Business consulting what is

Contact Us. Engineering Blog. Call Sales:. Log In. Business Consulting. Startups can use consultants to complete planning and get a strong start. Many seasoned business managers and owners can struggle with seeing the complete picture as they are in the middle of it. A business consultant has a fresh mind and viewpoint, allowing them to see things that business owners might not. This gives them invaluable insight and ideas from many different avenues. They can use the expertise they gain from other industries and adapt them to a new industry.

Business consultants help to develop these plans more quickly and clearly and then help you put them to work. Business consultants can help find weak areas in your spending and provide creative solutions for those areas. Businesses can use this to gain knowledge and use external resources that a business may not even be aware of. Management consulting is a popular destination for bright students after graduating university. Management consultants work with businesses to improve their performance by providing expert advice to solve problems and encourage growth.

They work with businesses across a wide range of sectors, including business strategy, finance, HR and marketing.

In basic terms the role of the consultant is to provide their client with an audit of current procedures, their recommendation for improvement and an action plan for implementation. They can be brought in by a business to advise senior management on a specific project or more broadly on the structure and practices of a firm. The management consultant will often be filling in for a skills gap a business has.

It can be much cheaper to source external help than hiring new individuals or even a team to manage a project or task. These professionals analyze businesses and create solutions while also helping companies meet their goals. Business owners should consider hiring business consultants when they need help or perspective on their chosen path or a catalyst for change in their companies. There are several reasons business owners should consider hiring consultants.

Consultants offer a wide range of services, including the following:. The first step for any business consultant is the discovery phase, where the goal is to learn the client's business. A good business consultant takes the time to learn as much as possible about the business from the owner and employees.

This can include touring the facility, meeting with the board of directors and employees, analyzing the finances and reading all company materials. During this process, the business consultant will uncover the details of a company's mission and what operations are in place.

Once the business consultant has developed an in-depth understanding of the company, they enter the evaluation phase, where the goal is to identify where change is needed. This phase includes identifying the company's strengths and weaknesses, as well as current and foreseeable problems. These issues can include problems that ownership and management have already identified, as well as new problems the business consultant discovers as a result of their objectivity.

A business consultant should also identify opportunities to grow the business, increase profits and boost efficiency. In addition to identifying these problems and opportunities, a business consultant should develop solutions to problems and plans for capitalizing on opportunities. Perhaps a company has a particularly strong sales department but a weak marketing department. This is an opportunity for the company to increase marketing resources and capitalize on the sales staff. During this phase, it's important for the consultant and the company's employees to maintain open, clear communications.

It's important for a business owner to take the business consultant's advice at this stage as constructive criticism. The owner should not take this criticism personally, as the business consultant brings objectivity and a fresh viewpoint.

The owner may be personally close to the business, which can be an obstacle to positive change and growth. The owner should have feedback and provide opinions to the business consultant, which the business owner should consider and revise plans as necessary. Once the owner and the consultant agree on a plan, the consultant should enter the third phase of consulting. This is the restructuring phase, or the implementation of the plan.

In this phase, the consultant builds on assets and eliminates liabilities. They also monitor the plan's progress and adjust it as needed. These business consultants can bring industry expertise to your business to help you scale, acquire new opportunities and drive revenue.

Consultants with a focus in strategy and management can help your business by:. Business consultants with an operations specialization can help business owners improve the quality of their day-to-day processes. These business consultants take inventory of your current business model and figure out the best way to produce the same high-quality results at a fraction of the cost and time.

Other ways these consultants help is through quality control and understanding how to tweak and optimize your production for better results. A financial consultant can show you the wider scope of the financial health of your business. They mainly assist in investment decisions and helping business owners find the best way to handle their assets and debts. Financial consultants can also provide even further specializations, including financial planning where they advise clients on their taxes, daily expenses and retirement plans.

