55: Taking an Entrepreneurial Approach to Partnerships - Dorian Kominek

How do you optimize your partner program to achieve new heights in Q4 and beyond? 

Dorian Kominek joins the show to share insights from her research about the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset in partnerships. 

Dorian has studied entrepreneurship and partnerships and has some gems to share. She talks about how building and scaling partnerships is about taking a problem-solving mindset. Partner pros need to think creatively instead of just using a managerial approach. They need to be willing to test, iterate, and scale. 

Join us as we dive in!

00:41 Nearbound Summit
01:15 Intro to Dorian
03:06 Entrepreneurship and partnership
04:11 Solving problems in partnerships
06:14 Managerial vs. entrepreneurial thinking and the pursuit of innovation
10:14 What are the core competencies that partner people need to konw about?
11:09 Tuning people vs. tuning an organization
12:09 Organizational tuning - the 5 factors to success

Transcript

Will Taylor: 0:07

partners and welcome to another episode of the Howdy Partners podcast, where we give you tactical insights so that you can execute in your role. Today we have a special guest and special meaning a special topic. But before we dive into that, Tom, how's it going? How's everything in

Tom Burgess: 0:25

I'm doing well. It's getting to the fall timeframe here in Denver, so leaf peeping is in full effect with all the colors in the mountains. And I think we need to get serious about some Howdy partners, merch, because our guest is showing us up with some cool stuff already.

Dorian Kominek: 0:41

Yeah, so

Will Taylor: 0:44

Yes. Well, I just dove into Etsy for the first time ever. I'd never purchased anything on there and I just made first purchase. I won't show it. Yet. But it's related to the Near Bound Summit. plug, if you haven't signed up for that yet, go sign up for it. The theme is cyberpunk and all I'll the theme of what I purchased and. Anyways, enough about that. Also, Tom, I've never heard the phrase leaf peeping, but now I have and maybe I'll do my own leaf peeping in Ontario. Okay, so today's topic we, I mentioned, it's a special guest and the reason it's special is because our guest has done research on the partnership space and we'll definitely be referencing that research In reviewing for this episode, I saw there was three pages of references, if not more, and it was from blogs and articles and you know, scholarly articles and business reviews. You name it, you reviewed it. Dorian, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I'm excited to dive into this topic, tell the guests more about yourself and that research that you did as well.

Dorian Kominek: 1:51

Sure. Yeah. Super excited. Thanks for having me. And I also signed up for the near bound. Summit. Just still I'll say that. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So cool. So I guess just my background I started as an entrepreneur, so I did sort of like 10 years of entrepreneurship. I've always been interested in entrepreneurship. For my undergrad I did a BComm in entrepreneurship and innovation. And then in the second half of my career, I sort of pivoted to a corporate career, wanted to build my corporate resume Have some stability, have kids. So I did that. And then on that side of my career, that's where I got into partnerships and especially building channel partnerships in the tech world. I did go back and complete more formal education. So I did a master of science again in entrepreneurship and innovation. And this time I took the opportunity to write my dissertation topic on how to. Build channel partner programs as an entrepreneurial venture. So basically like how do we treat building and scaling a partner program or specifically like a channel partner program as though you're building a business. So it kind of combined these two halves of my career into this research and that's, that's how that started came about. But yeah. Yeah. So that's me.

Will Taylor: 3:06

Nice. And the, the reason I, I'm so excited about this topic is you know, you came to those conclusions about and the necessity for that skillset to be in partnerships, and that was a theme that was emerging. I. In conversations that I was having, you know, the, the leaders that I spoke to, they said, well, the best partner person is one who's entrepreneurial because they have so many hands in so many different places in the business. And so the entrepreneurial spirit is really important. So when you were talking about everything that you have worked on got me jazzed up and we met at Catalyst, and now we finally get to dive into this topic even further. So, I learn more about this. Why? Why was this topic compelling for you? Why did you feel it was so important that you should invest your time, and that perhaps the industry needed this kind of surfacing of all this information and the summarization that you did in your paper? Tell us more about the catalyst as to why, for, you know, the whole reason that you did this research.

