Finding the Right Partner

Everyday there are more partners we could work with, and it’s harder to choose the right ones. With more businesses starting up and joining in the social media conversation the number of potential partners, for delivery as well as supply chain is literally exploding.

Finding these businesses isn’t hard. Identifying the right ones is. Unfortunately their profiles and sites tell us a great deal, but usually not what we want to know.

We need to ask them the questions related to our particular interests, record the answers and compare them. Then, having decided on a short list, we need to apply “due diligence” – really getting in to the stuff that counts.

Finding the right partner is a multi stage process (if we really want to consider the whole market).

We start with Request for Information, net the responses down to a list for Request for Proposals, then net the short list down to the short, short list.

We can cope with the work when starting out with five, but how do we cope with five hundred? We want to get the best of the best, and that means surveying everybody in the increasingly global market.

To address this problem we built Webrequest in Front Office Box.

We needed a partner to work with us developing and maintaining our software. There are hundreds of Ruby on Rails developers across the US, Canada, Europe, India and even strange places like Brazil, China and Morocco.

Assembling a list of potential partners, more than 100 was easy – they promote themselves on the Ruby on Rails site.

Having selected a list of those who seemed likely candidates we distilled the list down to around fifty.

Using Webrequest we sent them all a series of simple questions and compared the responses, moving on to a shorter list of ten.

The we used Webrequest again – more detailed questions this time.

Ultimately we got the list down to three, at which point conference calls over Skype let us choose the perfect partner.

The Internet offered us a range of partners situated all around the globe.

Webrequest helped us understand what each was good at, and how they could add value to our business.

We did all this in the terms we wanted to use.

The result was we did the right deal with the company best able to deliver what we wanted, and we did it all with the minimum of effort on our part because Webrequest enabled us to do it our way.

How do you decide who to work with?

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