Today’s interview is with Marsha Wright, serial-entrepreneur, author, investor and speaker. She agreed to join me to talk about her new book: The Secret Collaborative Economy: More Clients, More Exposure, More Profit, Faster!?

This interview follows on from my recent interview: The 9 ½ Principles of Innovative Customer Service – Interview with Chip Bell – and is number seventy three in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Here’s the highlights from the interview I did with Marsha:

• Marsha recently wrote a book called: The Secret Collaborative Economy: More Clients, More Exposure, More Profit, Faster!?
• It is a manifestation, or a manual, of what they do in Marsha’s businesses and how they create strategic alliances.
• Ultimately, it’s all about how you can achieve anything in your business through the use and development of strategic alliances.
• Marsha believes there is no correlation between partnerships, as they are currently understood, and the sort of strategic alliances she is proposing.
• Their type of strategic alliances are not about one-off deals or joint ventures but about how do you build a long-term and valuable relationship with other businesses and business people.
• The majority, if not all, success stories whether they are in business or otherwise are not accomplished alone and all of these cases have been supported by the relationships and strategic alliances they have in place.
• This approach, or mindset, should be applied to all areas of your business and should not be confined to areas like sales & marketing.
• Joint ventures tend to be more transactional in nature and strategic alliances should be more relationship, long-term and value based.
• You should leave success or progress down to luck but should use what Marsha calls ‘Opportunity Engineering’ to ‘make your own luck’.
• Most entrepreneurs can get stopped when doing this due to a lack of funds. Marsha suggests looking at things differently and looking for strategic alliances that can help you achieve what you both want by identifying the right alliances and developing a ‘value for value proposition’.
• Everything you want to accomplish is achievable with enough planning and the right positioning.
• Marsha uses the example of Jim Stovall, best-selling author and President of the Narrative Television Network in the US, to illustrate how he has used the principles in the book, particularly to build Narrative Television Network, which works to make television and movies accessible to the blind and has received various awards including an Emmy. Jim is blind.
• When starting any strategic alliance conversation, the most powerful position to start from is to say: “I think that we have something in common, how can I help you….”
• In order to get this most out of this and before starting, businesses have to identify their ‘asset points’ ie. what can you, your business or your staff do that can help someone else.
• Wow! The book took only 36 days to write and publish, cost just over $600 to produce and was promoted to over 1.1 million businesses using strategies that Marsha details in the book.
• However, one of her mentors did say quite sagely….’it might have taken you only 36 days to produce it but it has taken you over 30 years to learn it’. True.
• As part of Marsha’a plug at the end, she plugged the fact that she runs a competition every month to win a 1-2-1 advice meeting with Marsha. More details at www.marshawright.com/competition

About Marsha

Marsha is a serial-entrepreneur, four time #1 bestselling author, investor, speaker, columnist and has an impressive array of business interests all over the world. In addition to growing her own businesses and portfolio, she has become a well known business expert; which has resulted in her appearing on TV, in newspapers and magazines and on radio internationally. You can find out a whole lot more about Marsha at her site: MarshaWright.com

You can also reach out and connect to Marsha on Twitter @MarshaWright and don’t forget to check out her new book The Secret Collaborative Economy: More Clients, More Exposure, More Profit, Faster!?

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