🌊 Deep Dive: The Small Giant's Guide to Strategic Partnerships That Actually Work

Why the wrong partnership can set you back months—and how to spot the right ones before your first meeting

Hey all! A reminder that I'm hosting an ask me anything session TODAY in London about building meaningful communities with Nicola Gunby (2x time founder and co-founder of CLIQ). There are still some in-person and virtual tickets, you can grab one here. 

Two years ago, when I was building Mane Hook-Up full-time, I was excited about a partnership that looked perfect on paper. A well-small brand with a strong reputation wanted to collaborate on content production. They promised to generate 1,000 leads for our community. The numbers looked good, their credentials were solid, and their pitch was polished.

I even pre-warned them that getting hair stylists as leads was a tricky job with unique challenges. “No problem,” they assured me. “We’ll make it work.”

They delivered less than 100 leads and didn’t tell me about their struggles until I started asking probing questions and dug the truth out of them.

That partnership didn’t just fail—it actively set us back. It almost cost me £1,000 and wasted months of valuable time during a critical period when every resource mattered. We’d allocated resources, adjusted our strategy, and built our quarterly goals around their promises. When they under-delivered by 90%, we didn’t have time to fill the gap while maintaining momentum with our community.

The worst part wasn’t even the poor results—it was the communication breakdown. They knew they were struggling but didn’t proactively communicate the problems. I had to play detective to understand what was actually happening.

It was an expensive lesson in why partnership decisions are make-or-break for Small Giants. When you’re building something intimate and values-driven, you can’t afford to waste months on misaligned relationships. Every partnership either accelerates your mission or derails it—there’s no middle ground.

But the experience taught me something crucial: most founders approach partnerships backwards. They get excited about the opportunity, negotiate terms, and start collaborating before they’ve properly vetted the relationship. By the time problems emerge, they’re already invested—financially, operationally, and emotionally.

The solution isn’t to avoid partnerships entirely. Done right, partnerships are the fastest way to achieve what you couldn’t accomplish alone. But they require a completely different evaluation framework than most founders use.

Here’s what I’ve learned about filtering opportunities to find partnerships that actually work.

The Hidden Cost of Bad Partnerships

Most founders focus on the upside of partnerships: expanded reach, shared resources, collaborative opportunities. But the real risk isn’t missing out on good partnerships—it’s saying yes to bad ones.

Bad partnerships don’t just fail quietly. They consume your time, energy, and credibility. They force you to make excuses to your community. They create operational chaos that ripples through your business for months.

Consider the math: if a partnership takes 20% of your focus for six months and delivers nothing, you’ve lost three months of progress. For a Small Giant trying to build sustainable growth, that’s devastating.

But the costs go deeper than lost time. Bad partnerships damage your reputation in tight-knit industries. When a partner fails to deliver promised results to your community, your credibility takes the hit. Your audience doesn’t know about internal partnership dynamics—they just know you promised something that didn’t happen.

There’s also the opportunity cost. While you’re managing a failing partnership, you’re not pursuing better opportunities. The mental energy spent on damage control could be invested in relationships that actually advance your mission.

Finally, bad partnerships often leave you worse off than when you started. They can disrupt your systems, confuse your messaging, and create operational complexity that persists long after the partnership ends.

The solution isn’t to avoid partnerships entirely—it’s to become ruthlessly selective about which opportunities deserve your attention.

The Partnership Filter Framework

After several partnerships (some brilliant, others disasters), I’ve developed a three-stage filter that helps me evaluate opportunities before they consume significant time or resources: