Do you use collaborations to help you to grow your business?

Whether you’re involved in a business that’s small or large, your capacity to get more things done faster will always be constrained – regardless of your ambitions – by limitations of time, resources, and money available to you.

And if you’re a one or a few person band who is overly reliant on what you can do yourself, you will likely find that it’s hard to grow your business beyond a certain point.

After all, no matter how smart you are, how valuable what you can do may be, or how hard you work…with just one or a few of you and only so many hours you can work in any given day, there’s necessarily going to be a limit to what you can accomplish.

But, if you can partner with others in ways where all parties to a collaboration benefit from the arrangement and you leverage everyone’s strengths…

…All of a sudden the prospects of scaling up your business, speeding up the time it takes to bring ideas to fruition, focusing more on what you do best, broadening your knowledge in key areas as you learn from fellow co-preneurs, and more, can become a deal brighter.

Sounds good, right? But, there’s a caveat:

While collaborations can literally open up a world of new possibilities for you and your business…

…They can also take a deal of work and won’t always work out in the ways you hope.

All of which begs the question, what can you do to increase the chances that any collaborations you choose to pursue will have a greater likelihood of being successful?

And that’s the topic tackled in today’s expert interview with international motivational speaker for confidence, author, columnist, recent Co-President of the Professional Speaking Association of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and queen of collaborations, Eilidh Milnes (aka Captain Positive) when she visited PSA Ireland.

Set Your Collaborations up to Succeed With These Communication Ideas

Listen in as we discuss

• Why developing a co-preneur mindset can help you (and others) to up your game
• How paying attention to ‘Whys’ is essential when building ‘Awesome’ partnerships
• What you need to decide before you launch a new collaboration
• Secrets to managing many relationships if you begin to collaborate more frequently
• Lessons from the front – what it takes to turn expectations into reality
• How to establish bases for greater clarity of purpose, responsibilities, and trust from the outset
• Why it’s important to enter collaborations with the right attitude and your ‘eyes wide open’
• An essential tip to get you started on the road to partnerships
• And more

Your Turn

And in the interests of collaborative thinking:

1. If you’re using collaborations and/or have used them in the past to help grow your business, what have you learned from your experiences? Also, what observations or advice would you give to those who are thinking about collaboration for the first time?
2. And if you haven’t yet dabbled in collaborations, why not? What is holding you back?

Interview Transcript

Eamonn:  You are so welcome to The Reluctant Speaker’s Club expert series.

Today, we’re going to talk about communication tips that you can use to create better collaborations for your business. And we have an outstanding expert here. I’m so excited to have Eilidh Milnes with us. And Eilidh, you are known as the queen of collaboration and things motivational. And of course, you’re a columnist, an author, and the recent co-president of The Professional Speaking Association. We’re thrilled to have you here.

Eilidh: It’s absolutely a pleasure to be in Dublin. It’s been super fun.

Eamonn: Good. So when it comes to the whole area of collaboration, you often times talk about co-preneurs. What is a co-preneur?

Eilidh: Well, traditionally if you’re an SME, you’re going to be working on you’re own. You’re a one man business. So if you move from solo-preneur to co-preneur, then you’re someone who has brought on board people to work alongside you. Now, that might be in your office, it might be in your family, and it might be external experts who you employ to bring into your business. So essentially you’re upping your game.

Eamonn: Absolutely. Why is that, that the notion of having co-preneur relationships, important for a speaker? Why would a speaker care?

Eilidh: Well, a speaker is very good at speaking, on the whole, we hope. We hope they’re not reluctant, Eamonn.

Eamonn: Yeah, they’d better.

Eilidh: And if they’re good, if been in your courses and they’ve learned their craft and they’ve honed their craft, then they’re very good at delivering that. But they may not be good at delivering the back office materials. They may not be good at the marketing. Perhaps their strength is not in media relationships, for example. So they bring on people who can assist you in other ways.

Eamon: Absolutely. But, what prompted you to dabble in this art of collaborating in the first place?

Eilidh: Money.

Eamonn: Oh, that’s…

Eilidh: A five letter word. You know I’m Scottish. We do like it.

Eamonn: Yes.

Eilidh: And at the end of the day, I thought, “If I can help other people to be more successful, then that’s maybe going to help me as well.” And I realized that if I… I say an expression that… I just did it. I say quirky things, but, “I strap on extra brains.” So I have my talents and I have my skills. But if I help somebody else who has a different set of tools, then between us we could actually, awesome.

Eamonn: Yes, awesome. I like that. But was there a moment in time, where you said, “Actually, I can see a real opportunity here?” What was, if you like… Money, I understand that, but if you think about what was the real catalyst beyond that because of course, there’s an old phrase that, “You should never marry for money. It’s always cheaper to borrow.” So if money is your only determinant, then to be honest with you, maybe it’s not set up for great success.

Eilidh: Yes, I was being flipped.

Eamonn: I know you were. Of course. So tell me, was there a particular issue or set of circumstances that caused you to think, “Golly, that would be great. I could really see that getting together with somebody else would produce something awesome”?

Eilidh: Well, a lot of businesses, in recent times,  around 2008, 2009, were suffering.

Eamonn: Sure.

Eilidh: Our balances were not healthy. And we were looking at our bottom lines and thinking, “How do I recreate myself?” And I just thought, “Well, if I worked with other people, and hopefully other people who are thriving rather than trying to survive, then again, it would be this… There has to be a synergy. You’re not just in it selfishly. Of course, I’m not in it for money. Yes I am. I’m in it because I want to help other people while I help myself. And for me there has to be a lot of fun. If there’s no fun, I can’t do it.

