Strategic Partners and Building a Team

The best way I can describe daily life in a new company is “exciting and terrifying.”  It is much different to teach and educate students on business development, marketing, and entrepreneurship than to throw your hat into the arena and start going after your own project.  That is exactly where Nick and I found ourselves after founding Lux Virtual.

We were both starry eyed and optimistic that we would have the endurance, patience, and courage to thrive during the time that it would take us to fully develop Lux Virtual into a maturing company. We would have to establish our reputation, find and build relationships with clients, and cultivate our creative team along with our strategic partners. This whole process takes a great deal of time, numerous interactions, and dozens of meetings with mentors and quality people in our lives.  It’s a long process but a process well worth taking to go after a worthy goal.

Early on we came up with a framework of how we selected our clients, strategic partners and team.  It was pretty simple, but this lens made the process very easy.  I was very careful to work with and build relationships with people that I got along with, trusted, and had the highest level of product or service.  You hear horror stories of new businesses that get caught up in working with clients who don’t pay, workers who don’t fit the culture well, and aligning with businesses that end up either taking away their clients or worse.

Over the past couple of years at Lux Virtual, we’ve had the opportunity to work with some incredible institutions and businesses.  It takes effort to establish these relationships and to go through the process of becoming one of their vendors. However, as business relationships continue to progress, these clients have become the foundation of our stable and consistent growth.  Taking the time to build a client base of people that have integrity, an incredible product and continue to push the technology and creative envelope is exactly the space we want to be in.  We are so grateful for the opportunity to highlight innovative projects and often work as a translation tool from an idea to a visual language that is easy for anyone to understand.

The secret to my approach to business development and growing quickly with minimal personal investment or private investors has to do with building up an outstanding group of strategic partners and creative team.  The key to this is pretty basic but profound.  Treat people the way you would like to be treated.  Pay them very well. Connect them to opportunities. Treat them like you would a close friend.

I firmly believe that if we seek to be an asset and add value to those around us, the more successful we will be.  It’s a great way to live and a profitable and enjoyable way to grow a business.