Home

If you’re new to business, you may well have heard about management consultants, yet you perhaps don’t have the full understanding on their job role. A management consultant is there to improve the business, and help a company grow, and it’s fair to say that not many small businesses will benefit from a management consultant, and it can take some time to be in the position where one is needed.

Tasks can range form carrying out research, reviewing competitor’s performance, interviewing employees, preparing presentations and taking a leading role in terms of sales. It the job of a consultant to step in and look at the areas that need improving, and then help take the business to the next level, so there is an element of pressure on a consultant’s shoulders.

A management consultant will require a good level of leadership and it’s a role that requires the backing and the respect of the employees, so it can also be very much seen as a ‘people role’.

Most consultants will be all to willing to claim that they know best, that in comparison to their competitors, they are best situated to help you to improve your business and help it evolve to the next level. It is important that you don’t buy this immediately, but there aren’t really many ways in which you can find out immediately whether or not this is the case. The best way is to review the work that they are doing, either using another consultancy firm, or looking for free resources over the internet which are able to define the good work and the bad. With this in mind, one way of avoiding bad consultancy firms is to determine how transparent their services are: If they are very transparent, then you can more easily judge their work, which begs the question, if they aren’t transparent, what are they hiding? Transparency is one of the only ways through which you can determine, either by yourself or through other resources, whether or not the work that they are doing is suitable for your needs, and in a worse situation, whether or not they are even doing the work that you’re paying for.

Consulting can be a tricky business. The entire model is based upon supplying businesses with expertise which they are lacking by themselves. Understandably, this can result in some rather negative responses by your clients, either because having somebody who isn’t as invested in the business as they are in a position of power makes them uncomfortable, or because they are unsure that the advice that you’re providing is accurate, or worth the money they are spending on you. The first is something which you’ll just have to reverse over time, but the latter can be more difficult to deal with. For instance, although clients are coming to you for advice, they will regularly overrun or ignore your advice and ask you to do something that they consider to be important. In this situation, it is important to remember that your job as a consultant, it is your job to do what’s best for your client, if that means arguing with them about something ill-advised, then that’s what you should do.