Dorian Kominek: 4:11

Yeah. So I guess, you know, for me, like the reason why I'm interested in entrepreneurship is because for one I really like opportunity identification and, and part of that is like, how do you solve problems? Like usually there's like a problem that you can be opportunistic about and then solve the problem like through entrepreneurship. So to me that's kind of like how this came about. Originally I was gonna write my topic as like, like to me it just seemed really obvious, like you're building and scaling this. Channel partner sort of thing. And it's like you're building a business within a business. So I was gonna write my topic doing that at an organization that I was working in. So, I had this whole plan on how I'd like, you know, just like everything you do as an entrepreneur, building a business, you know, and all those tools you'd use, I was gonna. Show how you could do that. Building a partner program. And I kind of kept running into these like barriers and challenges just sort of organizational friction. And there's a sort of a managerial mindset that was a little bit too rigid. It was sort of preventing me, it was creating barriers for me. And I was like, what is this Like, why can't I do this? And then I was thinking, well man, I can't, I gotta write my paper. How am I gonna get this done? Like, So I kind of looked to the industry and I'm like, am I the only one that's experiencing this? And I, I just sort of started seeing themes across, you know, LinkedIn and people's chatter and like commentary, like just the challenges that partner professionals were facing in trying to build and scale like these partner programs in organizations. They were often like under-resourced. They didn't have like Top down executive support even like in job postings, you can see it. So there'll be like a role for like partner manager, first of all, And then this ma partner manager is expected to like come in, build an entire partner program, scale it, develop the strategy, manage all the partners, onboard all the, like, everything. And. Yet the organization's only willing to allocate like one role to it and no other resources. And it's like, what is this about? Like, so it just seemed like a, a problem. And then it was like, well, how do we define this? And then it just sort of dawned on me, well, like this is What we're seeing is like managerial behavior being applied to something that should be entrepreneurial. So there's this concept around managerial thinking, which is sort of, which is totally valid and has a place is around like maintenance and managing budget and not overspending and. You've got something, you've got a good thing going. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like all of that. And then the other side is like entrepreneurial thinking or an entrepreneurial approach, which is all about like, testing and iterating and scaling and breaking things and you know, having failures. So it's sort of like, This dichotomy. So you can't apply managerial thinking to an entrepreneurial pursuit. So to me it was like, oh, channel partner program development is an entrepreneurial practice or a practice of innovation, and organizations are used to applying managerial thinking to everything. So they're applying managerial thinking to this too. They're not framing this correctly. They're framing this as just another thing to manage, assign KPIs to, and then done. But it's not. It's a pursuit of innovation. So that was sort of like the genesis of the idea, and then it was like, all right, well, so if that's my hypothesis or my assertion that building partner programs and scaling or channel partner programs is An entrepreneurial pursuit, then what lessons can we bring from entrepreneurship and innovation to better that process and help you know, partner managers, but also organizations so that they can better align themselves and, and be prepared to properly resource partner program development. So that was like the genesis of it and just like from just purely making observations how the topic came about.

Tom Burgess: 8:03

I, I love that you found the the partnership ecosystem in, in the right channels on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and, and two, that you notice like every commonality. An issue that we, we, we talk about this all the time. I mean, if you go back and listen to every episode, I guarantee you hit on like, literally the, the most talked about topics. Like we just, we, we just did an episode on how to get top down or c-suite level buy-in for partnerships. So, I, I, this is so refreshing. I, I, the idea of thinking about it from an entrepreneurial lens allows you to. Free up your mind to truly go after what you need to go after. Because partnerships isn't, it's not a one size fits all, and it's not necessarily a one avenue is your right path. Like you're going to have to stress test, you're going to have to continually get that buy-in. Like it's not just like you get buy-in once. You're gonna have to continually do it. So I, this is

Dorian Kominek: 9:01

Good. Yay. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad. It definitely feels like it hit a nerve for people because just even in the research, like, putting out like surveys and, and things like. It was like, there were definitely very common themes and then people were like, I wanna hear like the results of this, because I feel I'm picking up what you're putting down. Like, this is my pain. You're like, so it was like, okay. So I think, yeah, just framing it that way. Like there's the world of entrepreneurship and innovation isn't new, so I don't, I don't really feel like I. Did anything new as far as furthering that research, I just brought it over and layered it on top of like, the partnership world and said like, Hey, look like this is the same. There's a lot of research on strategic and corporate entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship and what makes it fail and what makes it it succeed, and what types of people should be working in those kind of roles and So it was just sort of like looking at that, those best practices and, and research and bringing it over to partnerships and saying, Hey, if these are the best practices in strategic entrepreneurship, like then this is why partnership stuff isn't working.'cause we're not doing that like, we're not. So Yeah. No, I'm glad it, I'm glad it resonates.

