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A business consultant operates as a specialist within almost every niche, specialty, market, region, and industry (on a global scale), and can work with a variety of enterprises.

Staying competitive in a complex and globalized ecosystem of enterprises, drawing on the expert aid, assistance, suggestions and expertise of outsourced, external advisors can help your business scale, reduce overhead, increase profit margins, and become more productive and efficient. Such professional business consultants can make you see the tree for the forest, by providing an objective position and expertise you can rely on.  These advantages can result from integrating and streamlining workflows and strategic projects in newl ways, and by implementing new solutions to solve common – and uncommon – business “pain points.”  A business consultant can help your business realize its full potential. A consultant is offering key insights and critical intel that can help a business, of any size, expat and scale, while reaching and fulfilling all its strategic, long-term goals. Below we are listing 8 different types of consulting services for businesses.

What is a business consultant ? 

Consultants are experts in their field, and think-tanks who work with companies as advisors. They ultimately assist a business with specific, critical and complex problems. It’s often integrated with optimizing the company’s workflows and projects, and offering insights on how to do things better. Initially, consultancy helps entrepreneurs, owners and management of companies with these general aspects of a business:

Business Management: Aiding management/executives with utilizing best-practices in optimizing how department directors, projects, personnel, and workflows are organized and managed.

Corporate Consultancy: Aiding a company with its internal workflow efficiency and productivity, among other things.

Consultants work within almost every industry, and can help with almost every task imaginable by augmenting internal personnel workflows. Consultancy is not limited to just corporate assistance within a company, but can include a consultancy firm helping a business with a very specific task like helping to optimize marketing and sales pipelines, among many other things.

Strategy Consulting (1)

One of the most critical forms of business consulting is strategy consulting, where a consultant acts as an advisor to a company in the sense of helping the organization to create and follow a long-term blueprint or strategic plan. Such a plan helps to establish the direction that the company will take, along with creating a map that defines the direction. This includes working with financial advisors to ensure that projects are financially manageable and profitable, and that all plans can feasibly be reached with the current resources and financial assets. Strategy consultants often work with a variety of C-suite executives, including the CEO, CFO, COO, and CIO, to ensure that all long-term goals, financial goals, operational projects, and IT infrastructure components align with the business vision.

Overall, strategy consultants work to not only establish the long-term company vision/goals, but also work to assist a company with ensuring that such goals are attainable, profitable, and competitive within the market.

Typically this market is owned by large firms that are considered pillars in the strategy consulting community (on a global level) including McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group, among many others.

Business Consulting (2)

A very common consultancy form. Business consultants are often confused with other forms of consulting, such as strategic consulting or management consulting. Business consulting is a form of corporate consulting where a specialist (typically one with many years of business experience) assists with optimizing internal workflow and the internal inner workings of the business as a whole, including:

Assessments and screening

A template for the screening of companies has been developed and being used by consultants as a checklist during the first meeting with the company owner. The template is designed as a 360-degree review of the company and includes questions relating to the financial situation of the company (assets, cash flow, state of operations, debt, creditors, etc.) and the main causes of the crisis or trouble.

There are several aspects of this exercise to discover discrepancies and malfunctions of:

Ownership, management and organisation (e.g. lack of managerial competencies, disagreement between owners, etc.)

Production, procurement and costs (e.g. quality, planning, facilities and equipment, etc.)

Administration and finance (e.g. expensive loans, financial losses from debtors, insufficient financial management, etc.)

Strategy, sales and marketing (e.g. market developments, insufficient marketing, lack of strategic focus, etc.)

Moreover, the business consultant will analyse the personal situation and personal relations of the company owner. Some of the main distress signals in that regard are:

The company has stress symptoms, is depressed or ill

The company owner does not assume responsibility for the situation

Stressful relations with key stakeholders (bank, accountant, board members).

Hierarchy

The manner in which a business operates includes the management & executive hierarchy. Optimizing and tweaking the business hierarchy can help to effectively streamline how teams work, which can positively alter how the business operates.

Structure

The business structure of a company can be optimized so that every team is working at full capacity. A business consultant may use industry data, statistics, and experience to suggest the best structure for a business to adopt.

Organizational development

Like the business structure, a business consultant may help the company to optimize its organization, which includes both macro-level organizational factors (e.g. the C-suite executive/management structure and standard duties) and micro-level organizational factors (e.g. how different teams within specific departments are organized, and how teams carry out workflows within the business ecosystem).

