Feeling Stuck?

Maybe you Should Hire a consultant

Company workers, colleagues talking discussing corporate business strategy, financial reports and statistics, suggesting problem solution. Concept of teamwork, cooperation, coworking — Image by @yanalya – Freepix.com

Have you looked at your progress recently? On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your results? If your number is under 8, you could benefit from working with a consultant.

Consultants help you to turn your vision of success into reality. They can help repave your bumpy roads, or they’ll shine a light on new opportunities you may not yet have considered. If you are looking to make a significant change in your organization or personal life, consider these three ways a consultant could help you.

Objective Perspective

Consultants don’t have a horse in the race. Therefore, they can consider solutions you may not have thought of before. A consultant can provide unbiased advice, or play devil’s advocate as you consider your options and opportunities. This will help you to work through potential pitfalls and reveal solutions you hadn’t thought of.

Here is an example of how a solopreneur, Marguerite, benefited from working with a consultant – Marguerite has a photography business. She does commercial shoots on weekdays and to make ends meet she does wedding photography on weekends. However, Marguerite is tired of having to split her time between these two industries. She would rather focus on just one and be excellent at that.

Working alone, when she isn’t on a shoot, she is busy with accounting, marketing, and sales calls. As a result, she often works six days a week, and sometimes seven. Ten hours a day is the norm. Marguerite did not go into business for herself to work so hard. In fact, she believed that having her own business would give her more freedom. Something has to change.

Meeting with Marguerite, it became evident how she could free up some time, and increase her revenue. By working with a couple of virtual assistants to do the mundane tasks her business required, such as sending and following up on invoices, routine maintenance on her website, and confirming appointments with clients, Marguerite was able to free up three days a week and increase her bookings.

As she got busier, she raised her rates. Soon, she was more than covering the expense of hiring the two virtual assistants, VAs. Her time was sold out months in advance. She even received commissions for out-of-town work that allowed her to vacation at minimal expense.

While Marguerite initially believed that hiring VAs was an expense she could not afford, in reality, they were assets that she could not live without.

As a solopreneur, Marguerite was too close to the situation to see the solution clearly. The consultant’s ability to provide new context and an objective perspective made a world of difference.

Subject Matter Expertise

A consultant with subject matter expertise could help a company in a variety of ways, be it in one-on-one discussions, presenting advice to top managers and executives, or facilitating group training programs. Using a consultant with expertise in an area of weakness can be a shortcut to upskilling members of an organization.

The Acme Export Company has offices in India, Japan, and the US. They were working on a project to export tea and coffee from India to their other regions. However, things were not going well. At first, the Indian staff seemed enthusiastic about the project and agreed with the ideas their Japanese and US counterparts put forth. Yet, as the project moved forward over weeks and months, the Indians arrived late to meetings or did not show up at all. This left their international counterparts believing the Indians were no longer interested in the project. Acme was considering canceling the project. But before they did that, they decided to meet with a cultural awareness consultant.

The consultant met with all parties involved individually, as country-specific groups, and then engaging the entire international team. Through these discovery sessions, the consultant discovered the Indian team believed the project was going along fine, so missing meetings was not a big deal. When they realized that the other teams considered attendance and involvement a sign of respect and dedication to the project, they adjusted their behaviors, making sure to attend all future meetings. The project ended up being a huge success, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in sales.

From this example, it is evident that understanding the cultural differences and helping to bridge those gaps by utilizing a consultant with a deep knowledge of cultural complexities saved the project and mended the relationships between coworkers across the seas.

Enhanced Decision Making

Consultants help organizations make better decisions by providing data, external knowledge, and strategic frameworks that help companies and individuals within them build more solid strategies for solving problems. They can bring new methodologies outside the norms of how things are currently done. This provides a broader view and the ability to analyze risk and reward in a whole new light. Here is an example of how reinventing processes made a huge difference.

Xtreme Logistics was having difficulty projecting truck maintenance expenses. This was costing the company tens of thousands of dollars every month in unexpected repairs. Every day before getting their routes and heading out for the day, drivers completed a vehicle inspection report and dropped it off in a tray near dispatch. From there, the forms went to a data entry person who input the information for their respective yard. The problem was that, on any given day, an average of 15% of the data from the inspection reports did not make it into the system. Sometimes it was human error. Occasionally, the driver did not turn in the forms. And there were even times when the forms were misplaced. In an ideal world, the reports would be dropped off and input into the system every day, making it easy to understand trends of vehicle wear and tear.

A business efficiency consultant recommended the company swap out their paper-based inspection process for a digital one. He helped them build custom apps that would send the data from the drivers’ tablets to HQ as soon as the drivers hit the submit button. This gave decision-makers more insight into their fleet and allowed Xtreme to schedule maintenance proactively before major repairs were needed. The result was that the company saved almost a hundred thousand dollars in unexpected costs related to their fleet of trucks in the first year of using the vehicle inspection app, and they developed even more apps transforming their paper-based workflows into digital ones. Costs were down, accuracy and productivity were up. It was a triple win.

In all these cases, from the solopreneur to national and international corporations, consultants play a vital role in aiding companies and individuals to make sound decisions. This helps bring new opportunities to light, enhances efficiency, and positively impacts the bottom line. If you think you need a new perspective on your old problems, a consultant could be your solution.

If you are interested in exploring working with a consultant, fill out our consultation form, and let’s schedule a call.