Join hands
Once you’ve scanned the landscape of the markets you serve and have begun taking initial steps to aid in your recession recovery, you’re going to need to develop the tools and relationships necessary to see the recovery through to completion.
For Kalenka, that means fostering collaboration, both between his office and clients and between clients who can form mutually beneficial working relationships.
Kalenka says collaboration can act as a way around a shortage of investment capital. When you don’t have the money to grow, find other companies or organizations with which you can partner. Together, you can take advantage of common resources, and potentially generate investment funding for both parties.
“Collaborating is a good risk-mitigating alternative to not having enough capital or experience,” Kalenka says. “For instance, a lot of [pharmaceutical] life sciences companies might be good at research but not good at commercialization, and we’ll have a network of companies that are experts in both ends of that spectrum. So from time to time, we try to assist in collaborative efforts to bring together successful product candidates with companies that are successful in bringing them to market.”
In other industries, collaboration might take the form of outsourcing of tasks that aren’t part of the company’s core competencies.
“It might mean outsourcing IT or business processes to reduce fixed costs or reduce the capital requirements of the business,” he says. “That way, a business can focus on those core competencies of bringing a product to market or whatever it might be.”
In order to find the right collaborative partners, you need to handle the process much like you handle strategic planning: You need to develop a set of standards that everyone in management agrees upon, then ensure that those standards are uniformly enforced when you and your management team head into the field to find potential partners.
“The selection process should be a thorough and objective process that includes a whole checklist of objectives and requirements that would apply to the specific outsourcing requirements,” Kalenka says. “Around IT, for example, there is a whole host of issues around service levels and response times as they relate to security and access to data. You don’t want to be creating additional security risk and privacy risk around data.”
Bill Molloie, who is in charge of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ life sciences program in San Diego, says the local business community has shown a strong willingness to collaborate, particularly during the economic downturn.
“I am amazed by the level of collaboration that takes place with organizations that, if you were on the outside looking in, your initial reaction would be that they are competitors,” Molloie says. “There is an enormous amount of collaboration in San Diego that is to the benefit of everyone because it creates success. We look at those opportunities and make sure that we have resources that can support those opportunities in that community.”