.
In New York, where a supplier and a possible partner can be on the same block, knowing how to work with them is a large part of what makes someone useful to an employer.
However well-funded a company is, it can’t do everything itself. Going solo means hitting roadblocks: a lack of expertise, limited reach and the cost of scaling. Partnerships solve that by combining strengths.
In 2006, Steve Jobs had a problem. The iPhone was months from shipping, a prototype was scratched in his pocket, and he decided to replace the plastic screen with glass. Apple’s chief operating officer told him that it would take three or four years. Jobs called the glass company Corning.
Corning had a chemically strengthened glass called Chemcor, invented in the 1960s but shelved due to a lack of market. Scientists reformulated it to be thinner and tougher, and it shipped on the first iPhone in June 2007 as Gorilla Glass.
Corning had the chemistry but no reason to develop it further. Apple had a need, but no capacity to develop glass. Their partnership transformed both the phone and glass industries.
Getting a product into national retail takes buyer relationships, shelf space and logistics. Building that from nothing can take longer than the opportunity lasts.
Glossier spent its first eight years refusing to do any of it. The New York-founded beauty brand was built as a direct-to-consumer company, selling only on its own website and in stores. Then, in 2022, it named Sephora as its first wholesale partner, and in February 2023, it went from zero third-party stores to roughly 600 across the US and Canada.
Glossier got distribution and shoppers who could test shades in person. Sephora got a brand its customers were already searching for.
Some projects are too expensive and too likely to fail for one company to fund alone. A drug program, for instance, runs for years, costs enormous sums and often doesn’t pass clinical trials, so whoever funds it absorbs the entire loss.
By 2019, the Japanese company Daiichi Sankyo had developed Enhertu, a breast cancer treatment. That March, it signed a global agreement with AstraZeneca to complete its development and sell it together, sharing development, commercial and profit costs. Enhertu was approved to treat breast and gastric cancers and reached patients faster than either company could have managed alone.
Had the trials failed, neither would have shouldered all the costs. That’s what shared terms buy. A bigger budget, and a loss small enough to survive.
Customers are cautious about products they’ve never heard of. A trusted partner solves that, because agreeing to work with an unknown company is itself an endorsement.
Oatly built its US entry on this. When the Swedish oat milk company arrived in 2016, it skipped supermarkets and went to specialty coffee shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Within a year, it had gone from a dozen New York cafés to more than 200.
Baristas are trusted judges. A café known for taking coffee seriously doesn’t casually put an unknown milk on its menu, so its choosing to do so told customers something advertising couldn’t. Oatly reached supermarkets later with a strong, already-built reputation.
Plenty of partnerships fail, and many for reasons that were clear at the start. In KPMG’s research, 71% of leaders cited aligning goals and expectations between partners as a key challenge. Only about a third of partnerships are measured for performance, so a collaboration can drift for years before someone decides it isn’t working.
Partnerships that last do so for a few key reasons.
Agreement on what success looks like is first. If one company focuses on short-term sales while the other invests in long-term brand building, the relationship won’t work, so partners should define objectives, roles and metrics before anything is signed.
The second is complementary strengths. Two companies offering the same expertise or similar products have little to trade. The pairings that work are those where each side lacks what the other already has.
The third is strong communication and processes. Regular check-ins are where a partnership gets corrected early rather than quietly failing. If one side benefits significantly more than the other, resentment builds and the collaboration falls apart.
You don’t need a job title that includes “partnerships” for these skills to be relevant. Most work involves getting something from a team, a supplier or a client who doesn’t report to you. People who can find the overlap between what two parties want are useful in sales, finance, operations and leadership alike. And since these skills rely on social cues, discernment and judgment, they’re hard to automate.
New York makes this clear. Within a few blocks of the IENYC campus in SoHo, there are advertising agencies, fashion labels, media companies, fintech startups and venture capital firms. Companies packed that closely tend to partner rather than build, because what they need already exists a few doors away.
None of the companies in this article succeeded because they found a clever partner. They succeeded because they were honest about what they couldn’t do, specific about who could do it and clear from the start about what each side was getting out of it.
The best way to build partnership skills is through practice. The MS in Management at IENYC runs on live briefs from external organizations, with real situations and stakeholders.
A joint venture creates a new jointly owned entity. A strategic alliance is a contractual arrangement in which both companies work toward a shared goal without forming a new entity. A commercial or channel partnership is narrower, usually an agreement for one company to sell or distribute another’s product.
Common measures include attributable revenue, costs saved, speed to market and joint customer retention. The harder part is agreeing on those measures before anything starts.
Misaligned objectives are what executives cite most often. Beyond that, common failures include an uneven value split that slowly demotivates one side, no single person owning the relationship at either company and a partnership that rests on the personal rapport of two executives who later move on.
New York concentrates finance, media, fashion, technology and professional services in a small physical area, so the specialist partner a company needs is often nearby. For someone starting a career here, partnership work frequently turns up in many jobs.
Look for work that involves coordinating across organizations, like client-facing roles, business development or procurement. Volunteering to own a relationship with an outside vendor is often the fastest route in. Keep a record of what you negotiated and what changed as a result.
SHARE THIS POST
Meag Gardner is an experienced writer, linguist, translator, and editor from Indianapolis, USA. She’s done anything from storytelling for luxury hotels in the Caribbean to song lyric translation, academic writing for universities, podcast production, app development, and she even ran an art gallery in Madrid, Spain.
Meag completed a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature at Indiana University, where she earned a minor in International Relations and a Certificate in Translation & Interpretation Studies. During this time, she completed a semester abroad at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain. She later completed a year of postgraduate studies in Fine Arts at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and several certificates in programming and software development. She has combined her love of language and storytelling with art and technology for a broader and deeper understanding of modern communication.
Meag is now the Head of Brand Narrative at IE University and a contributor to The Blueprint at IENYC. She is also an Adjunct Professor at IE University in Segovia, where she teaches Research & Academic Writing.
