– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy podcast. I have with me again, Nikki Bradley, and we are going to continue our discussion on collaboration. And we’re gonna talk today a little bit more about what are some of the problems that you experienced when you collaborate and what do you have to be mindful of? Because you do need to be mindful of some things, don’t you, Nikki?

– You do, there are a few pitfalls.

– A few, yeah, we’ve all experienced them. So, what are some of the ones that come to your mind?

– I think sometimes when we talk about collaboration, people get a little bit fearful of entering into a relationship with someone who is not already in their business, of inviting them in and them seeing behind the curtain and having to expose kind of the family jewels. So sharing intellectual property, sharing how they do business with someone else who’s not already a part of your business. And that can be fear of someone taking your ideas, taking your intellectual property. It can also be fear of judgment, someone fearing, you know, what are they gonna think when they see how I’m doing things? So I think there’s a little bit of both of that, but as far as the fear of someone taking your ideas, taking your intellectual property, I think there’s a couple of things that you wanna ask yourself. So, number one, how much information are you actually sharing with the partner? So if it’s information that you normally would make public, if you’re already sharing this information openly with other people who would come in contact with you, if it’s things that are on your website, if it’s things that you would share with clients or share with, with people who had just come into contact with you on a regular basis anyway, then there’s really no reason to be concerned about that with a collaboration. Sometimes just when we put that label of collaboration or somebody from the outside coming in, we get a little bit nervous about, oh, they’re gonna take my information. They’re gonna take my stuff. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, if you are going to share and be sharing information back and forth with an outside party from your business, then you might wanna start looking at some legal protections for yourself, like an agreement or NDAs, confidentiality agreements, things like that. Memorandum of understanding something that will protect you and lay out what the parameters are of this relationship, what you are both agreeing to and what you are allowing as far as transfer of information and how that will be handled.

– You know, I think that’s so important. I think sometimes, especially entrepreneurs, struggle with this, because you think, oh, let’s just do this. And then you get your self involved and you haven’t thought through the ramifications about have I really protected myself? And it’s so, so important to be able to do it and having developed intellectual property myself and having trademarks all over the world, one of the things that I realize is that it is a resource that many people look at taking if they feel that you are not smart enough to protect yourself. So really being smart about what you share, why do you share it? And then as you say, Nikki, having those agreements, because there’s always ways of exiting and there’s ways of putting limits around what your relationship is. And that’s so, so important.

– Yeah, I think another thing that people, that can be a pitfall is we talked about trust in the last episode, but once you get, you know, you have your kind of filtering process in the beginning that we talked about before, but sometimes people do fall through the cracks and what they present to you, their interview face, or their, you know, when you’re dating someone, the first three months, they’re giving you, you know, they’re giving you one side of themselves. And then after the first three months, then they start revealing a little bit more. So sometimes that can happen in a collaboration. And so once you get into it, you might find that they’re not exactly who they positioned themselves to be. And so that might be something that could be a pitfall as well. And again, that’s when you have those protections in place for how do you exit, if something comes up where you realize this is not a good fit and giving yourself permission to say, if this is not working, then it’s okay to get out of it. It’s okay to end it.

– You don’t need to finish it. You can end it ahead of time, if you thought about that ahead of time, too. Right, and I think we can lose a lot of time, but we can lose energy and the project can fall apart. If you aren’t really thoughtful about that. And there are times that you, it’s just like you said, you know, you don’t marry everybody you date because there’s a reason for that. You have discovered that there’s things that don’t work. And so, doing things in chunks and testing in small bite pieces before you really dig in, I think is one of the things you talked about in our earliest podcasts, Nikki. And I think it’s really important advice.

– Yeah, you know, you don’t need to jump in 100%, you can test the waters with somebody first. Especially, and a lot of times I think too, we also have to listen to our gut. That is something that often in business, we discount our gut and we lean so much on our logic and intellect that we forget that we were given this for a reason and we’ll get an inkling or a feeling in some of those initial conversations that make us go hmm, when they give us an answer to something or when they make a comment or something, and it just kind of just clock it, just clock it and be aware because sometimes those things will come up and bite you later, but just be aware of those things. And because a lot of times your gut will be trying to tell you something and we don’t listen to it. And then it comes up later and we’re like, oh yeah, I should, yeah, they did kind of, yeah. They told me who they were in the beginning. I should’ve listened when they told me who they were.

