Stakeholder engagement is essential to building, growing, and scaling your business over the long term.
You’re a passionate, high-integrity business leader ready to innovate and grow. When scaling, you’ve primarily focused on new business acquisition. This is common for businesses of all sizes, and it’s important – but if that’s your sole focus, you’re missing out on building other crucial relationships that could help you successfully scale your business.
It’s easy to stay stuck in the acquisition mindset. After all, healthy cash flow is a must for every business. But if that’s your primary relationship focus, you’re leaving opportunities and money on the table. And most importantly, the steps (and relationships!) that got you where you are today won’t get you to the future you envision.
After years of seeing this phenomenon in action, I created the 10 Vital Business Relationships framework. It’s a guide to help you shift your thinking about the relationships you cultivate in your business and how to grow your company strategically, authentically, and sustainably.
Specifically, I want to challenge you to view these relationships in, perhaps, a broader sense than you might have before.
This framework scales and applies to businesses of all sizes, in any industry and location. Let’s get into it.
Building and Nurturing Stakeholder Relationships: Essential for Business Development and Company Health
To grow, you’ll need to build and nurture relationships with stakeholders across every touch point of your business—not just the clients and customers you hope to sell to.
Thriving in business isn’t just about the bottom line. It’s also about setting your company up for success year after year. To build a system that replicates and scales, focus on building stakeholder relationships.
Solid stakeholder relationships are essential for your overall business development and the health of your company. They’re also crucial for building a sustainable, strong organization and powerful value proposition. The more you proactively engage with your stakeholders, the more likely you’ll be able to find out what they need—and how you can best support them.
I have identified 10 vital business relationships that can make a significant difference in your business, and each one deserves your attention. Here they are at a glance:
- Strategic Partnerships
- Community
- Employees/Team
- Customers
- Prospects
- Competitors
- Media
- CEO (Leadership)
- Suppliers/Vendors
- Environment
This series of articles about stakeholder engagement dives deep into each of these crucial business relationships. It’s important to note that stakeholder engagement isn’t just about engagement; it’s also about awareness, intention, and shifting from unawareness to proactivity inside these relationships.
While all 10 relationships are relevant to large enterprises, they may not all apply to small or solo businesses. Depending on your business’s size, maturity, and location, some of these relationships may be more or less relevant to you. That’s perfectly okay—just focus on the ones that resonate with you. The key is to reflect on each relationship, consider if and how it applies to your situation, and start mapping them out to incorporate into your planning. If you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Now That You Know the 10 Vital Business Relationships, What’s Next?
Now that you’re familiar with the 10 vital relationships, what do you do next? How do you nurture and cultivate these relationships well? Knowing where to focus first can be overwhelming.
Your first step is to examine the health of each relationship as it relates to your business. And if you don’t have some of these relationships in place yet, it’s time to get started.
I’m offering a series of Stakeholder Engagement workshops that dive deep into each of the 10 Vital Business Relationships. If you’re ready to discover the growth opportunities in your ecosystem, fill out this form and select the relationships you’re most interested in developing. When new dates are available, we’ll notify you.
Alternatively, this article by Tim Frick of Mightybytes provides an outline to help purpose-driven companies with their stakeholder mapping.