If you’re looking to start some new projects this new year, streamline your business for efficiency, open new locations or anything else with big implications for your business, you need to plan carefully. Anything that can deliver success for you has an equal capacity to result in failure if you’re not careful, and making plans to maximise your chances of success – and minimise your chances of failing – isn’t necessarily an easy process. It can help to get an injection of expertise from outside your business to ensure your plans are founded on solid data and expert insight that it may not make sense for you to acquire yourself, whether that’s through study or a full time hire.
Consultants can offer this topical treatment: delivering exactly what you need, when you need it, but you need to be careful with how you use them. You need clear aims in mind, otherwise it’s hard to get value for money. Consultants can deliver big returns on your investment with them and protect you from mistakes you wouldn’t otherwise see coming, but they can also be a way to spend a lot of money quickly if they’re not used wisely.
With that in mind, we’re taking a look at some of the different types of consultants on offer and times you might use them, so you can make a more informed decision.
High Level Changes
One of the times it’s most useful to bring in consultants is when you’re making high level changes to your business: reviewing your strategy, making efficiency savings, restructuring and so on. Decisions like this can be difficult for someone who’s built the business from the ground up. A founder is often too close to the issues to see them clearly. They also need expertise in financial forecasting and market prediction that it would be foolish for many business owners to pretend to.
Talking with one of the management consulting firms London hosts in its business districts can be a real boon if you’re looking at reviewing your own business strategy, for example, as they’ll have deeper insights into how to measure the performance of your strategy to date, and how any new one is likely to perform in the medium to long term.
Gathering Research
If you’re planning a project like a new sale, launching a new product or opening a new store, then it’s well worth working with consultants to gather research that’ll help you ensure your investment pays off. Market research consultants can survey customers and interpret the data for you to ensure you’re making choices that they’ll reward by spending money with you. Competitive intelligence firms, meanwhile, can help you understand what your competitors are likely doing, to help you find the white space in the market (and on the calendar) where your projects can really shine.