In the most successful relationships, there is not a rigid distinction between roles; formal recommendations should contain no surprises if the client helps develop them and the consultant is concerned with their implementation. A consultant will often ask for a second engagement to help install a recommended new system. However, if the process to this point has not been collaborative, the client may reject a request to assist with implementation simply because it represents such a sudden shift in the nature of the relationship.

Effective work on implementation problems requires a level of trust and cooperation that is developed gradually throughout the engagement. In any successful engagement, the consultant continually strives to understand which actions, if recommended, are likely to be implemented and where people are prepared to do things differently. Recommendations may be confined to those steps the consultant believes will be implemented well.

Some may think such sensitivity amounts to telling a client only what he wants to hear. Indeed, a frequent dilemma for experienced consultants is whether they should recommend what they know is right or what they know will be accepted. When a client requests information, the consultant asks how it will be used and what steps have already been taken to acquire it.

Then he or she, along with members of the client organization, determines which steps the company is ready to pursue and how to launch further actions. An adviser continually builds support for the implementation phase by asking questions focused on action, repeatedly discussing progress made, and including organization members on the team.

It follows that managers should be willing to experiment with new procedures during the course of an engagement—and not wait until the end of the project before beginning to implement change. When innovations prove successful, they are institutionalized more effectively than when simply recommended without some demonstration of their value. For implementation to be truly effective, readiness and commitment to change must be developed, and client members must learn new ways of solving problems to improve organizational performance.

How well these goals are achieved depends on how well both parties understand and manage the process of the entire engagement. People are much more likely to use and institutionalize innovations proved successful than recommendations merely set forth on paper. All in all, effective implementation requires consensus, commitment, and new problem-solving techniques and management methods.

To provide sound and convincing recommendations, a consultant must be persuasive and have finely tuned analytic skills. But more important is the ability to design and conduct a process for 1 building an agreement about what steps are necessary and 2 establishing the momentum to see these steps through. An observation by one consultant summarizes this well. But that is the tip of the iceberg.

What supports that is establishing enough agreement within the organization that the action makes sense—in other words, not only getting the client to move, but getting enough support so that the movement will be successful. To do that, a consultant needs superb problem-solving techniques and the ability to persuade the client through the logic of his analysis.

In addition, enough key players must be on board, each with a stake in the solution, so that it will succeed. So the consultant needs to develop a process through which he can identify whom it is important to involve and how to interest them.

Managers should not necessarily expect their advisers to ask these questions. But they should expect that consultants will be concerned with issues of this kind during each phase of the engagement. In addition to increasing commitment through client involvement during each phase, the consultant may kindle enthusiasm with the help of an ally from the organization not necessarily the person most responsible for the engagement.

The role is similar to that of informant-collaborator in field research in cultural anthropology, and it is often most successful when not explicitly sought. If conducted skillfully, interviews to gather information can at the same time build trust and readiness to accept the need for change throughout the organization. Then members at all levels of the organization come to see the project as helpful, not as unwanted inquisition.

By locating potential resistance or acceptance, the interviews help the consultant learn which corrective actions will work and almost always reveal more sound solutions and more willingness to confront difficulty than upper management had expected. And they may also reveal that potential resisters have valid data and viewpoints. The relationship with the principal client is especially important in developing consensus and commitment. Ideally, each meeting involves two-way reporting on what has been done since the last contact and discussion of what both parties should do next.

In this way a process of mutual influence develops, with natural shifts in agenda and focus as the project continues. Although I have somewhat exaggerated the level of collaboration usually possible, I am convinced that effective management consulting is difficult unless the relationship moves farther in a collaborative direction than most clients expect. Management consultants like to leave behind something of lasting value.

This does not imply that effective professionals work themselves out of a job. Satisfied clients will recommend them to others and will invite them back the next time there is a need. For example, demonstrating an appropriate technique or recommending a relevant book often accomplishes more than quietly performing a needed analysis.

However, some members of management may need to acquire complex skills that they can learn only through guided experience over time.