Planning

What’s that saying? If you fail to plan, you plan to fail? Well, it’s true. If you don’t plan ahead, you’ll make reactive decisions, not strategic decisions. You’ll be blindsided by competitors, customers and even your own employees. By putting together strategic, business, possibility and human resources plans and buying insurance, you can help keep your small business on track.

Credit

A few years ago, a company hired me to improve their sales. They’d grown sales by a large amount in the previous year and they wanted me to build on that success. However, when I examined their numbers, I discovered that their accounts receivable has tripled and the average collection period was more than a year. In other words, the company’s growth had been achieved by pretty much giving away their product, since they hadn’t bothered to invoice or enforce payment. Don’t let your clients use you as a free line of credit. Develop a credit policy, invoice regularly and follow up to enforce payment. Finance and credit are key.

Marketing

Your marketing should be about more than good will and brand name recognition. Strategic marketing serves to help you increase revenues, attract customers, retain profitable customers, and meet your targets. When you’re running a consulting business, you’re doing more than working at a job. You need to work hard at getting work, not just working.

Accounting

If you don’t keep track of where your money is, you’ve pretty much lost it. If you don’t know when bills are due to collect or to pay, when it’s time to respond to customers’ requests, or when to deliver projects, you’re bleeding money. Make sure you know how to set fees, read a balance sheet, figure out your cash flow and measure growth. If you don’t know the finance and numbers behind your consulting business, you’re giving your money away.

Selling

Do prospective clients ever invite you to long meetings, then never contact you again? If you’re doing more talking than interrogative in a sales meeting, you’re giving your services and income away. As a consultant, you should be asking questions, not giving answers until you’ve got a contract in place. Otherwise, your prospective clients may simply enjoy a free consulting session that remove the need to actually hire you.

The good news is that you don’t have to master all these skills. If you’re not good at accounting or marketing, outsource your work. Hire an administrative assistant or, if you have more complex and strategic needs, hire a consultant. By tapping the skills of subject matter experts, you may be in a better position to make money. Heck, that’s why people hire you, right?

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A short answer: A business strategy consultant helps business owners or organizational leaders with decision making in regards to their business strategy. We understand and can lead you through the processes that will help you determine who you are, where you want to go, how you will get there, and how you will measure success. Leaders make many decisions every day, but strategic planning decisions focus on where to allocate different resources (money, people, and time) to achieve the desired objective of the organization.

A management consultant/strategic planning facilitator can help you determine which specific strategic initiatives are going to get you what you want, and which ones are leading you away from what you want. We work with you and your team to figure out what those things are through market research, competitive analysis, scenario planning, and professional experience.

Even successful organizations will benefit from working with a facilitator, especially if they are working towards sustained growth, optimizing team performance, or developing board leaders.

Or, sometimes things can be going great for your business, but something unexpected happens. We worked with an organization regularly experiencing 10-20% growth year over year, but the economic climate changed and their growth became stagnant. They wanted to understand what was happening, plan for future scenarios, and develop an adaptive strategy to adjust to the current market.

Strategic planning is an ongoing process, and successful organizations will review their strategies on a regular basis. Working with outside consultants has other benefits as well, including:

• Getting your team on board and aligned on your strategy – this is key for later implementation.
• Setting strategic priorities and measurable goals so you know what success looks like for your organization and your team.
• Finding opportunities to differentiate you from your competitors to create a more valuable value proposition.
• Looking at your systems and processes to find improvements that will support future growth.
• Doing a cost/benefit analysis to determine the best opportunities for growth.
• Creating strategies to gain new market share or protect existing market share
• Help you figure out what to do next with organizational change and development.

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Starting an independent consulting practice is one of the best ways to turn your depth of knowledge and years of experience into a business. A consultant is an expert who advises others in a specific field or to fix specific problems. In an effort to improve results in their lives or businesses, people bring in one or more consultants to evaluate issues, provide solutions, and help to implement necessary changes.

Consulting differs from coaching, which is another way to help others with your expertise. Consulting is usually focused on business or groups as a client, although individuals sometimes seek consultants. Consultants assess an issue and prepare a solution with a focus on processes. In most cases, after an explanation and assistance in implementing the solution, the consultant’s work is done.

Coaching, on the other hand, is more often done one-on-one, focusing on building up a client’s personal strengths. Similar to counselling, a coach is usually involved regularly (i.e. weekly) over a period of time until the client has met their goals.

The Pros and Cons of Independent Consulting Work

Consultants exist in just about every industry. While income varies depending on the industry and how the consulting business is set up, Pay Scale reports that the median income of business consultants is $68,982 with a range from $44,473 to​​​ $109,488.

The advantages to consulting are many including:

• Flexibility to set your own schedule
• Ability to earn more with your experience, knowledge and low overhead than with a job
• Start-up time is quick and start-up capital requirement is low

Like most home business ideas, consulting has a few disadvantages as well, such as:

• The time it takes to build up and maintain a clientele
• Income that may be unsteady
• No office resources (IT or HR support, accountant, etc.)
• While you can turn any type of knowledge into a consulting business, here a few of the best industries to consider now.

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