Here’s three real-life, partner-based success stories to show you how to attract more customers while spending less on promotion via apt partnerships that benefit all parties. When you’ve read these examples consider how you can adapt these approaches to your kind of business. Goal: Spur more prospective customers to discover your firm via vendors they already trust — and enable your partnering companies to enjoy the same benefit.  Hint: Mutuality matters.

1. Serve a Very Specific Niche Better Together

Baby Cuisine author Shane Valentine shifted from serving mommies to also creating fresh food for the elderly when he partnered with another business also located in his Marin County, Living Well provides a broad mix of medical, logistical, safety and lifestyle services that enable older people to live longer in their homes.

Meeting with Living Well’s caregivers Valentine customizes healthy versions of familiar comfort foods – like fried chicken – that many seniors cite as favorites.

2. Serve a Very Specific Situation Where Partners’ Jobs Are Easier With You Involved

After watching her mother helplessly staining her clothes while undergoing her dialysis treatments several times a week, online site designer, Megan Stengel joined forces with two clothing designers and began making functional and attractive clothing with hidden zippers and other alterations.

Their firm, Libre Clothing, now also partners with grateful dialysis clinics, hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation to make it easier and more comfortable for their “mutual market” of patients to undergo chemotherapy, dialysis or other treatments requiring intravenous lines, catheters or infusion tubes.

3. Together Become a Bigger Location-Centered Magnet to Attract More Customers
Two tenants in a struggling strip mall in Vallejo, California began sharing space and cross-promoting their services. That attracted other nearby businesses.

Now several medical offices, a beauty salon and some restaurants have morphed into a virtual co-op – doing better together than they were on their own. The medical-related services (Jackson Medical Supply, Cal Nurse Training Institute, dentists and doctors) sometimes offer each other’s patients or clients free screenings so they get a warmed-up introduction to prospective new patients. All partners also joined forces to hold a party and a fundraiser for the city’s needy.

Ready to redefine your work and life around a mutuality mindset and create profitable partnerships?