Reality’s Craig Martin was recently asked to speak about partnerships at the SEGD conference ‘The business of Design’. The event focused on strengthening the business skills to build, manage and sustain a design practice.
At Reality, we actively seek and nurture partnerships, as we believe in their value in creating exceptional work for our clients. They also allow us to solve more problems faster for clients, as collaboration nurtures innovation. Here are some of the lessons learned and the guidelines we follow when it comes to partnerships:
- We don’t present ourselves as experts in areas we are not. Instead, we find the experts and bring them into projects.
- That means we also bring our partners in to pitch with us – because we don’t know their business as well as they do.
- We are transparent with our clients when we’re partnering with others. So when it comes to budgets, rather than just simply marking up other partner’s fees, we allow our clients to understand how much each part of the project costs.
- We have a set of rules of engagement with our partners that broadly cover the ways of working together.
There is truly an advantage to a multidisciplinary team working together, and in our partnerships – it’s great to watch teams learn from each other. If you’d like to learn more about how we handle partnerships, get in touch. You can also watch Craig’s full presentation on the SEGD.org website.
