Photo: Simon Howick, Managing Director at ODS and oxfordworkplace partner
I have spent a lot of my career leading businesses in Oxford, and if there is one lesson I have learned, perhaps later than I should have, it is that the most transformative business decisions are rarely about what you build yourself. They are about who you build it with.
Early in my career, I believed, as many business leaders do, that growth meant getting better at more things. If a capability was missing, you hired for it. If a service line was underdeveloped, you invested in it. The instinct was always to build inward with more expertise and more control. It felt like strength.
What I have come to understand, particularly in a place as densely interconnected as Oxfordshire, is that the real strength lies in knowing exactly what you are exceptional at and being disciplined enough to find partners who are exceptional at everything else. That is strategy and realism.
The Oxfordshire advantage
Oxfordshire is an unusual business environment. It is small enough that you can know your competitors personally, but sophisticated enough that the quality of work being done here rivals anything in London or beyond, in my opinion. That creates an interesting dynamic: the organisations you might most naturally collaborate with are often the ones operating in adjacent spaces to your own.
What makes Oxfordshire particularly well-suited to collaboration is that the quality bar is high across the board. When you partner with another local business that shares your values, you are not compromising on standards; you are combining them, and that changes the equation entirely. The businesses that last, and the ones that genuinely scale, are almost never the ones doing everything themselves. They are the ones who have worked out how to be world-class at one thing, and self-aware or perhaps smart enough to partner with others who are world-class at the rest.
What a good partnership actually requires
If you are thinking about a collaboration, or if someone has approached you and you are not sure whether to take it seriously, there are three questions worth asking before you go any further.
First: are the strengths genuinely complementary? The partnerships that create the most value are the ones where each party brings a distinct and established capability. Not a slightly different approach to the same thing, but something fundamentally different that can bolster an offering. That is exactly what drew us to work with Q3 Services in forming oxfordworkplace, a collaboration that combines ODS’s deep roots in Oxfordshire’s public infrastructure with Q3’s technical property management capability and commercial agility. Neither of us was trying to become the other. We were trying to build something better together.
Second: do your values actually align? The ones that show up when a client has a problem at 5pm (or later) on a Friday, or when a decision has to be made that costs money in the short term but is the right thing to do in the long term. If those instincts are misaligned, the partnership will not survive the first serious test. If they are aligned, you can weather almost anything.
Third: is the collaboration designed to serve clients, or to serve the two organisations involved? The best partnerships I have seen are relentlessly outward-facing. They exist because they make something better for the people they are trying to serve, not because they make life easier for the partners.
The local multiplier no one talks about
There is another reason to think seriously about collaboration in Oxfordshire, and it is one that rarely makes it into the business case but probably should. When a local business partners strategically, particularly with organisations that have national reach, the benefits have a way of anchoring locally even as the capability scales.
When an Oxfordshire business brings in expertise from beyond the county, whether that is technical capability, commercial agility, or access to wider networks, the economic impact still circulates here. Jobs are created here. Apprenticeships are offered here. Local suppliers are prioritised here. Sponsorship and community investment happen here. The partnership may draw on national resources, but the value it generates stays rooted in Oxfordshire.
Over time, that creates a business environment that is meaningfully stronger, not in some abstract civic sense, but in a way that makes it easier to recruit, easier to retain clients, and easier to build a reputation that opens doors. The best collaborations do not pull value out of the county, they bring capability in and multiply what is already here.
The path forward
The best partnerships are often the ones that feel most significant, precisely because they are built on a clear-eyed understanding of what each party does brilliantly and where they genuinely need each other. That mutual respect is not just the foundation of collaboration; it is what makes it powerful.
In Oxfordshire, where the talent is deep and the ambitions are high, the opportunity to build something genuinely distinctive by combining strengths has never been greater.
Simon Howick is Managing Director at ODS and oxfordworkplace partner.
ODS (Oxford Direct Services) was established in 2018 to serve local communities while delivering commercial services where it has the expertise to do so. Operating as two companies working together, ODS provides cost-effective public and commercial services across Oxfordshire. While it operates with strong commercial discipline, its purpose goes beyond profit.
oxfordworkplace brings together the local expertise and community values of ODS with the technical service know-how of Q3 Services to keep workplaces running smoothly. Together, the partnership delivers an integrated facilities management approach designed around Oxford’s people, places and future – combining strong local roots with proven operational capability.
