Is It Worth Spending Money on Consultants?
When you’re running a business, most days come down to decisions about if and how you’re going to spend your money. Unless you’re a titan like Google or Amazon, money is a limited, precious resource. If you’re committing to a spend you need to think and research carefully to ensure you’ll get some bankable benefit, or you’ve wasted important resources (potentially to the point of doing lasting harm to your future chances of success!), so today we’re taking a look at one of the big potential spends for a business: consultants.
When you read the word, you might be imagining a stereotypical management consultant: a suited freelancer, commanding huge fees intended only for the biggest businesses. In fact business consultants exist for every specialist niche, and may be able to deliver valuable insights even to small businesses that could secure them a healthy return on the consultant’s fee. Today we’re taking a look at some of the options that are available and asking if they’re worth your money.
Strategy Consultants
It’s important, especially as a new business, to have a strategy: a vision for the future that can guide your day to day decisions. If you don’t, you risk pulling your business apart with a multitude of decisions that make sense in isolation but don’t work together to reinforce each other or create a coherent brand.
Strategy consultants can help you develop your idea of what success looks like, and come with a plan that even the smallest of decisions can play into. This could be an extremely worthwhile investment for your business, if you don’t already have a clear strategy for the future. If you’re interested in strategy consultancy London is the place to look: there are agencies and individuals there to fit most businesses.
Operations Consultants
If you’re trying to grow your business, then it’s worth making an effort (and spending some money) to ensure you’re running the most efficient operation possible – scaling inefficient processes can lead to huge costs in the long run. Operations consultants look at the ops side of your business: the nitty gritty of the processes that drive each department, from manufacturing to sales, and find both inefficiencies and opportunities.
It’s all too easy for bad processes to become embedded, just ‘the way things are done’. Bringing in an external consultant can be a breath of fresh air that helps you find new solutions, and better savings.
IT Consultants
IT consultants can help you if you want to find or install new IT systems, as a stop gap if you don’t have or can’t support permanent IT hires, or to educate your in-house IT team about new technology or processes.
Make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how much you’re prepared to pay to achieve it. IT consulting is one area where it’s easy for costs to balloon, with no certainty of an improved outcome.