An organisation identifies something it wants to offer but doesn’t currently have. A university wants additional English support for international students. A language school wants to extend learning beyond the classroom. An employer needs specialist support for teams working internationally. An NGO sees an opportunity to offer education to more of the people it serves.
There are several ways forward.
Develop the capability internally. Buy an existing solution. Outsource some or all of it. Work with a partner. Or combine elements of several approaches.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time around decisions like these—both developing things ourselves and trying to work with organisations that could benefit from something we’d already built. One lesson has stayed with me:
The fact that you can build something yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Equally, the existence of an external solution doesn’t mean partnering is automatically the better answer. The useful starting point is understanding what you’re actually missing.
What don’t you have?
Technology. Content. People. Access to a particular market. Relationships. Delivery capability. Or simply enough time and resources to develop something properly. These are very different gaps.
A university with considerable academic expertise but limited specialist English-language provision faces a different decision from a language school with excellent teachers that doesn’t want to invest in building an entire online learning platform.
An organisation may even have the capability already, but not enough of it to respond to a new opportunity. Being precise about what’s missing changes the conversation.
Instead of asking: “Who can sell us something?”
you can begin to ask: “What would another organisation need to bring for this to become better?”
Building can create something worth owning
There are good reasons to develop capability internally. If something is central to your organisation, control may matter enormously. You may already possess much of the expertise and infrastructure. The capability itself may become strategically important—or potentially create new income in future.
Building internally also develops knowledge that remains inside the organisation. And sometimes the external alternatives simply aren’t good enough. But building has a cost beyond the development budget. People have to create it. Then somebody has to maintain it, improve it and keep it relevant.
There is also time. If an organisation takes eighteen months to build something that could have been available next month, the real cost includes what might have happened during those eighteen months.
Buying may be perfectly sufficient
Not every external relationship needs to become a “partnership”. Sometimes an organisation needs a product or service that already exists and does the job perfectly well. Buy it.
The relationship can remain straightforward: one organisation provides something and another pays for it. There’s nothing inferior about that.
In fact, calling every supplier relationship a partnership can obscure what both sides actually expect from one another.
Partnership becomes more interesting when both organisations bring something important to the outcome.
The value can be in the combination
I’ve seen this particularly clearly in language education. A local language school may have excellent teachers, trusted student relationships and a deep understanding of its learners—their first language, culture, educational background and the difficulties they commonly encounter.
An external provider may have specialist teachers, extensive digital content, technology or learning opportunities that would be difficult for the school to create economically itself. Neither needs to become the other.
The value is in the combination.
The same principle can apply elsewhere. A university doesn’t necessarily need to build every specialist student-support service. An employer operating internationally doesn’t need to become an expert in language education. An NGO with strong community relationships may not need to develop the technology or educational content required to support those communities.
Sometimes each organisation continuing to do what it does particularly well produces the stronger proposition.
Partnership can let you learn before making the biggest investment
There is another potential advantage. An organisation may believe its students, employees or customers want something new. It may be right.
But investing heavily in building the complete capability before finding out can be an expensive way to test the assumption. An external solution or partnership can sometimes allow an organisation to start earlier, see how people actually respond and learn what really matters. The eventual answer may still be to build internally.
Or the external relationship may become more valuable as it develops. The point is that the largest commitment doesn’t always have to be the first one.
What do you give up?
Working with somebody else brings trade-offs. Control is one. Part of your customer, employee or student experience may now depend on another organisation. Its technology can fail. Service levels can change. Prices can move. Priorities can diverge. There is reputational exposure too.
If you recommend something and it disappoints, the person using it may reasonably regard that as your problem as well as the provider’s. And another organisation creating part of the value will expect an appropriate share of that value.
These aren’t arguments against partnership. They’re part of the decision.
External doesn’t mean effortless
One misconception is worth avoiding. Choosing an existing solution may save you from building the capability. It doesn’t remove the work of making that solution function inside your organisation. There will still be implementation, ownership, communication and support. The amount varies enormously, but it needs to be included when comparing options.
The meaningful comparison isn’t simply the cost of building versus the partner’s price. It’s the real cost, effort, risk and potential value of each route.
Why are we better doing this together?
This is perhaps my favourite test of a potential partnership. What does each side bring that the other doesn’t?
Expertise? Distribution? Technology? Relationships? Content? Local knowledge? Credibility? Access to people the other organisation couldn’t easily reach?
If the combination creates something genuinely better, there may be a strong reason to work together. If one organisation provides almost everything while the other contributes little beyond enthusiasm, the word “partnership” won’t change the underlying relationship.
And sometimes a straightforward supplier/customer arrangement is exactly what is needed.
The answer can change
Build, buy and partner aren’t necessarily permanent categories. An organisation may begin with an external specialist and later decide that the capability has become important enough to bring in-house.
A supplier relationship may become increasingly collaborative. A limited partnership may demonstrate enough demand to justify substantial investment. Or two organisations may discover that something they expected to work simply doesn’t.
That’s useful information too. The right decision today doesn’t have to remain the right decision forever.
What are you actually trying to make possible?
Build, buy or partner? There is no default answer. The decision depends on what the organisation is trying to achieve, what it already does well, what is missing and what each route would genuinely require.
But there is one possibility worth keeping in mind. Sometimes the opportunity isn’t something either organisation needs to create alone. It exists because of what they can bring together.
That’s when partnership becomes more than an alternative to building or buying.
It becomes part of the opportunity itself.
David de Jager is the founder of Opportunities Through English (OTE). His career has spanned English-language education, international business, technology and partnerships, including founding the online English-learning platform Perfectly Spoken. More about OTE
