Strategic partnerships: a rubric for determining compatibility

Repost from YongoPal:

Early last week, I was connected with the CEO of another company that offers online English lesson services to South Korean students. The company is based in the Philippines, and their angle is to provide inexpensive ESL services by leveraging Filipino English speakers as teachers and tutors — something not terribly uncommon in the Korean online ESL market. This gentleman, who is himself Korean, was hoping to find in us a marketing partner that would allow him to more easily form partnerships with hagwon chains to drive customer acquisition. In spite of how well connected he is in the ESL industry, hagwons are hesitant to partner with his company because they don’t feel that he offers a full range of educational services. Essentially, they are unwilling to partner with his company unless he is able to offer native English speaking teachers and tutors in addition to his usual Filipino faculty — something he is simply not equipped to do.

We had a very good discussion that laid out his needs and gave me something to mull over. It really got me thinking about strategic partnerships and provided me with the impetus to determine and articulate important requirements that must be met before we would be willing to form any. Most of these things probably seem obvious, but I still think that spelling them out clearly was an important exercise:

1. Partnerships cannot disrupt our cash conversion model. [This is important to these talks, since the Filipino company caters to a lot of K-12 students. It's acceptable for us to partner native English speaking tutors with adult university and graduate students without performing background checks and the like, but if we were being asked to provide these services in scale to K-12 students, it would be a much different story. The upfront cost of performing background checks on new tutors would seriously disrupt the negative cash conversion model that allows us to expand unhindered by financial constraints. Eventually we will move into the K-12 space, but for the immediate future our focus must remain on adult students.]
2. Partnerships cannot disrupt YongoPal’s brand image (our narrow niche focus on conversation partnering) or require us to step outside of our core competency. [We are not in the business of providing academic style tutoring with professional educators; we are simply providing conversation partners to students as a supplement to curriculum-based study. We need to steer clear of potential partners who need us to provide these academic services, at least until we've sufficiently built our brand in the market. Right now there are plenty of academic tutoring services that can kick our ass in cost, content, experience, visibility, etc... We can't play in their league. But as long as we stick to our niche, we'll be a market leader.]
3. Marketing partnerships need to be clean and ideally should not require transfer of funds between organizations. They should be based purely on mutual interest in being able to form more valuable partnerships with hagwon chains, universities, etc… [I was introduced a few weeks ago by an uncle of mine to complexity theory, and I really like the idea of loose non-entangling partnerships that minimally hinder our ability to be nimble and adaptive. As far as we're concerned, this is best for all parties involved.]
4. Partners need to give us reasonable time to properly assemble, test, and launch our online tools and cannot commit us to deadlines with hagwons that we can’t keep. [Duh.]