As a business owner, it’s vital that you have great business relationships with those that you work with. Not only within your own business with your staff and employees, but it’s important that you have good relationships with the vendors, suppliers, and other businesses that you need in order to keep your business running well. So if you’re having a hard time with these kinds of relationships, you’ll be glad to know that there are things that you can do to rectify this.
To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for creating better business relationships.
Remember The Golden Rule
When you were younger, you were likely taught about the Golden Rule, which essentially teaches you to treat people the way that you’d like to be treated. And while some people don’t really internalize this, if you want to create good business relationships, this is something that you should operate your business by.
As a business, you can live by the Golden Rule when interacting with other businesses by doing things like paying your bills on time, being flexible with their needs, and making your relationships about more than just money and business. As you’re able to do this, you’ll have far more trust within your business relationships. This can be beneficial because not only will the people you’re working with feel like they can trust you, but you can rely on being able to trust them in return.
Get Your Communication Right
No relationship can survive without communication, and this includes your business relationships. So if you want to have solid business relationships, you have to make sure that you’re communicating frequently and effectively with each business partner that you’re working with.
If you have business relationships that you feel don’t have the quality or amount of communication that you’d like, you can take this into your own hands to instigate more communication. And if your efforts aren’t reciprocated and don’t prove to make your communications better or at the level that you’d like, you can always find new business partners to work with that will be better suited to you.
Be Proactive
Just as with your customers, something that you can do to have better relationships with your vendors and suppliers is to go above and beyond what they’ve come to expect from a business partner.
The difference between how you treat your customers and how you treat your business partners should only be found in what you’re offering them, not in how you treat them. So if you can anticipate what your business partners might need and help facilitate this for them, you’ll quickly find that those partners become much more loyal to you.
If you want to have better business relationships between your organization and the organizations that you work with, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you learn how to execute on this.