A time tracking company pitched me on a partnership recently. I told them I was already partnered with a time tracking tool I like and wasn’t looking to switch, which I assumed would end the conversation politely. They asked for a demo anyway.
The demo was mostly a list of reasons they beat the competition. At one point they told me a competitor didn’t have a particular feature, and I knew that was wrong, because I use that competitor and I use that feature. Then the call ended, and it ended rudely enough that I sat there for a second afterward with the laptop still open. Somewhere in that second I stopped thinking of it as a partnership I’d declined and started thinking of it as one I’d escaped.
An agency partnership is only worth exploring when three parties win at the same time: you, the partner, and the client you’d both be serving. If any one of the three comes out flat, there’s nothing to talk about yet.
Quick Take
- Liking someone isn’t a reason to partner with them. The only filter that’s held up for me is whether all three of us win, and the client is the one people forget to count.
- One-sided partnerships don’t announce themselves at the start. They show up as a year of you sending business, then a friendly reappearance the week they need something.
- The pitch call tells you most of what you need. A partner who opens with “we’re better than them” is telling you they don’t have a position, they have a comparison.
- Your best partners are usually already in your phone. Of the 50 partners on my own target list, 28 were people who had already sat down with me for a podcast interview.
What this covers
- What counts as an agency partnership, and what’s just a referral agreement wearing a nicer coat
- The question that comes before all the other questions
- The questions to ask before you agree to anything
- How to spot a one-sided partnership before it costs you a year
- What a good one looks like when it’s working
- Where good partners come from
What counts as an agency partnership?
An agency partnership is an ongoing relationship with another business where both of you send value in each other’s direction and the client is better off because the two of you are connected. It isn’t equity, it isn’t a merger, and it doesn’t require a contract to be real. I’ve argued the case for fewer and deeper partnerships before, and this is the practical half of it.
That definition matters because the word “partnership” gets used for at least four different things, and the advice written for one of them is useless for the others. Search for partnership advice and you’ll get articles about co-founder equity splits, insurance agencies sharing commissions, and buyers deciding which agency to hire. All fine, none of them about the thing an agency owner is usually deciding, which is whether to invest real time in a relationship with a software company, a complementary agency, a community, or a podcast.
The version I care about is closer to distribution than to contracts. When I built my own list of 50 target partners, not one of them was a revenue share or a joint venture. They were shows, communities, events, and individual people with an audience of the same agency owners I’m trying to reach. I was offered the chance to rebuild that list against a contractual definition of partnership and I turned it down, because the contract was never the point. Access was.
The question that comes before the others
Before any of the practical questions, there’s one filter, and I run everything through it: does this work for all three of us?
I only play positive-sum games. If I win and my partner wins but the client is stuck with a tool they didn’t need, that’s not a partnership I want to be in, and it will cost me more in trust than it pays in referral fees. If the client wins and the partner wins but I’m the only one giving, I’m not a partner, I’m a channel. And if the partner is the only one losing, that ends on its own soon enough.
All three or don’t explore it. That one rule kills more conversations than every other question combined, and it kills them early, which is the useful part.
What questions should I ask before agreeing to a partnership?
Ask these before you commit any time, ideally on the first real conversation. None of them are gotchas. They’re the ones where the answer tells you something whether it’s good or bad.
“What does winning look like for you here?” If they can’t answer with something specific, they haven’t thought about it, and you’ll be doing the thinking for both of you. Vague enthusiasm is the most expensive answer in this list because it feels like a yes.
“What does the client get that they can’t get from either of us alone?” This is the three-way win, asked out loud. If the honest answer is “nothing, but we both get leads,” you’ve learned that the client is the product rather than the point.
“How would you describe what you do without comparing yourself to anyone else?” I ask this now because of the time tracking call. A company that can only explain itself in contrast to a competitor doesn’t have a position of its own, and a partner without a position will drift into whatever the market is doing that quarter. Better is not a position, it’s a claim, and it’s one their competitor is making about them at the same moment. If they can’t say what makes them different without a rival in the sentence, their buyers can’t either.
“What have you done for a partner in the last 90 days when there was nothing in it for you?” The best question in the list. Reciprocity is a habit, and habits leave evidence. Someone who operates this way will answer immediately and specifically, usually with something small and unglamorous.
“Who are you not for?” A partner who serves everyone will send you clients who fit nobody, and you’ll spend the next six months politely declining introductions while trying not to damage the relationship.
“What happens if this doesn’t work?” Ask it while everyone’s optimistic. The answer tells you whether you’re talking to someone who has done this before.
How do I tell if a partnership is one-sided?
