What do consulting services do?
When You Don’t Have A Strategy
Companies that go into their business without a strategy will most likely have issues with scaling, marketing, and remaining competitive. A strategy is a long-term plan – a blueprint – that helps establish the direction that a company wants to ultimately take to stay within its business model and meet its overarching goals. To get there, Strategy consultants and corporate consultants can help a business chart projects, workflows, and steps that are needed to get to the destination. Without such a map, a company may remain stagnant or unable to scale.
Say a new company that sells computer hardware parts and who aspires to being an industry leader in a particular region may not have the expertise to expand and reach new regions, customers, or demographics. Without a strategy, the company has no real way of setting a system in place for getting to the destination of being an industry leader. A strategic consultant can be brought in to use their expertise to draft up a blueprint that can help the company reach its overarching goals, while providing management with the know-how for tactically planning and producing the requisite long-term projects that can help the enterprise get to the ultimate, planned destination.
What Does A Consultancy Service Do?
Consulting services carry out a variety of important tasks that can help a business have a more objective, data-driven perspective on how to tactically carry out projects, strategize their long-term projects, and leverage resources most effectively. In order to do this, consulting firms conduct certain industry-standard processes that can help an enterprise of any size reach their goals.
1. Conduct Industry Research
One of the most important tasks of a consulting firm is to carry out professional, industry research on specific aspects associated with a company’s business model, including competition (benchmarking) – which may include the products, prices and strategies of industry competitors – along with consumer trends, market trends, and even new regulations. Such aspects have a direct impact on how a business operates, and how well a business may do in an industry or region. Such critical market research helps businesses or companies stay current with the latest and most critical industry trends.
2. Analyze The SWOT
The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a Management consulting framework that is used by management consultants and corporate consultants to help a business identify critical aspects that can help the business improve.
Part of a consulting firm’s responsibility is to analyze the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a client company and ensure that their current business practices and plans are optimized for success and scalability.
3. Identify The Issues And Challenges
Every business has challenges and pain points that need to be solved. This requires research and analyzing the market to pinpoint weaknesses in a company – what isn’t working – and how to transform such weaknesses into strengths.
4. Come Up With Solutions
Finding the lowest-cost solution and implementing solutions in the most effective manner possible is part of the job of a consulting firm. Consultants will present to a company a thorough analysis of the company’s issues and how to solve them in the most feasible way possible. Sometimes consulting firms come up with completely novel approaches and solutions to companies’ pressing problems or challenges, giving enterprises a unique way of dealing with common as well as uncommon problems.
Assess Pros And Cons
The SWOT framework above is a detailed way of carefully determining what is working within a company, and what isn’t working. A consultancy firm will come in and determine how to make things better within a company, which includes assessing the pros and cons of the company’s structure, projects, workflows, and workplace culture.
Develop New Processes
One of the jobs of a consultant is to find novel ways to solve old problems. This may include developing new and novel workflows and/or suggesting the use of completely new systems, such as IT applications or even project management methodologies. For instance, in a company that has too many issues within departmental silos, a consultant may suggest integrating pipelines within projects to create a more cohesive, streamlined, and problem-free working environment, which also increases its efficiency.
Develop Training Procedures
If necessary, consultants may develop training materials and/or implement training programs to help personnel work with novel methodologies and/or new systems. This can include working with new software or hardware systems or utilizing new workplace methodologies (i.e. DevOps or a Secure-Software development life cycle) for optimizing daily efficiency.
5. Implement The Agreed Solution
Oftentimes, consultants will go beyond simply giving advice or suggestions on what to do, and will undertake (or assist with) the actual tasks associated with implementing the new system or methodology (including training). This is important, as consultants are not just business theoreticians, but are experts who have real-world, hands-on experience with their specific corporate niche. They can offer tips and solutions, and then help to implement them.
For instance, a marketing consultancy firm can suggest to a growing e-commerce based enterprise that they should adopt a marketing strategy aligned to the use of SEO on their web assets. The consultancy firm can then help to implement the SEO-based system on the web asset and can help draft a marketing strategy based on viewing the company’s pertinent corporate profile/information and portfolio.
6. Reconcile and Present Information Through Reports
A consulting agency will reach their conclusions and/or implement the chosen solution by preparing a variety of visual, at-a-glance reports, presentations, and graphs to keep company management fully briefed of what is happening, the timeframe and budget associated with their implementation plans, and all other pertinent information. It is the job of the consulting firm to prepare and design beautiful and informative presentations and reports to communicate with company executives in an easy to understand format.
7. Make Recommendations For Improvement
Consulting agencies and firms are proficient at knowing how a company can improve, which includes:
- Optimizing workflows
- Increasing company productivity and efficiency (e.g. by utilizing business messaging apps to increase and optimize intra-departmental communication)
- Making project management more efficient
- Utilizing IT systems in a more effective manner
- Maximizing ROI on all required business systems
- Reaching more demographics via marketing, sales, and brand consulting processes
- Reducing overhead
- Improving profit margins
- Using more effective financial analysis tools
- Creating better long-term strategies for scalability
- And more…
Consulting agencies are key to identifying how to make a good business transform into a great business or enterprise.
Consulting Is Not Just About Providing Information
Ultimately, a consultancy agency or firm is one of the most critical partnerships that a company can form in this globalized age. Consultancy is more than just providing information or giving advice. Though the process begins there, it ends with a company receiving a systemic set of directives and principles that can result in a business going from point A to point B. In other words, consulting is a way to improve, optimize, increase, and better the business by utilizing the expertise and knowledge of an outside expert that knows how to carry out certain tasks in a better way. Consulting workflows contain a lot of valuable input, expertise, and assistance that a business can gain, which can help it thrive and grow.
A Consulting Firm is Useless if They Can Not Communicate Effectively
A consulting firm may have decades of experience within your field and they may offer a comprehensive set of consulting services, but if it appears like their communication skills are average at best, you might want to look elsewhere. The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is one of the most important factors that determines whether a consulting firm is a good fit for your organization. A consulting firm that puts effort into its ability to communicate is more likely to be trustworthy and reliable, and will be more capable of helping your company meet its business goals.