Will Taylor: 10:14

So I'm curious about what those core competencies are are successful for entrepreneurs. Because there's so much of an overlap with partnerships. What should our audience pay attention to when it comes to program building and building the skills within themselves as well? What are those core competencies or even strategies that make a an entrepreneur successful, that partner people should be using as

Dorian Kominek: 10:36

okay. So yeah, so I'll take a step back and I'll just say in my paper I kind of focused on like from an organizational perspective what should or can an organization that wants to build a partner program do? So there's sort of two things here. There's the organization and then there's also the partner professional. So for sure I would say a in order for a partner professional to be successful, it, you know, I would say if you're building and scaling a program, being entrepreneurial and all of the traits and qualities that come with that that's definitely gonna really help you. And there's a lot of research on that. I didn't talk about that so much in my paper. It was more from the organization. The organizational side. So, but I do think it is a top down, bottom up. So I'd say top down is like, what does the organization need to do? And bottom up is like what does the individual in the role need to do? So for the organization, I kind of broke it down into like People tuning and organizational tuning inside of the organization. So the people the people tuning part is really about that managerial versus entrepreneurial approach to management that I was talking about earlier. So taking like a. More of a, a, a less of a rigid hard line approach when like the organization needs to sort of tune itself that way. The executive team, the people at the top, whoever's making the decisions on partnership need to kind of like come to terms with the fact that this is not, like if you've never done this before and you have no strategy and no, you can't just throw KPIs at this and then just sort of You know, assign a person to it and hope it works out. You're not gonna be successful. You've gotta be prepared to invest the time, resources, all of those things in building this and take an iterative entrepreneurial approach. So then the organizational tuning is the next step. So this is like, not my research, it's just research that I brought over to partnerships, but there's these five organizational factors that lend to success in innovation. And then like Therefore lend to success in developing partner programs. So those are managerial support. So you need that top-down managerial support in that entrepreneurial endeavor. The organizational structure needs to be sort of flat and bureaucracy free. You need to be able to quickly make decisions and test ideas. Nope. The less constraints, the better work discretion. So whoever's in this role doing this needs to be able to have like, autonomy and make decisions. And you know, Like pivot on the fly and not be sort of rigidly controlled. They need to be properly resourced. So that's not just money but also time. They need to be given a proper timescale to do things and scale things and test things. The tools that they need to succeed. Maybe other team members, if you can't sort of. Put direct hires under this person, then they need to be able to borrow people from other teams and then rewards and reinforcements. So if you are an organization and you want to ensure that a really awesome entrepreneurial person leaves don't recognize them for their achievements and successes and don't don't compensate them in sort of a what's the, what's the right word, I guess, don't, don't compensate them in a way that recognizes their achievement, right? Like, so entrepreneurs love that. Like, the harder you work, the better you do the American dream kind of mentality, right? So, that reward reinforcement is super important. So that's kind of inside the organization. And then I had a couple other points like outside the organization, I guess, that the partner professional would do. But so I'd say advice to the partner professional is find an organization that's like this, that's entrepreneurial that sort of gets it, that has an understanding like that, that you know, that there's reality in play, in the, in the role that you're coming into, like, I guess is what I'd say.

Tom Burgess: 14:28

Yeah. I I've got, I've got one point in one question, so I wanna go back to your, your, you were talking about, you know, like the idea of being entrepreneurial in, in partnerships I think is, is resonating. But let's say, let's say, you know, a partner manager is either in a role or looking to get hired in this role. I would love to know, If you've got any resources or like materials that someone could go out and find, you know, like if I'm not a, if I'm like, ah, I'm just not as entrepreneurial as I think, but I want to learn you know, kind of in that pro dev mindset, if there's anything out there, like, I'm sure our listeners would love to see it. So like by all means, we would love to see anything that you have on that piece or resources that you've used.'cause that's something that honestly I would like to look at. And then two, just like talk, talking about this in like a, a very Real sense, like I was brought into my organization a year ago to help build our channel program. And what I will tell everyone, you know, whether you're managing a partner program, you are a partner, professional, or you're trying to get that buy-in, is that it's refreshing to go into building. KPIs. And, and like, I know there's, we can argue about this through and through. I I, at some point you will need KPIs and you should be measured, but you can't be expected to drive revenue, let's say, if you don't have any partners. So like reframing that in a, in a way to think about like what. What milestones are we trying to hit? Is that like getting, you know, our partner pages up on our site so that we can actually advertise this? Is it building the processes to making sure that you have you know, proper inbound funnels for partnerships to partnerships to succeed, like referral process? There's so, there's so much structure that, like, I'll go back to the, the saying, like, you can't build a house without a blueprint, and so, If your goal is to build that house, like use that blueprint, but go, go slow and methodical. Don't go fast because as I've talked to Will about this both in working with him at in an organization in partner enablement and just continue our relationship. It's harder to rip down and rebuild than it is to build it right the first time. So that being tethered back to you. If you can like, try not to be so rigid around KPIs in the first six months, even in the first year, like that will, you don't even know what, you don't even know what type of revenue numbers you're looking at to start. So like, I, I just wanna reiterate how refreshing it is that you see that as well.'cause I think it, it holds water to building a very foundational and successful partnership when you're not being graded on numbers right from the beginning.