Teams and workloads

 A business consultant may suggest to change the structure of the teams within a department. Their job might include assisting with altering how teams operate within a business for further efficiency.

Workflows/Operations

A business consultant often acts in an overlapping manner when compared with an operations consultant and/or a business analyst. Such a consultant may help an enterprise with streamlining operations, workflows, projects, and other business tasks whose optimization can increase the bottom line of a business.

Business environment

A business consultant may help a business to draft a code of ethics, or may help an enterprise deal with intra- or inter-departmental issues associated with the workplace environment.

Tools and systems

 There might be certain corporate tools and systems to be deployed at the company to improve efficiency and provide a solid foundation of data-driven decision for the business leaders.

And of course many more.

Financial Consulting (3)

One of the most well known forms of consultancy is financial consultancy. A financial consultant often works with a company’s CFO and/or a strategic consultant (or internal business strategist) to help the business align its financial goals (e.g. profit margins, overhead, spending habits, ROI, etc.) with short-term goals, and strategic long-term goals.

Additionally, a financial consultant analyzes an enterprise’s entire position and portfolio soa company can determine how feasible requisite projects are, and whether opportunity costs can or should be considered. There are a myriad of other tasks that a financial consultant may help a business with, including investment strategies, taxes, insurance, strategies for saving money, scaling into other markets, including profit margins, and lowering customer acquisition costs.

Information Technology Consulting (4)

IT consultants include a vast array of experts that work within many different areas, all of which may help a business better leverage their IT infrastructure. Typically, there a two kinds of IT consulants:

Change: These consultants are concerned with IT change management, and work with changing the IT systems of a business for the sake of bettering their capacities. This includes upgrading to cloud systems, migrating data, replacing legacy systems. It might include bringing in advantaged technological systems like AI, Blockchain technology or Big Data analytics engines, and more.

Maintenance: Other IT consultants are, broadly speaking, not associated with changing the IT infrastructure of the business per se, but are usually hired to optimize existing systems in some way. This includes software engineers to do a specific coding project, security testers meant to ensure that a company’s systems cannot be hacked. Technicians hired to carry out a tricky or complex fix on IT components.

Management Consulting (5)

Management consulting includes a robust set of practices. The purpose is to optimize how senior personnel manage teams, projects, and departments on a day-to-day basis. This is a very important subset of consultancy work as it deals with how the company runs from the top-down. Management consultants are usually former senior executives with years of management experience. They often work with internal business strategists to help set up a comprehensive blueprint that defines long-term management goals.

Additionally, management consultants often use robust management consulting frameworks and case studies to help managers be more aware of industry best-practices and the most effective management methodologies.

Management consultancy frameworks contains several factors that can influence how management directs the company. The framework includes benchmark comparisons with competition, market entry feasibility, optimizing game organizational structures, IT component ROI, personnel team restructuring, asset management, and opportunity costs, among other factors.

The end-goal of management consultancy is to optimize the management methodologies in use. That should result that he business operates in a better and more efficient manner.

Sales Consulting (6)

Sales consultants are important external supporters of the sales procedures. They can help a business optimize a company’s internal sales pipelines. They can present to a company new ways for optimizing the entire sales/marketing system that converts more leads into customers. While working with the Chief Sales/Marketing Officer and strategic business analysts, sales consultants can offer a unique outside view on implementing sales funnel charts. Sales consultant can help increasing conversion rates, lowering churn rates, increasing customer loyalty, lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC), all with minimal overhead.

Sales consultants can also operate as more in-depth experts on specific issues, such as offering insights on how a company merge can increase sales, or helping an enterprise to forecast sales when moving into a new region or market.

Marketing Consulting (7)

Like sales consultants, marketing consultants are effective thought-leaders and marketing experts.

They are the experts who can help a business radically revolutionize their marketing pipeline tools and systems, including:

Implementing a strategic marketing plan for long-term goals (aligned to sales forecasts).

Creating a Content marketing plan, and helping to implement it.

Helping to create plans for decreasing churn rates and increasing conversion rates, which often includes designing a system for increasing qualified leads and reducing the number of unqualified leads.

Alignment of all marketing goals with a robust marketing funnel scheme.

Creating and implementing an Inbound Marketing Scheme.

