Partners and partners
2 types of partners and why you need both
I spent a great deal of my corporate career in partnerships. And, in these roles, we would often frame and differentiate partners into 2 categories:
Capital P partners
little p partners
As I work away as an entrepreneur, partnerships continue to be critical to growth. Guess what? Capital P and little p is still a useful categorization.
In today’s post will explain my definitions for the categories, why each is valuable and offer some examples. So let’s jump in
“Capital P” Partners
In corporate roles we would think about Capital P partners as having outsized or potentially outsized impact on our business. They may also require a great deal of resources to manage. Some of the qualities of Capital P Partners include
having the capacity or ability to generate significant revenue
having a substantially sized audience
having significant brand cache that can provide a halo effect on our business
“Little p” partners
In corporate roles little p partners are also sometimes called long tail partners. Small in size and cache, they often required simpler deal structures or generally required less resources to manage. They can fill a very specific need. In aggregate they can impact your business. They usually have potential to grow.
Interestingly, when I think about partners for Digital Mom and Broad Collective I still have a tendency to bucket them this way.
When you’re a small business, Capital P Partners are often the people or accounts that have bigger followings or audiences than you. Maybe they are well known in your niche or have established revenue lines. They tend to be aspirational for us. These partners can take some time to establish.
Little p’s are our peers. Similar or smaller in size. Hungry, collaborative, flexible, up to experiment. Easy to work with, also easier to slip in and out partnership with.
I think its really important to focus on both.
Capital P’s can be slower to cultivate but a few can significantly impact our businesses– think a large audience or cache or multi pronged agreement. Each one of these will probably look different.
Little p’s are much easier to strike up, so you can have alot of them. In aggregate they can be powerful. Also, odds are some of them are likely to grow quickly and may turn into Capital P’s for you. So being in partnership with many little p’s can pay off later too.
How do you organize your partnerships?
Love,
Sarah + Erin