Dorian Kominek: 16:58

Yeah, totally agree. Okay, so to your first point about characteristics of entrepreneurs and what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur, and is it, you know, this whole born versus made discussion, there's like a lot of research about that and it's pretty interesting and it even gets into sort of like, the The convergence of like, psychology and business research. I, so one of the papers that I referenced is sson, and I'll just say SSON etal because I can't remember all the authors on the paper. But they, they talk about like, they did a, a cross-functional kind of look at a whole bunch of papers in the industry about characteristics of entrepreneurs and what entrepreneurs bring to the table and what they're like personality. Features and things like that. And they, I can't remember how many papers they looked at, but it was a lot. And they distilled it down to the top characteristics and traits that entrepreneurial people have or bring to the table. So I would reference that and I reference it in my paper So,

Tom Burgess: 17:55

Awesome.

Dorian Kominek: 17:55

It's like if you look up like nascent et al it's like research on entrepreneurship and innovation. You'll find that paper and I'm happy to share a link if you wanna share it with your audience. But yeah, like there's a lot of really interesting research on what makes an entrepreneur and then if you wanna be more like that, I guess I'd just say like, look at those traits and characteristics, which ones are changeable right in yourself. Some might not be others, might be. And then Then work on that. But a huge one is like opportunity identification and being sort of interested in that and problem solving orientation. So and then to your, your next point. Yeah. I mean, if you're coming into a role and you're given KPIs, right? And this is a net new role, net new function that might work for something like sales where we have a blueprint, like we know I'm a direct sales team member. All the other direct sales team members in a similar industry are selling X amount with a similar product, blah, blah. Like, it's like, okay, we can kind of, so if you were to ask like, what is the K P I based on, you'd have something to point to and like some pretty credible, you know, data to, to back up. Where you got the K p I from with partnerships, it's not necessarily like that, like what another organization is doing on a partner team with a completely different product, at a different scale, at a different funding level. Like, you know, let alone, just like you don't even have partners in your organization yet. You don't know what they're gonna be able to contribute. So that's and I guess I'd give an analogy, like if you were given a K p I, like let's say to build a house and it's like you need to optimize for having the least amount of rain land on the inhabitants, right. You're gonna build a house with like a gigantic roof and nobody caress if the walls are made out of sticks or if it's like just cement beams and there are no walls and it's holding up a roof, like you're gonna have no rain, but it's gonna be a cold, terrible house like So it's a, it's a dangerous way to, to scale a program is it's sort of cart before the horse, right? Like, so if you're building a business, you wouldn't do that either. You'd, you'd Okay. Like, here's my product, here's who buys the product. What's the, what's the tam? Right? And the, the Sam and the Somm, or like, however you break it down, what's my total accessible market? How many people do I think are gonna buy it? What's the price of the product? Here's the revenue I think I'm gonna achieve. You do the same with partners. Like, okay, I I think we can have like, and it may vary. Maybe you could have 10, or maybe you could have a hundred say good partners within You know, a year. So let's say it's 10. And let's say each partner we believe can sell two things per quarter. And let's say you can scale that To like five things per quarter by the end of the year. And then like, what's the payout you're giving those partners and like, so you can build a business model just like you would with selling any product. And you don't need to just sort of randomly guess. You can, but you do need to have, be given, you know, fair, reasonable time to set out that business model in my paper. It's one of the things I talk about is like using the tools of entrepreneurship, use a business model canvas, map out a business model like this is, I'm building a business. Here's the business model, here's a financial model. Like use financial modeling. And you know, I have a whole spreadsheet in there that I show how you can use financial modeling from. Entrepreneurship to assess what you think your partner program will deliver revenue-wise and also what it's gonna cost you to hire partner managers, do marketing campaigns, pay out your referral rewards, or whatever you're doing. Right? So, yeah. So I will affirm your feelings. I agree with you yeah, you can't, that's, you can't set KPIs without having any data.

