Acquisition or Partnership? How to Decide

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Instagram and Facebook. Microsoft and Yammer. Is an acquisition or partnership a possibility in your future? If your company is growing, first things first: CONGRATS! It’s a tough economy and you’re lucky to be on the upswing, no matter how big or small it might be.

One way companies try to grow quickly is to either partner with another uae whatsapp number database company or acquire it. If you’re thinking about forming a partnership or acquiring another business, you’re in for quite the ride. I’ve been on both sides in the past 11 years of running VerticalResponse. It was unnerving, stressful, expensive, time consuming, amazing and exhilarating … just to name a few emotions.

So I thought to myself, there’s got to be something to make it a little easier to decide what path is best. Here are three questions you should ask yourself:

1. Is your goal to acquire more customers, to own intellectual property I might not have, or both?
Partnerships come out of the need to grow a business. A marketing partnership might be as simple as a restaurant owner who advertises a neighboring wine bar in his email marketing campaigns, and the wine bar owner does the same for the restaurant. This could drive traffic into the local area where both businesses benefit from increased sales.

Another good example: a contact management software company that finds they get more business customers when they have email marketing companies integrated tightly into their software, so that their business customers can easily interact with their customers.

In both of these cases, either an acquisition or a partnership would be appropriate. In the former, the restaurant owner could benefit from the wine bar’s customers. But taking it a step further, he could also get some major cost benefits from scaling when ordering food, wine and beer since he’s already sourcing them for his current restaurant. He could also benefit from an administrative perspective, such as managing, menu planning and scheduling. In the latter example, the contact management company might hurt itself if it chose just one and could really benefit from the email marketing companies driving customers to use its software.

So you have to decide: Do you want to form a partnership to drive more customers cost-effectively, or do you need that business for more than just access to its customer base?