Eamonn: Yeah.

Eilidh: So I look for the synergy. And then I work together. And I looked around the world at what other people were doing, and there’s so many ways to collaborate. It might be webinars, it can be seminars, it can be writing books together. There’s so many different ways. There’s a chap in New Zealand, a speaker that I really respect, and his name is Mike Handcock. And I thought I was good at collaboration, but he currently has some 40 projects in collaborative and strategic alliances and cooperative working practices. And I thought, “Eilidh, you could learn from this guy.”

Eamonn: Oh, absolutely. But now, if you’ve got that many things going on in collaboration, I suppose, you’re engaged in a lot of multitasking, are you? How do you actually manage those things? Because you’ve got a number of collaborations. So are there ideas and notions, and how do you go about–

Eilidh: They don’t all come to fruition at the same time. For example, there’s a very good friend of mine in The Professional Speaking Association at the moment, and we were all geared up. We actually started our collaborative project, and we were really excited about it. I’d like to be able to tell you about it, but if I did, she would kill me. So we’ve had to put it to one side because she has found she’s pregnant.

Eamonn: All right!

Eilidh: So she’s having a baby. She’s more keen to give birth to that than to give birth to our project. So at the moment, that’s put to bed. So not everything is going to come along. So you have to have more than one iron in the fire and more than one collaboration going because they won’t all come through on time on the expectation that you might originally have thought of.

Eamonn: Tell me. So the first few collaborations that you had, what kind of expectations did you have at the outset? And what happened in reality? And what did you learn from that?

Eilidh: I learned that you have to get as much as you can understood. I personally, because I do work on intuition, and I work on trust. So I was speaking to Alec, one of your speakers, as well, and he was in a collaborative, cooperative working relationship for 25, 27 years. They never had a written contract.

Eamonn: Oh, right. Yeah.

Eilidh: So there has to be a huge element of trust in that. And some people would say you shouldn’t even start if you haven’t got a contract.

Eamonn: Yes. This is the prenup or no prenup type of notion. Yeah.

Eilidh: Exactly that. And so you do have to have discussions. And I think maybe one of the biggest discussions you will have is over your money.

Eamonn: I’m sure.

Eilidh: Is to how to sort it out. What’s the split going to be?

Eamonn: And who owns what.

Eilidh: And who owns what and your intellectual property. So have some sensible conversations, and maybe write down, “What will we do if such happens?” that worst what-if scenario. Write down half a dozen of them and what you will do. And then should that nasty elephant appear in the room, you at least have a starting point to find the solution.

Eamonn: And I know that that really matters because I’ve used partnership agreements in the past. And it did sort out all those things, where you did have those discussions about, “Well, what might happen to us?” For example, if somebody gets sick. Maybe they can’t do what they thought they could do. Maybe the dog ate your homework. It doesn’t matter what it is, but having thought about those things, maybe there’s a bit more clarity.

Eilidh: Absolutely. And the clearer it is… I think I mentioned in my presentation: communicate everything, define your deliverables, no frolics, and no going off and playing on your own.

Eamonn: You did say no frolics, did you?

Eilidh: No frolics. Shall I spell that?

Eamonn: I just wanted to clarify that, so we don’t have to put subtitles in.

Eilidh: Frolics.

Eamonn: It sounds much more interesting than the word it suggests. But if there was one abiding lesson that you picked up along the way about things that you’ll never do again, what would that be? So what did you learn that there are right ways and wrong ways to do things?

Eilidh: I’ve got one ongoing collaboration at the moment that isn’t sweet, and I don’t know how to bring it to a conclusion. So not everything is sweet. All I know is I have the intellectual property. I can do what I want with it. But I don’t want to spoil our relationship.

Eamonn: And that’s often times an issue.

Eilidh: And that is the issue. And I don’t know where to go because I’ve asked this person many times to step up to the plate. And there’s always a disaster happening in this person’s life. Some people seem to be beset by troubles and trials and tribulations. And I’m thinking, “How can all of this stuff happen to one person?”

Eamonn: Yes. And maybe therein lies your observation about having many irons in the fire, so that you’re not overly dependent on one maybe.

Eilidh: Oh no. If I was dependent on that one collaboration, I would’ve probably put off the opportunity for life. So you have to accept that people are people. Not all marriages work. Not all partnerships work.

Eamonn: That’s right.

Eilidh: Not all friendships work. And unfortunately, not all strategic alliances will work. But the more homework you do, the more preparation and planning you do, and the more fun you have… Because I guess maybe that, get profiled at the beginning, simply. But find out what drives the other person, and work to their language.

Eamonn: Yeah. And on that bombshell, if we think about maybe concluding our conversation, what’s the biggest thing that you have learned? Maybe something that you wish you had known at the outset that you’d love to share with people about setting collaborations up to succeed.

Eilidh: I’m a very simplistic person. I give overt nuggets. Just do it.

Eamonn: Just do it. Wonderful.

Eilidh: Just do it. Get started and do it!

Eamonn: Yes, and I like that. [inaudible 00:09:25] And on that note, that’s a wonderful way to finish our interview. Eilidh, I thank you so much. And thank you for watching today. You have been watching The Reluctant Speaker’s Club expert series. And until the next time, happy speaking.

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