As you enter into business, the first thing you'll need to realize is your business cannot do it alone.

Our economy is an interwoven set of customers and suppliers. While you're opening shop to be a supplier in one end, you will become a customer of many other suppliers.

From Internet providers, to email services, to business management platforms like PushPress, you will be partnering with dozens of other companies who will help you bring your ideas and services to life.

Evaluate All Partners With Care

While many business owners put a tremendous amount of time and energy evaluating potential business partners, coaches, and employees - they often fail to spend any time considering the qualifications of the companies they work with.

In reality the companies you choose to help you in your business are just as important to you as any business partner.  A disruption to any part of your business can be crippling.

For starters, you should spend some time to evaluate the companies you might work with for things like philosophy and company motivation. These things will ultimately shape the direction of the company you're working with; considering these things up front might save you from surprises down the road.

Profit Is Not Bad - But It's Not All.

Every company, yours included, must work towards profit. It's the one thing that guarantees future sustainability. Therefore profit isn't a bad thing to have as a corporate value. However, if it's a companies primary value by a long shot, you will need to consider a host of future possibilities in how your relationship might change based on these values and philosophies.

A company motivated by profit will make all future choices with the impact to profit in mind first - and the consideration for the impact to it's client base second.

What Is Your Primary Motivation?

This should be something you evaluate as you move your business forward:

Are you concerned about profit first?  If not - then what is your primary mission statement?

"Help First" - Our Primary Motivation

At PushPress, we genuinely operate on a "help first" philosophy. We believe if you put a viable product into the marketplace with a true desire and passion for helping the people you can, you will succeed.

In this vein, when we begin discussing a potential client's move to PushPress, we like to do a couple things:

1. Explain our philosophies and explain the "why" behind everything we do
2. Listen to your unique needs and pain points, to determine the best fit for you.

By explaining our philosophies, we're seeking to attract similar potential clients, those whose value sets fall in line with ours. By understanding their needs, we can honestly evaluate if we're not the best fit for them. If we're not, we'll gladly refer them to a competitor of ours we feel is better fit.

Be The Company You Want Your Providers To Be

In general it works best to align yourself with companies that share your visions.  If you are looking to be the most cutthroat business on the block, your vision and philosophies likely align best with cutthroat companies.  If you're of the "help first" mindset, your business will likely be served better by "help first" type companies (and there's a ton of them out there).

If you have not done this already - take the time to evaluate the true business philosophies of the companies you work with.  If you feel like they don't align with yours, it's time to start finding some that do.