Solid Thinking

A lot of businesses engage business consultants to improve their performance, including online marketing consultants, general marketing consultants, HR, general business consultants, etc. Yet many fail to get the best value from the business consultancy and view this as a costly exercise instead of an investment. Why?

Take a look at these valuable tips you need to follow to ensure your business consultants can do their best for your business.

1. Communicate and work with them

Business consultants are like housemaids that you hire for your mansion: if you do not tell them which rooms need particular cleanup and how to operate the vacuum cleaner, chances are they’ll do something you don’t like and your house won’t be clean. Never make yourself too busy to talk to your consultants!

2. Be Transparent: Honesty is the best policy

Do not lie to your consultants. Let them understand fully your business practice. Consultants need to treat your business as their own business to understand the intricacies, identify pitfalls, and secure opportunities for you. Consultants are there to give you guidance on getting your business to the right direction: would they be able to do this while blindfolded? Give them as much data they need to analyze their progress and the effects of the consultancy to your business. If they can’t see themselves doing good/bad to your business, how can they improve the value they are delivering to you? Do not worry about business secrecy as consultants should honour you and can operate in a non-disclosure mode if requested.

3. Set Realistic Goals and Milestones

For consultancy to achieve results, first you need to determine what “good results” are. Set specific goals (desired outcomes) of the consultancy, and program achievable milestones which define “good progress” (Key Performance Indicators - KPIs). Get your consultants to report regularly on the progress, and enable analysis on what is successful to gain good learnings, and what is unsuccessful to identify non-productive campaigns/activities and avoid them in the future.

4. Measure! Measure! Measure!

Measure your progress. Use Analytics, measurement systems,  and periodic reporting/data audits. Without measurements, you would be rowing a dinghy in the middle of the sea in the dark of the night: you would move forward but you would not know how fast and in what direction! By the time you realize, you may well be tired to death and have been going in circles!

5. Need Them!

Never assume you don’t need your contracted consultants. If you believe someone within your business can now do what your consultant does, you can tell your consultant and get them to work on something else to improve your business further, or just stop your consultancy and reduce your business cost.

6. CONSULT!

Consultants are there to hear what you think and offer you what they think is the best practice. They are also there to tell you if you are doing well or if you are killing your own business, but how would they know this if they could not know what you are currently doing? Do not be afraid to talk to them, ask questions, share your thoughts and sought for advice. Even if your thoughts/plans look trivial and sounds like a guaranteed success, spending 5 minute to confirm this with your consultant can avoid a nasty cost blowout and risk of failure.

Spend 5 minutes with your consultant today and avoid 5-month loss of revenue later!