Are Business Consultants SinkingYour Business?

Hiring a business consultant can be essential to solving complex business problems. But if you’re not careful about how you make the decision, you can end up worse off than ever.

There comes a time at which every business leader needs assistance.

While building a teriffic in-house team is essential, there’s nothing like recieving a little help from outside your companyto find the best solution to a particularly tricky problem. It’s the desire for this kind of thinking that has turned consulting into a multi-trillion dollar industry.

There’s no doubt that finding the right consultant can make the difference between whether or not a company sinks or swims. Unfortunately, far too many consultants harm the companies they’re being paid a whole lot of money to serve.

If you’re thinking of hiring a consultant or currently working with one, keep an these possible issues in mind.

1. Substituting Perception for Reality

If your consultant traffics heavily in high-level theories and complex concepts, it might be worth your while to raise an eyebrow. There are times when the answer to a business problem is complicated, but that’s the exception to the rule.Consulting firms that make a habit of regularly delivering presentation decks filled with convoluted messages and obscure analyses are often masking the reality of what they’re able to deliver.

2. Sidestepping Tactics

Often a consultant will present a seemingly impressive solution backed up with mountains of charts, figures, and statistics. But when their clients attempt to implement what they’ve received, they find there really isn’t much there in the way of actionable steps to take. The truth is that many consultants are experts at burying an absence of real tactical advice under many layers of fancy-sounding fluff. Be sure to ask the necessary questions to determine whether a consultant is effective at solving the problems you need help with — or if they’re just good at talking about them.

3. Putting Their Brand Before Yours

Many times, a consulting firm will spend a lot of marketing dollars on making its own brand famous, which is often represented by a trademarked report, paper, or analysis that only it does. One way to determine whether a consulting firm will give you advice that can actually drive solutions is to ask yourself if it seems to be pushing a information product tailored to impress investors or one designed to help your business get to where it needs to go.

4. Relying on The “Tried-and-True”

A company brings on a consulting powerhouse to help it figure out how to adapt to the new reality of marketing in the digital era. The solution the firm comes up involves a high tech presentation and even higher tech case studies. But when it comes to the true substance of the steps they recommend, it may as well be 1992. Before accepting at face value what a consultant says you should do, conduct at least a little bit of your own research to make sure they aren’t just rehashing old ideas with a new cover page.

5. They Present Themselves as Experts … on Everything”

The bigger a consulting firm gets, the more companies, industries, and types of advice they begin to give out (and charge for). Just because a consulting firm made its name giving one kind of advice doesn’t mean they’re equally adept at dealing with every business problem. Before hiring a consultant based on size and reputation, make sure the group you’re considering has had successes in eliminating the specific pain points you’re struggling with.

You’ll find scores of business consultants, both big and small, specializing in just the concerns your dealing with. Most work on a “Per Gig” basis. Visit us. You’ll have more options than time to interview them.* VISIT US NOW

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