Tom Burgess: 21:40

sure.

Will Taylor: 21:41

I love that analogy of the host that can stop the rain but will be cold as heck for everybody else underneath

Tom Burgess: 21:48

so easy for everyone to visualize Like it, it's, it's spot on.

Will Taylor: 21:51

Yeah. Okay. But just being conscious of time, I, wanna do some, like a couple rapid fire questions. One is, I'm curious about surprising finding from your research. What was unexpected that you learned that you're just like, wow. From that research.

Dorian Kominek: 22:10

So I guess just the prevalence of this what we're talking about sort of as a global issue in partnerships and, you know, I know like partnerships is kind of new as, as a practice. Like it's sort of this burgeoning kind of silo. Even like normally it's just stuffed underneath sales, but now it's kind of becoming its own silo. So I was a little surprised to find though how, how globally a problem this was. And I'll give you a stat. That I like to cite. It's like 66% of the partner professionals that I surveyed. When asked, what is the biggest challenge in your career, like in managing, you know, partnerships? The biggest challenge was their own organization. Like, so if you think about that,like for any other job, right? Where would The biggest problem that you have, be the, or the company that you work for, making it hard for you to do your job right. Like it's such a silly problem. But yeah, it was a lack of one of those five factors that I talked about causing problems in, in the job. 66%. Like that's a lot biggest problem. And not just in their current role across their entire career and partnerships. So yeah.

Will Taylor: 23:23

Wow. That is astounding. Okay. And the, the last question is from all the research that you did, you know, you're just shy of 15,000 words and I'm correcting myself and looking at my, my notes, it wasn't three pages of references, it was six pages of references. So you've consumed a lot of information. And let's say I'm starting in partnerships and I'm that person who You know, has KPIs and I gotta start building and I'm in this organization that kind of believes in it, but also wants to see results. What is a tactical tip that you can give our listeners where if they take action on it daily, weekly, or making sure they're at least doing it every month, how can they do that and be successful? What is that tactical tip that you would recommend someone does? That they can use, you know, tomorrow?

Dorian Kominek: 24:13

So would just say one thing That entrepreneurs are, is resourceful. So be as resourceful as possible. If you're kind of in that situation you know, Look at your, and when, I mean, when I say resourceful, I mean especially with your own time. So make sure that absolutely everything you're doing ties back to one of your KPIs, because those KPIs and those targets are going to help you win, buy-in and hopefully get more resources. So that's the whole game is, is like use your time very wisely and make sure all of it drives the KPIs or the narrative around you know, how, how do you build a business case to, to better, you know, well either to serve your KPIs or I guess to like, build a case to adjust those KPIs if needed or to seek resources or whatever you need to do. But yeah that's the name of the game. Like, that's should be your, your business is like, how do I use my time? To push those, to push those KPIs and that's it. And like nothing else, it's super easy to get distracted. In partnerships, there's like a billion things you could do and waste a lot of time but if you're, you know, that one person, you've gotta like nail it.

Will Taylor: 25:30

Yeah, so it sounds like maybe even doing a review either every day or every week of how did I make progress towards that K P I, or, let's see what I did this week. How does that align with the K P I? Sounds like that would be probably the best practice that they could do, you know, week over week to make sure that they're on track there. And then of course, be scrappy, like you said, make sure they're doing everything in their power to make that happen. Dorian, thank you so much for your time, amazing insights. There's so much more that we can dive into, but where can people find you? There's obviously a lot to dive in your research, but how can they reach you? How can they find you? What do you have going on?

Dorian Kominek: 26:05

Okay, so, first of all, I just set up a YouTube channel, so there's nothing on it, but I'm gonna start breaking down my dissertation into like small, digestible videos and put them up on my YouTube channel. So it's innovation Sensation that's my YouTube channel. I was thinking like Howdy Partners would be good. Actually, that did cross my mind. But yeah, innovation sensation I'm gonna talk about later beyond partner stuff. Also topics in entrepreneurship and innovation. But yeah, I'm gonna break my dissertation down there and then you can also find me on LinkedIn. So my name Dorian, r Nik, there's only one other. Dorian Nik, and he's a man in Poland. So you you should be able to find me if you just search my name.

Will Taylor: 26:49

Amazing. Thank you so much again. And of course, everyone go check out Dorian. And that was another episode of the Howdy Partners podcast.