Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Blog Assignment: Finding the right business partner

THE BLOG ASSIGNMENT


THE PROBLEM
I have the dream of having my own business after graduation in a near future. To achieve this goal, I think that it is important to have partners to build a healthy company. But the profiles of these partners must be very well studied and defined. Based on this, I believe that the three main pillars of a successful business partnership are technical, administrative and commercial.
In this context, after analyze my social networking I realized that I would like to be responsible for the administrative area of the company. It will be a management consulting firm and the technical area would belong to a colleague that worked with me some years ago in some management projects in Brazil and Europe.
The issue in this case is to define and find the third pillar: the commercial man, responsible for selling the projects, find new clients and interact politically with institutions and the government.

DATA THAT I NEED
I need to know between my social networks which people have a good contact nets and if these contacts are strong enough to build trustful relations and develop good business opportunities in the near future. These data are not easy to find, because if we consider the sources of information available, like Facebook and LinkedIn, they are not complete and not so reliable as it should be. The SNA would be helpful identifying the number of people with connections with people from government institutions and/or from big companies with potential and financial power to hire our services.

THE MOST IMPORTANT NETWORK MEASURES
As mentioned before, SNA is a very useful tool to measure the number of connections in different degrees. This indicator will be crucial for our profile analyzes and for the right person’s choice. The best scenario would be finding someone with first degree contacts.
To stablish the best profile I could create an electronic sheet and ask the best “candidates” to fill it in. The sheet would have questions like:
-          Do you know people working for government institutions?
-          How many people in positions like CEO or director do you have contact with?
-          Are you a good seller?
-          Do you like to be in touch with people?
-          How many people do you have in your LinkedIn profile?
Then, I could create the best standard of answers and compare with the content received. Each common answer would sum a point and this measure would help me to identify the ones with the highest possibility of doing the commercial role as my business partner.


ROMULO COSCARELLI

1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

OK, but what data and what kind of analysis can you do that will help identify your "rainmakers"? How can you use SNA to tell if someone's "contacts are strong enough?" Also, you need to rethink your Questions. For instance, if you ask someone if they're a "good seller," it's hard to imagine them saying anything but yes. There are better ways to get at the answer...needs more thought.