The tell is timing. In a one-sided partnership, the other party’s engagement arrives exactly when they need something and goes quiet the rest of the year.
I’ve been in several of these. I sent business, sometimes a lot of it, and nothing came back the other way, not a referral or an intro or even a mention to someone else. Then an event would come around, something with an audience they wanted access to, and suddenly they were back at my door asking how they could contribute to the partnership. The contribution was always available. It just never arrived unprompted.
A partnership has to be good for both sides most of the time, otherwise it’s just charity with a better name on it. I don’t mean it has to balance every quarter, because it won’t and shouldn’t. Real relationships run uneven for stretches. But if you drew the line over a year and it only ever ran one direction, the word partnership is doing work the relationship isn’t.
The reason this is worth catching early is that it costs a year to learn otherwise, and you’ll usually spend that year assuming the imbalance is temporary. It’s the same pattern as referral dependency: the thing feels fine right up until you count.
What does a good agency partnership look like?
Value moves in more than one form and neither party is keeping a ledger. Money is the least interesting part of it.
The best partnership I have is with a tech platform. I’ve sent them a lot of business. They’ve sent me money and given me free access to the tool, which is the part most people would list first, and it’s the smallest part of why it works. What makes it work is everything around the transaction. We bounce ideas off each other. I gave them positioning advice they took and ran with. When they build a new feature, I get to try it before it ships. None of that was negotiated, and none of it appears in an agreement anywhere.
The result is that I promote them to everyone, constantly and without being asked, because I believe they’re trying to help. That’s the return they get on treating a partnership as a relationship instead of a channel, and it’s worth more than whatever a referral fee would have bought them.
You can see the difference in one question: when something good happens to you, does your partner hear about it before there’s an ask attached? In the one-sided version, contact and request arrive in the same message every time.
Where do good agency partners come from?
Mostly from people you already know. When I built a 50-partner target list for my own business, 28 of them were past guests on my podcast, which means more than half of my best partnership opportunities were relationships that already existed and had never been worked.
The cold half went differently. I sourced an initial group of partner candidates from public partner directories and tier badges, and 88% of them failed verification on fit. The reason turned out to be structural rather than bad luck. A visible partner tier is a size signal, and the top tiers are the top 1% to 2% of a vendor’s partner base, so the agencies easiest to find in a directory are the ones that have already outgrown the band I work with. For this kind of sourcing, public credentials correlate inversely with fit.
That’s a useful thing to know before you spend a quarter on outreach. The findable partners are findable because they’re big, and the ones who’d be good for you are sitting in your podcast archive and your sent folder. Start there. If you need a way to think about which rooms are worth being in at all, the builder ecosystem map is the version of this I use with clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a contract for an agency partnership?
Usually no, and reaching for one early is often a sign the relationship isn’t there yet. Every partnership on my own list runs without a revenue share or a signed agreement. Contracts make sense when there’s shared delivery risk, real money changing hands on a schedule, or client data moving between you. For distribution relationships, a contract mostly formalizes something that either works or doesn’t.
How many partnerships should an agency have?
Fewer than you’d think, and worked harder than you’re working them. Most agency owners I talk to have twenty loose connections they call partnerships and two that produce anything. The two are the partnerships. If you can’t name what happened with a partner in the last quarter, they’re a contact.
What if the partnership is going well for them and not for me?
Say so, plainly and early, before resentment does the talking. Most one-sided partnerships aren’t malicious, they’re just unexamined, and a direct conversation fixes a real share of them. If nothing changes after you’ve named it, you have your answer, and you should stop sending business rather than waiting for the balance to correct itself.
Should I partner with a competitor?
Often yes, if you’ve each narrowed enough that the overlap is small. Two agencies with real positioning can send each other the work that doesn’t fit, and that referral is worth more than the work you’d have taken badly. Two generalist agencies can’t do this, because everything looks like a fit and nothing is a clean handoff, which is one more argument for narrowing in the first place.
How long before I know if a partnership is working?
Two quarters is usually enough to see the pattern, but the first call tells you more than people give it credit for. The time tracking company showed me who they were inside twenty minutes, and nothing in the following two quarters would have changed that read.
The short version
Run every partnership conversation through one filter: do you win, do they win, and does the client win? All three, most of the time, or there’s nothing here yet. Then ask what winning looks like for them, what they’ve done for a partner recently with nothing in it for themselves, and how they’d describe their business without naming a competitor. The answers sort people quickly.
And check your podcast guests, your old clients, and the communities you’re already in before you go looking for strangers. The partners worth having are usually already standing there.
If you want to work through which partnerships are worth your time with other agency owners doing the same thing, that conversation happens in the Dynamic Agency Community.