You may have often wondered, why do businesses hire consultants in the first place? Why don’t they just solve their own problems and work things out for themselves?
It can seem puzzling to the untrained eye, but read on and you’ll see not only why businesses hire consultants, but why they need them. You can use this information to either decide whether a business consultant is right for you, or even if you would like to become one.
An outside eye.
Business consultants have the advantage of looking in from the outside. They don’t necessarily have a vested interest in the firm, making them valuable at looking in on the company and pointing out any potential flaws in the setup. This is very much like how you turn to your friends and family for advice on relationship issues. You ask them for their opinion as an outsider, and this is what businesses are doing with consultants. They’re asking them for their advice as someone who doesn’t have any reason to be pleasant with what they say. The client may be so close to the problem that they can’t fully see how to solve it, and this is where a consultant would come in. A consultant would prompt their client of the obvious so to speak. It may seem obvious from the outside, whereas on the inside it’s hidden in plain sight.
Businesses aren’t just asking for any opinion, however. They’re asking for the opinion of someone who has worked with many companies and has likely come across this issue before. Someone who has encountered the same problem with another business and knows how to get around it. It’s valuable advice that sitting around a table full of insiders can’t always reach themselves. Consultants are providing a perspective based on what they’ve already seen works, and they know it can work again. It’s all about injecting something new and fresh into the company. Consultants like Dan Giuglianotti provide a fantastic insight to businesses, due to their previous experience for working on not only their own businesses but others too.
Extra horsepower.
Sometimes a business will find themselves facing a problem, but not having the manpower to deal with it. This is again where consultants come into the fold. They provide additional manpower to the business – manpower that is specifically focused on solving the issues at hand. When facing a problem, a company still has to focus on its day-to-day tasks and keep their existing teams doing what they usually do best. This opens up the market to business consultants because they can be hired in primarily to focus on the problems that small and big businesses alike face.
Many problems are a one-off project, meaning that hiring new staff just for this one project doesn’t make much sense in a financial capacity. Consultants can often provide a team of people to carry out the work necessary while being cost effective. Experts in this instance will serve as highly effective, temporary, employees of the business – expressly engaged in targeting the problems at hand. As temporary employees of the company, it is often cheaper to hire consultants than it is permanent employees. Consultants switch around companies frequently, meaning they’re used to picking up the grind quickly and know how to integrate into new teams of people rapidly and efficiently – making them, even more, cost effective. And finally, by hiring a consultant, companies can keep their regular staff doing the jobs they were actually hired to do in the first place.
Specialized skills.
Perhaps one of the most common reasons a company may choose to hire a consultant is so that they can tap into a particular, specialized, skill-set that they may not possess in-house. Specialist firms offer expertise and skills that range from design to finances, making them cost effective as well as perfect for the job. It would be more expensive to hire these people separately as opposed to a package of access to a consultancy firm who have these people ready and waiting to work for your business.
This can again be likened to your family. Your family may be able to give you advice on an individual issue, but when it comes to another issue (such as relationships), you will hire that help out to a friend. You wouldn’t be inviting your friend to join your family on a full-time basis, but would be specifically engaging them to help you with your dilemma at that point.
A safe zone.
Consultants are perfect for doing your dirty work. A business doesn’t want to get caught up in the emotions and politics of a controversial project. So instead, they hire out consultancy firms to cast an eye over proceedings and to thus do the dirty work for them. Consultants provide an unbiased perspective to a project, and allow a business to continue what they would usually do while they deal with the particular project they have been hired to do.
Consultants can be nominated for a whole range of controversial projects. Your business could use a consultant to carry out a restructuring of the company. You can trust a consultant to be both experienced in the particular task, as well as removed enough actually to carry it out. For example, in “Up in the Air” George Clooney was engaged to go around the country and sack employees on behalf of his clients. He did this because he was experienced enough to do it as well as removed enough to actually carry out the heartless terminations. This is what consultancy firms are particularly useful at doing, carrying out the dirty work so that you don’t have to.
As you can see, business consultants are particularly useful at providing a unique and specialized skill set to their employers. They’re also helpful for carrying out dirty work on behalf of the companies they represent. So, whether you wish to become a business consultant or want to hire one, this is why companies need them.
