Gold bond: alliances are worth their weight in good business

Entrepreneur, March, 2003 by Julie Bick

In eight minutes, you can meet that special someone. Tom Jaffee, the mastermind behind Boston based 8minuteDating.com, found even more than that at one of his matchmaking parties

At a typical 8minuteDating event, single men and women gather at a restaurant, chat one-on-one for eight minutes, and then move on to the next table. After the event, couples who like each other can meet again. Last January, Adam Segel, an executive with Tele-Publishing International (TPI), happened to be having dinner with his mother at a restaurant that was hosting an 8minuteDating event at the same time. TPI runs the personal ad pages for 550 newspapers in the United States.

Never one to pass up an opportunity, Jaffee, 40, introduced himself and sat down at Segel's table for about eight minutes. Each quickly described what they did, their needs and what they could offer the other. So, like many singles at the event, they exchanged e-mail messages and eventually met again in person to see if they were right for each other. It wasn't the typical way to form a business alliance, but it worked.

No matter how it is formed, a smart business alliance can help you enter a new market, reach more customers, freeze out a competitor or fill a gap in your company's abilities. These partnerships take many forms, from joint sales calls or distributing each other's wares to developing new products or services. And this newfound competitive advantage can happen without a major cash infusion.

Trading Spaces

The first 8minuteDating event was held in Boston in February 2001. The company has since expanded rapidly and will host more than 1,000 events in 40 cities by the end of 2003. While the 8minute formula has been successful, Jaffee struggled with the issue of reaching audiences in 40 different locations. At the same time, TPI's Segel was looking for a way to add more customer value to his product.

TPI made an offer. They would work with newspapers to advertise 8minuteDating events in the personal pages, and, in return, the newspapers would be co-sponsors of 8minute's events. "Speed-dating is the hot thing among singles, and we wanted our name associated with it," Segel says.

For Jaffee, who expects 8minuteDating to bring in more than $1 million in 2003, teaming up with TPI's personals sections seemed like the perfect way to reach his audience. "People who check out the personal pages are already taking action to meet people," Jaffee says. "We're just offering them an additional way to do it."

The cross-promotion worked like cross-pollination. At 8minuteDating events, free coupons and contests spurred the attendees to try the local newspaper's personal ads, and in the newspaper, advertisements for the 8minuteDating events drove attendance.

Jaffee's 8minuteDating has grown tenfold in the past year. He hasn't measured exactly how much of the growth can be credited to TPI, but he thinks it's significant.

Jaffee believes the alliance has been a success because each company made it a priority. "We shared a goal that was critical to the success of both businesses, to reach more people in our target market," he says.

Now the two companies are going further, with TPI appearing on the 8minuteDating Web site. More joint activities are being planned. 'A partnership in stages makes a lot of sense," explains Emer Dooley, a business professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. "Once the two organizations start working together, they can see how well they operate as a team, if their joint objectives are being met, etc. From there, they can add layers or activities to benefit both."

"The beauty of our alliance is that it can expand with 8minuteDating's growth," says Segel. "Every time they start events in a new city, TPI will already be there with our personal ads in the newspapers. Talk about a match made in heaven."

Buying Your Way to the Top

While some entrepreneurs find a partner through serendipity, others take a much more studied approach. Nancy Michaels, president of the Lexington, Massachusetts, consulting company Impression Impact, was casting about for a place to offer her small-business seminar, "Creative Marketing Strategies." After some research, she saw that Office Depot was trying to differentiate itself from competing office-supply chains. "Just looking at the Office Depot Web site, you can see they want to add value to their small-business customers," says Michaels, 39. "They want to provide knowledge and expertise."

As an entrepreneur, Michaels lives by one rule: Go to the highest-ranking person in an organization for a decision. So when she came up with the idea to give seminars in the Office Depot retail space, she decided to speak to Office Depot CEO Bruce Nelson. But how does a small-business owner meet with a captain of industry? In Michaels' case, by bidding a thousand dollars at a charity auction in January of this year to have lunch with him.

Michaels heard Nelson speak at an event set up by the Women's Business Enterprise Council (WBENC) and Office Depot in Boca Raton, Florida. At the event's silent auction fund-raiser, she bid $1,050 for lunch with Nelson.