These are the keys to good strategic partnerships that can future-proof your business

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

Modern business is built on partnerships. Some 43% of mid-market executives surveyed by J.P. Morgan at the end of last year said they were planning to invest in strategic alliances in 2025 as part of their growth plans. A third of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies surveyed in 2023 said they were looking at initiating partnerships with third parties to maintain their innovation readiness.

What does it take to make such partnerships work? “You need humility and the willingness to take a risk on behalf of the partner so that both sides have skin in the game,” says Steve Beard, chairman and CEO of Adtalem Global Education, a for-profit provider of education and training for the healthcare industry.

Finding solutions together

Adtalem, which reported $1.6 billion in sales in fiscal 2024, up 9.2% from a year earlier, routinely partners with schools, hospital systems, and training organizations to increase its pipeline of medical professionals and offer hands-on experience to students and graduates.

Beard shared the example of a new alliance between Chamberlain University, one of Adtalem’s nursing schools, and SSM Health, a nonprofit health system operating in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. The arrangement aims to enroll 400 nurses annually, primarily in Chamberlain’s online Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program. Students in the program have the opportunity to gain work experience at SSM Health facilities while in school and have access to full-time employment opportunities at SSM Health—with loan repayment—upon graduation.

Beard and Amy Wilson, chief nurse executive of SSM Health, say the program is designed to help address a nursing shortage in the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting nearly 200,000 nursing openings each year through 2032 due to retirements—but the size of the registered nurse population is only expected to grow by 177,400 nurses between 2022 and 2032.

Chamberlain recruits “nontraditional” students, including people whose educations have been interrupted or those who have been shut out of selective colleges and universities. The school says it is the No. 1 provider of nursing degrees to minority students. “Prestige and selectivity are, by definition, intended to be small, and there’s no incentive for those institutions to grow to meet the market demand, which creates a very attractive lane for us,” says Beard. “That is exactly what we exist to do.”

Critics of for-profit colleges say students can get a comparable education at community or state colleges for much less money and fret about the schools’ low completion rates. “While our tuition may be higher than community colleges, it’s often lower than private nonprofit institutions and out-of-state public rates,” says Beard. “When you factor in speed to completion and targeted career alignment, we believe we offer strong return on investment for students underserved by traditional models.” Chamberlain says its four-year graduation rate is 71.2% for full-time undergraduate students across all its campuses compared with about 50% across all four-year institutions.

Partnerships at work

Beard says Adtalem respects its partners’ areas of expertise. “We have to have the humility to understand that we’ll never know as much about their business and the challenges they’re facing as they do.”

And in partnerships like the one with SSM Health, each party had to be willing to try something different in order to make the deal a win-win. In SSM’s case, Wilson says, the health system had to get comfortable with giving Chamberlain students priority placement in its clinical settings, an accommodation Wilson says she was willing to make in order to help fill her hiring pipeline. “Saying that you have a strategic relationship with one school can sometimes be difficult within the nursing profession,” she says. “We had to overcome that hurdle internally and get people comfortable with that.”

For Adtalem, the arrangement means that other health systems won’t necessarily have access to recruit from the student population that commits to work at SSM.

Beard advises other CEOs that their teams need to be willing to co-create and iterate for partnerships to succeed. “We’ve built in a tremendous amount of flexibility to adapt the program and its features as we learn together.”

Announcing Inc.’s Power Partners

Does your company partner with small businesses and entrepreneurs? Every year, Inc.’s Power Partner Awards recognizes companies of all sizes that help independent companies scale. You can apply here to earn a slot on this prestigious list. The deadline is July 25.

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