An Introduction to Business Collaboration

By Purplebox Digital


Expand Your Knowledge & Impress Clients With Collaboration

It’s no secret that teamwork makes the dream work, but for many businesses, working with people outside of their business is often a rare occurrence.

This lack of external collaboration could be harming your business’s growth without you even realising it.

We’re here to show you why you should be collaborating with other businesses and the many benefits you’ll experience in doing so. From new creative ideas to increased profits, you’ll definitely want to pay close attention to this article.

Before we can take a look at the many benefits of collaboration, we first need to make sure everybody is on the same page. So just what is collaboration and why should businesses care?

What Is Collaboration?

To put it simply, collaboration is when two or more individuals work together in order to achieve a common goal, such as building a website or improving a business’s search engine rankings. These individuals could be from the same business or spread from multiple businesses, as long as they are working in a team to achieve a goal, it’s collaboration.

Collaboration usually mixes several skillsets together. In the example of building a website, you might have 1 person who specialises in design, another in programming, and someone else in search engine optimisation. They all combine their individual skills and talents to create a final product neither could have done on their own. It’s this combining of various skills and talents that can do wonders for your business.

The Many Benefits of Collaboration

You may not realise it, but there are actually countless benefits of collaborating, especially when you collaborate with other businesses.

The first and most obvious is that you get to share ideas with someone or a team of people you have never worked with before. Not only does this usually lead to new and creative ideas, but you can also pick up new ways to tackle challenging problems and projects.

Collaborating with other businesses also brings a whole new set of skills to the table. Imagine for a minute you’re a WordPress design agency that has lots of experience designing and building WordPress sites. Well, what if you could collaborate with a marketing or SEO business on a project? Your agency would work together with the marketing team to ensure your website follows all the best user experience guidelines and marketing guidelines, resulting in an exceptional website. You might even pick up some useful tips and tricks that you can use on future projects, all from this one collaboration.

But that’s not all. If you build a good relationship with another business, then there’s a good chance you could be collaborating a lot more in the future. If you deliver great results, then you’re only going to be in their good books and any future projects are likely to be passed your way. This means there’s a really good chance that you can increase your workload and secure more income, all from one collaboration project.

Top Collaboration Tools

To help you collaborate with other businesses, we’ve hand-picked some of our favourite collaboration tools that we use in our office every day. No matter if you’re a design agency, development agency, or anything in between, these tools will help you share ideas, work together, and provide feedback in an organised environment.

  • Teamwork – Excellent project management software that incorporates time tracking, live messaging, and project planning all in one. Set individual tasks, assign members, share files and exchange feedback.
  • Slack – The go-to instant messaging app for businesses and teams. Create general channels to share ideas and files with your team, or use direct messages to discuss private matters. Lots of 3rd party integrations available and faster than email.
  • Trello – A no-frills project management and collaboration tool which allows you to plan and organise projects. A good free alternative to Teamwork for businesses looking to collaborate for the first time.
  • InvisionApp – Design and UX app that allows you to create interactive design prototypes and wireframes which can be shared with other users for feedback. Very simple to use and great for non-designers to explain their ideas.
  • Bitbucket – Git collaboration software for developers and teams that allows you to plan, collaborate, test and deploy all in one place. Ideal for development agencies to keep track of their code.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of collaboration in business, then be sure to watch Richard’s talk at the 2019 Bristol WordCamp.

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