– Should’ve listened, boy, you know what? I think we’ve all had that experience where we sat back and said, wow, we should have listened.

– Right, right.

– I think another problem that we can have with collaboration is sometimes we look for people who are just like us and really the benefit of a collaborative relationship is differences and getting outside of our box. So we can bring more ideas in, your thoughts on that Nikki?

– I love diversity of thought. And I think that is, like you said, that is a great benefit of collaboration and having not just diversity of thought, but as I was saying earlier, looking for a partner that might be in an adjacent space than you, so not the exact same space as you, but somebody who might have a similar audience to you, but it’s doing something totally different than what you’re doing. They’re going to be, and again, you can learn from them too. Especially if you have the same audience. What are they doing that is attracting the same people you’re trying to get access to? Even if you’re selling something different, you can learn from each other that way. So I think that is something, I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people make with collaborations is they are looking for somebody that does something very similar to what they’re doing rather than looking for somebody who is complimentary or adjacent to what they’re doing.

– There’s the security in it, we tend to draw our, we’d make friends with people who are like us, right? So there’s a comfort in that. When we are looking for differences, we’re being challenged ourselves, our ideas are being challenged, right? So it’s like, okay, I’m having to work. This is not just sudden. It’s a struggle, it can be a struggle.

– It is.

– And I think the other thing is, is if you don’t look for differences, you get stuck with group think. And problems generally don’t get solved when we are just all thinking the same way, maybe because we think that’s what’s safe.

– Well, and that’s what we’re called to be as business owners, as visionaries, as leaders, we’re called to be problem solvers. And so often we come up with great ideas on our own, but we come up with amazing ideas with other people who have differences of thought.

– And that’s the reason why you put the effort in, isn’t it? Because there’s a point where sometimes I have sat back after a collaborative effort and I’ve gone, oh, this was so much work. Was it worth it? And it is more work, right? But is it worth it, so please speak to that.

– Yeah, I mean, that’s why when you go to corporations and they have brainstorming sessions, that’s why they bring in creative consultants that do hold days of workshops, where they bring everybody together in a room to put their thoughts together and spitball things, you know, in a room together. So it’s not one person in their office with the door closed, trying to figure something out on their own. We are better together, when we get together and we put all these ideas together, then we come up with something much greater. And I think something that kind of going along with this, we think a lot of times about collaboration as collaborating for the purpose of, you know, selling something. But collaboration really, I think a missed opportunity is collaborating for content. And that is really where you can experience a lot of growth too. So what we’re doing right now, we’re collaborating for content. And that is where a lot of businesses are seeing growth because you can expand your audience. You can expand your reach, you can get your message out to more people through your content. That’s where marketing is happening right now too, is with content. So if you think about where we experience collaboration for content all the time, think about the last webinar that you were on. You might’ve gotten invited to it by someone whose email list you were on, or maybe you went to someone’s website and they had a form on their page that said, hey, we’re doing this webinar. Fill out, you know, answer these couple of questions and attend our next webinar. You show up on the webinar, the person who invited you is not even the person who’s teaching the content on the webinar. It’s some other company, and you’re like, wait a minute, but I thought this was such and such as webinars. That was a collaboration. That was two different businesses coming together to leverage each other’s resources, audiences, intellect, brain bank and creating something bigger than they could have individually. And it’s the same thing. You can use this collaboration for content for white papers. So if you have an idea that you want to share out with the masses, think about what is another business that has maybe a tool or a resource, or has a business that is adjacent or complimentary to yours that you might be able to work together to create a white paper together, to get your idea out to more people or promote something that one or both of you are doing. Think about it in terms of a training, you might be able to create a training with another business, another partner that is a collaboration, where again you’re bringing two different companies, two different businesses together that can provide value, more value together than you could individually. So you might be an expert or an authority on one thing. This other business is an authority on something else, but together you’re providing more information, more value to the audience that you’re both trying to serve. And everybody walks away a winner. I was mentioning to Lois earlier that yesterday, I just did a live video with a business friend of mine who’s in a totally different industry because we had just had a conversation about something that we saw on TV that we had learned so many different things from it, that we thought would be a value to each of our audiences. And we said, why don’t we get together? Talk about it from each of our perspectives related to our industries and bring our audiences together. So now I’m exposed to her audience, she’s exposed to mine and we both got to promote our thing at the end, so you can do it. And even something as simple as that on social media. And I think live video is a great and free way to do that. Even if you’re just starting out in your business, I love live video, I do it all the time. If it’s something that, I know I hear a lot of times from people that they feel uncomfortable on video, whether you’re doing a webinar or going live on social media. And if you don’t mind Lois, I have a free resource if that’s something that would help people.

