Welcome to the second installment of our Next Level Leadership series! Here, we interview small to mid-size business leaders about certain areas in which they have proven themselves to be exceptionally successful.

Next in our series is TAB member Mark Beck, founder of The Boulevard Group. Mark was kind enough to spend time to share some of his experiences in local relationship building. The Boulevard Group is a firm that provides Web site design, development and marketing services.

When was The Boulevard Group founded?

My wife and I founded the company in 2000. We’ve been in business for 11 years, with the vast majority of our clients from the New York City/Philadelphia geographic area.

We started pairing with local businesses back in 2003. I’m a programmer, not a designer. We brought in a graphic designer on an outsource basis. The graphic designer had the exact opposite problem I did: he did design work, not programming. From then on we would refer business to each other.

From that relationship, the graphic designer has referred The Boulevard Group to other companies over the years. Close to 30 percent of our business comes from partner referrals.

How do you approach other local businesses? Has building relationships with them been a natural part of doing business, or have you actively worked to build a strong local network?

When I go to networking events, I look for people, like local printers and PC repair companies, who have the same client base, but not those who provide competing services.

In Long Valley, I partner with Eric Frenchman, an online marketing guru. It’s a good example of how we both target the same types of companies, but our businesses are not competitive at all. We refer potential partners to each other.

What do you consider the most important aspect of developing relationships with other businesses?

Primarily, I look at a person’s experience and examples of work that they’ve done. Whenever possible I would like to be the person referring another to a potential partner first, instead of being the one to ask for business.

When we have work referred to us, we have to keep two important things in mind:

First, we have to make the referring partner look as good as possible. Second, we have to keep the partner in the loop. Always let them know what’s going on: whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s something we’re doing or something the client is doing, we want to make sure there are no surprises on their end.

I noticed you have a page on your Web site dedicated to “Business Resources”. Is this part of building relationships with other local businesses?

Companies listed on the page are a combination of partners with whom we do work and others who are part of my local BNI networking group.

How has working with other local businesses benefited The Boulevard Group, outside of the financial reward?

In addition to the financial reward, having good relationships with other local businesses makes the sales cycle a whole lot shorter. Partner clients have already been sold on a Web site, and are now looking to put the pieces together to get the project going.

In some cases, when we’re doing work with a partner, The Boulevard Group works in the background and the client doesn’t know we exist. Sometimes we work face to face with the end client. We can get out, meet new people, and see who they use as resources. We see if The Boulevard Group can help them work with other businesses.

What is your favorite aspect of being a member of The Alternative Board?

It’s tremendously beneficial to have a new set of eyes looking in on the business. We can be so engulfed in the day-to-day operations that we don’t take the time to look at the big picture.  It’s so helpful to have board members coming in with a different set of eyes – new perspectives have helped the business get along, keep it going.