In our latest blog, we explore the benefits of engaging with professional consultants who provide specialised expertise and objective assessments. Learn how a consultancy can help you navigate capability or capacity constraints, implement solutions, and complete special projects. Discover the advantages of tapping into their vast knowledge and experience, leveraging proven strategies from other clients while respecting confidentiality. We also highlight the importance of unbiased guidance, stakeholder alignment, and selecting the right consultancy for your industry and values.
What is a business consultancy and what does a business consultant do?
A business consultancy is a company that helps its clients overcome business problems, realise opportunities, or help implement improvements to their business. They do this by providing specialist professional expertise on an “as required” basis. The consultants will help define the problem or opportunity, make an objective assessment, and then suggest appropriate recommendations which deliver the necessary change.
In the perfect world, a company will manage to do this on its own using its own people. However, there are barriers to being able to achieve this, essentially due to capability or capacity constraints.
When might an organisation use a business consultant?
The skills necessary for the growing and changing needs of your organisation are not always readily available in-house, making it hard to undertake projects or solve issues. By engaging with a business consultancy firm, you can tap into their relevant knowledge, experience, and expertise that is needed to implement a “fit for purpose” solution.
Even when you have the skills needed in your organisation, those staff members may not have the time to engage in and complete special projects and it may be more important to your business for them to keep focus on “business as usual”. A business consultant will have the experience needed to activate and complete those projects, which is important as it’s the project/change piece that turns the dial of your organisation’s intrinsic value.
Sometimes a business may need to deal with specific issues or challenges which it hasn’t come across before. The right business consultancy will often have a wider repository of experience to draw from, allowing them to better address the unique challenges. Whilst always respecting client confidentiality, business consultants bring with them ideas and solutions that have worked in the past for other clients. This cross-pollination is a surefire way to tap into the most appropriate solution for a client. Whatever the solution, they seek to implement them in the most efficient and cost-effective manner, then move on.
Providing unbiased and impartial advice
In situations where there are multiple stakeholders with divergent views, a business consultancy will provide unbiased and an impartial pathway that considers all requirements and promotes the most appropriate go-forward solution.
So how does this happen? At the outset, a business consultancy will work with you to truly understand the situation you need their help with. This is called a discovery meeting, outlining the current lay of the land and the issues or challenges needed to be addressed.
From there the business consultant will provide their recommendations on how best to tackle the issues confronting the business. Sometimes there may be more than one option in which case a summary of the pros and cons of each may be presented but with a clear recommendation.
Once agreed, the business consultancy will draft a detailed statement of work covering recommended approach, what is needed from you the client, a time scale, the expected business outcomes, and pricing. Once the statement of work has been approved by the client, the work can begin, with constant milestones and updates provided by the business consultant along the way.
Normally some form of quality oversight is performed at the partner level to ensure the agreed scope is delivered on time, with the resources agreed upon and within budget.
The selection of a business consultancy is an important one. In choosing one, it’s important to consider the following:
Do they have a good reputation within the industry I work in? Also, explore any potential conflict of interest in them currently working with your competitors.
Are they of a comparable scale to meet the changing demands of your business? Using a sole business advisor is discouraged for this reason.
Alignment of values is also important as it flows through to how they operate internally and how they treat you as a client.
If you’d like our help to see whether a business consultancy is right for your business, why not drop us a line at info@copperfox.org