 It's really hard to be successful all by ourselves. Building strategic relationships is key to achieving our goals. Welcome back, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. We're continuing our theme of growth and revitalization in April, and today we're going to talk about growing partnerships and strategic relationships to help us meet our goals. Here at Evil Genius Leadership, we talk a lot about professional relationships because we believe so strongly in how important those relationships are. By putting a little bit of focus and conscious effort on who we'd like to have strategic relationships with, we can make the difference between getting somewhere near our goals and really achieving what we set out to do. So you're probably saying, I get it, strategic relationships are important, but where do I start? Who should I be looking to partner or build strategic relationships with? And that question, who is a great place to start? We need to be asking ourselves, who shares my goals and ambitions? Who has a similar outlook on life and business as I do? We may also want to consider who has the same goals, but a different perspective. Different perspectives can help both partners reach a better solution than if the two agree on everything. And who has the experience or expertise that could be necessary to meet my goals, but that I don't have? One thing to remember as we look to develop strategic relationships is that this is not quite the same as building our network or expanding our connections. The idea here with a strategic relationship or a partnership is that this is going to be someone we're going to be working with on a regular basis and not just someone we might connect with occasionally. For this reason, we need to consider if the person we're building a strategic partnership with is someone we can have a strong and amicable professional relationship with. We don't need to agree with them all the time, but this needs to be a person or a group of people that we can work together with to solve problems in a rational and professional way. As we mentioned earlier, strategic relationships are a bit different from networking. We're not just looking to build any relationship, but one that's mutually beneficial to both of our goals. Now that means we need to have common goals or complementary goals. In the case of evil genius leadership, we're looking to build a business that helps people grow into strong, effective leaders of tomorrow. We have a strategic partner whose business is marketing. We work together to share our expertise and help each other out so we both can create strong, successful businesses. What's important to remember is that in any true strategic partnership we need to give and not just get. Whether we provide time, effort, advice, or even money, it's important that we bring whatever we have to offer to the partnership and that the other party does the same to advance our common and or complementary goals. If you found this helpful, don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and check us out every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time for a live interactive leadership discussion on BLAD. If you can't make it there, click off on that globe to the right. That'll get you subscribed to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.