– No please, go ahead. We’ll also put that in the show notes so people can have it in the written version, but go ahead.

– Yeah, I have a free guide for doing more live videos and feeling more confident. So it’s everything from how to plan a live video, what tools you can use for it, how to repurpose your content for live videos, how to do collaborations on live videos. So how to bring other people into your live videos and do it well. And so you can get that at nikkibradley.net/livevideo.

– Super, wonderful, thank you for that, Nikki. Thank you, we’ll make sure people have that. I think another thing along with that, that I think of in terms of why collaboration, I’m very concerned for businesses moving forward, that they have enough resources for their growth. And by that, I mean, I think we’re gonna see a time when there may be a tightening of our financial resources and businesses’ access to capital may be more difficult. And when that occurs, the way the companies that are gonna do well are the ones who began to say, I need collaborative relationships and I’ve built them. I’ve got some, here are my strengths. I need resources here. Who do I look for with those in developing very loose, but defined relationships you can move in and out of, because when you’ve accomplished that goal, you’re gonna need to move on to another. And, but don’t burn those bridges ’cause you may come back to them. They’re gonna grow too, and you may need to come back, right? I think that’s gonna be something we’re gonna be facing more in the future.

– I definitely agree with that. And I think that, you know, I think there was a big push, I think in the 90s and the 2000s for like, networking events and people would go there and exchange business cards and you would come home with this big stack and then they would sit on your desk, right? And I think the same thing is true with, you know, in the last episode we talked about how do you identify your collaboration partners? You can go through that process and come up with your list of people who fall into these different categories, but as you were just talking about how do you leverage these collaborative relationships if there is a tightening of resources? And be able to weave in and out of these partnerships and collaborations when you need to, and the way that you do that is through cultivating the relationships, whether you’re in an active one right now or not. And so it’s not just about identifying who these potential collaboration partners are or working in one right now, it’s about fostering and cultivating those relationships on an ongoing basis. So that because there might not be an immediate opportunity right now, when you’re asking those three questions that I talked about in the last episode where you’re trying to find out what are you working on right now? And they might be working on something and you’re saying, well, that’s not really a fit for anything I’m doing right now, but you ask that same question again in three months because you’re doing the followup and cultivating the relationship and now there’s a fit. So there’s gotta be that continuous focus on maintaining and cultivating the relationship. And it’s not just a, hey, just checking in, you know, ’cause it’s that tickler on your email, but genuinely being interested in what’s going on with them so that you can be a value to them too.

– Nikki, you talk about “The Avengers” as an example for why collaborating. And I love that example and we’ll end our podcast with that. So, please share that.

– Oh my goodness, so I love “The Avengers” franchise. My family and I probably have watched every one of those movies multiple times. I love “Iron Man”, I’m a big fan of “Black Panther”. I went to school at Howard university with Chadwick Bozeman. And so I’m still still dealing with his untimely passing. But what I think is so interesting is that each one of those franchise movies, “Iron Man”, “Black Panther”, any of the Hulks, all of those movies did exceptionally well in the Box Office, people love those movies. But the last Avengers movie blew all of them out of the water, I think right now it is the highest grossing movie of all time. So what we can learn from that is you can do this alone. You can do this business thing by yourself. You can go lone ranger, if you choose. However, when you come together and make the decision that I’m going to look at how I can add value to somebody else and look for opportunities where I can leverage my strengths with someone else’s in order to benefit my audience and the people that I’m trying to serve, that is when you’re gonna see the maximum results.

– Wow, love that story. And you’re so right. It’s when we come together that we get maximum results. And that’s what collaboration is all about. Nikki, thank you so much for your time and for your wisdom. And we will share your information in the show notes and I look forward to more with you. So thank you much, and those of you who are listening to our podcast today, thank you for listening to Building My Legacy podcast.