Standards
Who gets a seat, and who keeps one
A referral group is only worth as much as its worst member. These are the standards we admit against — published in full, because you should be able to decide whether this is your kind of table before anyone spends an hour on a call.
Why we exist
Built for the introduction that has to be right
NW Strategic Partners started from a specific frustration: business owners in the Pacific Northwest routinely need four or five professionals at once — a lender, an attorney, a CPA, a broker, someone to fix the network — and they end up assembling that bench from search results and guesswork, one bad experience at a time.
The people best placed to fix that are the professionals who already serve those owners. They know who is good. They just need a structure that makes the referral safe to give: a small, closed group where every category has exactly one answer, and where that answer is accountable to the person who named them.
So we built the smallest thing that does the job. 28 seats. One company each. One person per company, with their real phone number on the page.
Admission
What we require
Every applicant is measured against all five. Meeting four is a no, and we will tell you which one and why.
- 01
Established, not aspiring
At least three years operating under current ownership, with clients who were not friends first. We are not a place to test whether a business works.
- 02
Licensed and insured where it applies
Current licensing for every regulated category, verified at admission and again annually. General liability and, where the category warrants it, professional liability.
- 03
Reachable by a human
A named representative with a direct line and a direct inbox. If the fastest route to you is a web form and a queue, this is the wrong table.
- 04
A clean record we can check
No unresolved regulatory action, no pattern of complaints, and a candid account of the last engagement that went badly. Everyone has one. We are interested in what you did about it.
- 05
Willing to be the only one
Holding a category exclusively means being the answer every time. Members must have the capacity to take the work, or the honesty to say when they cannot and hand it on.
Conduct
What holding a seat obliges you to do
These are not aspirations. They are the terms, and a pattern of ignoring them reopens the category.
- Respond to a member introduction within one business day, even if the answer is no.
- Close the loop with the member who made the introduction, whether the work landed or not.
- Never quote a member’s client on work outside your own category to cut another seat out.
- Disclose any private fee arrangement with another member to the client it affects.
- Decline work you are not equipped to do well, and say who is.
- Treat what you learn about another member’s clients as confidential, permanently.
Losing a seat
The category always comes back to the table
A seat is a loan, not a purchase. It returns to the table when a member stops meeting the standards above, when the named representative leaves and is not replaced, or when a member simply stops showing up. That is not a punishment — it is the mechanism that makes every other seat worth holding.