As a small business owner, do you ever wish you could clone yourself so you could accomplish more in a day or overcome common business challenges? While duplicating yourself may not be possible, you might consider hiring a business consultant to alleviate some of your stress. A business consultant is someone outside of your organization who evaluates your company to help improve its efficiency and the overall job performance of employees among many other things.
Types of Business Consultants
Most business consultants specialize in a specific area rather than offering general consulting services. Here are the most common types of consultants:
- Human Resources: A human resources consultant can help you develop recruiting strategies to attract top talent, review the compensation you currently offer to ensure it’s competitive, and help to reduce employee turnover. You might also work with a human resources consultant to create new positions and develop current staff to fill the roles.
- Information Technology (IT): With technology always rapidly evolving, most companies have an IT consultant on hand or have used one in the past. Examples of services provided by an IT consultant include upgrading servers, implementing a new phone system, and improve the security of company computers.
- Operations: These consultants focus on improving overall business efficiency and specific quality processes. An operations consultant can come in handy when you want to increase profit margins, decrease costs, or eliminate repetitive or unnecessary steps in a business process.
- Sales and Marketing: Your company can only grow when people know it exists and feel enthusiastic about its products or services. A sales and marketing consultant can help in this area by creating a unique marketing plan, strong company branding, establish a social media presence and strategy, launch marketing campaigns, initiate strategies for sales process improvements, and much more.
- Strategy and Management: A strategy and management specialist will have expert knowledge of your industry and help you define industry best practices. Some of the specific services they can provide include expanding product offerings, increasing your market share, represent you in a buyout of another company, and reduce costs.
How Business Consultants Get to Know Your Company
A quality business consultant will spend significant time learning about your employees, company processes, history, goals, and current issues you would like to resolve. The consultant should visit your place of business in person to tour it, speak to employees, and conduct meetings with the board of directors. You should be prepared to provide the consultant with as much information as possible such as company financial records and its mission statement. These actions all occur during the discovery phase.
Once the consultant has acquired adequate knowledge about your company, it’s time to move on to the evaluation phase. This is where the consultant provides input on potential areas of change after identifying the primary strengths and weaknesses of your company. The goal is for the consultant to use information provided by you, your employees, and board of directors to formulate a plan for improvement. This includes identifying ways to increase profits and pursue business growth opportunities.
Although you made the decision to hire a business consultant, some of the feedback may be difficult for you to hear. You should not take any observations or recommendations personally but rather as an opportunity for your company to perform even better. After you and the consultant have agreed on a plan, it’s time to move to the restructuring phase. Here the consultant increases assets and minimizes liability. Both of you should continue to monitor how well the plan works in action and step in to make adjustments if necessary.
Think of Us as an Extension of Your Business
Juvo Business Group provides services to small business owners such as coaching, marketing, advisory boards, and more. We invite you to contact us today to learn more about how we can work together to make your business even more successful.