Creating an online marketing strategy for the company to attract online customers, using digital technologies. They can advice how to generate marketing value on social media platforms to target these customers, and how to make an ideal marketing mix.

Senior marketing experts – who are often marketing consultants – can help a company discover novel opportunities for more advantageous marketing processes, such as identifying a new demographic or creating a buyer persona plan associated with marketing regions.

Brand and PR Consulting (8)

The Brand of a company represents the public-face and overall representation of the enterprise. This includes everything from its Public-Relations (PR) department, to the design, logo, and visual imagery of the company. Essentially, the brand of the business is every symbolic representation of the company. Optimizing the brand of a company is just as important as optimizing marketing and sales processes and workflows. A brand consultant can help a business discover new ways for presenting the company’s assets to the public. This can include utilizing specific PR best-practices to ensure that the public view of the company is at its best.

PR consultants are related to Brand consultants in that they assist with creating a better public-image of the company. However, PR consultants focus entirely on PR work (that is, communicating business information to the public), and not on the overarching brand of the company.

A PR consultant may help a business with:

Acting as a liaison between the business and the public for general or specific purposes.

Disseminating specific business information to the public, including company policies, goals, and announcements associated with disputes.

Creating promotional materials and working with company social media/marketing teams.

Help PR managers optimize the company’s foothold among its demographics and sales regions.

Function and Industry Specific Consulting 

Usually there are two groups of consultant you can identify: 

Function-specific consultants: purpose-based consultants who work to solve a particular problem irrespective of the industry. Function-specific consultants are a sub-type of general consultancy who operate in a variety of different fields. They focus on aiding a company with a particular purpose. Function-specific consultants are usually problem solvers working as external experts for a company. Their sole purpose of solving an overarching company issue that might span several departments and/or niches.

Industry-specific consultants: area-based consultants who are usually tethered to a department or industry. Industry-specific consultancy is associated with many different types of practices within the consulting ecosystem.

A Functional Expertise For Every Field

Consulting firms and consultancy experts offer companies a unique “think-tank” asset that allows an enterprise to leverage their experience. Such business consultant experts operate in every field, and can help with virtually every problem. Is a manager is not able to tackle an issue with the internal staff  you can involve an external consultant. Instead of hiring a salaried specialist long-term, it is often more cost-effective to hire a temporary consultant. His knowledge and training  can help solve your company’s pain points, and to offer novel solutions for growth and scale.

The critical aspect about consultancy firms is that the many different forms of existing experts available in every field. You can have access to these resources, regardless of the issue you are facing.

Adressable issues

It could be a legal, IT, HR, financial, operations, sales, marketing, security, or corporate issues, there is a consultant to meet your needs:

Legal issues: A legal consultant can help your company follow all legal regulations.

IT issues: An IT consultant can help to fix your IT infrastructure and/or upgrade your IT systems.

HR issues: An HR consultant can ensure creating a framework of  transparent and honest employee communication with the management. Also they help creating an attractive working environment for the prospective employees.

Financial issues: A financial consultant can help your business spend less and attain more over the long-term.

Operations issues: An operations consultant can help your business optimize all daily, short-term, and long-term operations.

Sales issues: A sales consultant can help your business upgrade your sales pipeline.

Marketing issues: A marketing consultant can help your business reduce churn rates and increase qualified marketing leads.

Digital issues: He is like an external Chief Digital Officer by helping to bring  the company to the digital age.

Security issues: An IT security consultant can test your systems to ensure that hackers cannot successfully breach your systems.

Corporate issues: A corporate consultant can optimize the business structure, hierarchy,  so you can reach all pertinent long-term goals.

Find your way to your matching business consultant

Every type of consultancy practice that exists leads to specific services or skills that your company may be looking for. This will allow enterprises to hire a consultant when needed to solve their specific problems in the most effective way.  Depending on the company size they could add a single function-specific consultant or an industry-specific consultant. At enterprise level you contract with a large consulting firm providing all the experts for each field required. 

Before becoming a coach and consulting specialist for the IT sales field,  I’ve spent 23 years in IT, power management and datacenter business. This my industry specific consultancy field: sales, marketing and corporate issues. I gained experience in channel management and business development. I’m at your service for strategy and business consulting,  sales and marketing consulting. I’ve understood that many of my customers not only need personal business or career coaching, or guidance on assertive communication or personal branding but also consulting on the major business challanges that goes beyond  all of these.

You only need to contact me for help.