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Running a business is hard work. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or building your first blog! The process is stressful, time-consuming, and rife with uncertainty. Furthermore, with 45% of start-ups ceasing to exist within 5 years, the potential for failure is always lingering in the background too.
Know the struggle?
Well, you might want to consider hiring a business consultant for help. Experts at their craft, they can fill any gaps in your current understanding of business operations, guide you through complex or novel situations, and steer you in the right direction to achieve that all-important growth.
Today, we’re going to dive into this topic to provide a comprehensive overview of when and how these individuals make a difference. Keep reading to discover whether or not you should hire a business consultant in 2022.
Table of Contents
What Is a Business Consultant?
Everything You Need to Know about Small Business Consultants
A business consultant is a third-party expert that you’d hire on a temporary basis for help with an array of different matters. This might include advice on a specific challenge or situation, or to evaluate your current operational approach.
Unlike an ordinary employee, a consultant is their own boss and works to their own schedule. That means they don’t go on your payroll! You only hire them for the specific services you need at any given time.
What Does a Consultant Do?
Let’s forget about business for a second and think about consultant doctors at the hospital instead. Your GP refers you to these guys and girls whenever there’s an issue they can’t confidently diagnose or treat, right?
Make sense too! As specialists in the area of medicine that you need support with, the consultant should know exactly how to help. Your issue gets resolved faster and with fewer hiccups along the way. It’s a similar story when it comes to business consultants. You have a problem; they have specialist skills and insights.
For instance, imagine that you’re struggling to adjust to the latest Pinterest algorithm update. Despite reading up on the subject, altering your strategy, and experimenting with new tactics, nothing you publish is gaining any traction.
Rather than banging your head against a brick wall, you could pay a Pinterest business consultant to assess your approach! Calling upon their deep understanding of all things Pinterest-related, they’d be able to recommend suitable changes that should, with any luck, provide the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.
Of course, this is just one example of what business consultants do.
You might be having trouble hiring (or firing) employees quickly enough, managing cash flow, streamlining your processes, or maximizing productivity. Likewise, you could be confronted by a challenge, yet fail to understand the cause of it. Whatever the situation, there’s a business consultant with the requisite knowledge and experience to address it.
They’ll enter your business, take time to understand it, and then evaluate the status quo. From there, they’ll a) identify your business’ current strengths and weaknesses, and b) highlight where it has to change, where it’s vulnerable, and where there are opportunities for growth.
How to Find a Business Consultant?
Finding a business consultant is easy. A quick Google search will reveal a plethora of potential options to choose from. The tricky part for owners and managers is finding one that’s actually right for the job!
The best consultants are experienced, skilled, passionate, conscientious, and boast hard-earned expertise in areas of business that relate to your needs.
Yet that’s not all.
Make sure any consultant you hire comes with strong recommendations from reputable sources and has all the certifications that are relevant to your field. You’ll encounter much of this information on their website and LinkedIn profile, but it’s also worth looking for external reviews/testimonials online.
Oh, and before signing any dotted lines, ask the consultant about their past success stories and see if they’re willing to give you the contact details of those clients! Be wary if they aren’t.
Your professional network could be a particularly useful source of referrals here. Ask members of your relevant Facebook groups for recommendations, consult your connections on LinkedIn, and see if any entrepreneurs/business owners in your network of friends and family know someone as well.
How Do You Know When to Hire a Business Consultant?
Knowing when to get support from a business consultant isn’t always obvious. If you’re teetering on the brink of a decision but find yourself hesitating to pull the trigger, then this section should help.
Under What Circumstances Should I Hire a Business Consultant?
The list of potential reasons or incentives to hire a consultant is almost endless. However, here are a few circumstances where their input can prove particularly valuable:
- When you lack expertise in a specific market
- When you need to identify problems
- When you have a major business decision to make
- When you have to fill gaps in your team
- When your business is about to go through a period of change
- When you’re searching for an objective opinion or fresh perspective
- When you want to teach or upskill your workforce
- When you need to sack employees
- When you’re creating a new business
- When you’re trying to spur your business to new levels of success
- When your business shows signs of failing
Which is Better: Consultant or Employee?
When faced with any of these predicaments, another viable option is hiring a new employee. This approach has numerous advantages. For instance, they’d provide ongoing support and you could call upon their expertise whenever you needed it.
Not only that, but they’d work exclusively for you. That means their time and energy wouldn’t be divided between multiple businesses.
Unfortunately, hiring employees is also expensive. You have to pay them a salary and benefits, as well as cover sick days and holiday leave. You also risk hiring someone who isn’t good enough, which can lead to a long, stressful, and expensive process of firing them and hiring somebody else.
The opposite’s true for business consultants.
Similar to renting versus buying a new car, these professional advisers are ideal when you have a particular problem that requires short-term expert input.
There’s no costly recruitment or training phase to worry about either. They enter the frame with all the tools and tactics they need to help. And, if they end up being a poor fit for your business, then you aren’t tied into any long-term contracts.
Should I Take Help From a Business Consultant?
This is the key question! After all, as valuable as their input can be, consultants can be expensive. For new businesses or those that are in a tricky financial situation, the decision to take on this expense is never straightforward.
Ultimately, if anything we’ve discussed so far rings true for you and your business, then there’s an argument to be made for hiring one. Below, we’ll run through a selection of the benefits involved that may help make up your mind!
Top 5 Reasons to Hire a Pinterest Business Consultant
1) External Perspective
Your business is your baby! Whether you’re a fledgling blogger or a seasoned content creator, you’re on the proverbial front lines every day, battling to make progress.
Unfortunately (and paradoxically), this can sometimes blind you to existing difficulties. Like standing too close to a piece of art in a gallery, it warps your impression of the business and makes it impossible to see what’s happening. There could be glaring issues you’ve either been overlooking or ignoring.
As an impartial third party, a consultant can point them out. You’ll have fresh eyes to identify the obstacles holding you back and suggest proven strategies to tackle them.
2) Useful Resources
Most small business owners are stretched exceptionally thin in terms of resources. They juggle multiple tasks and have countless jobs on their to-do list at once, all of which leaves little space for tackling problems and taking action that grows the company.
This changes with a consultant in your corner. Suddenly, there are more hands on deck. Not only will your workload reduce, but they’ll also make suggestions and implement changes that improve efficiency and take the business to the next level.
3) Bring in Expert Business Skillsets
You can’t do everything by yourself, but you can’t know everything either. In fact, many new entrepreneurs know nothing about the nuts and bolts of running a business! They learn as they go, picking up skills and insights as novel problems arise.
Alas, any gaps in your understanding can lead to costly mistakes that hinder growth. Consultants can prevent this from happening, while simultaneously training/upskilling you and your team.
4) Spare Your Business the Stress, Time, and Money
We’ll say it again: business is hard! Consultants make it easier (and reduce your stress levels in the process) by solving your problems, reducing your workload, and taking on key responsibilities.
As we noted before, they also save you the time and hassle of hiring and training new employees. The upfront cost might be higher, but over time it can save you significant amounts of capital.
5) Achieve Your Goals
Last but not least, business consultants play a significant role in helping you attain your business goals. How? By working with you to establish a pathway to success, then ensuring you take action on those ideas, and holding you accountable thereafter!
You and your team can expect to feel clearer about the route forward and more motivated by the challenge. All told, it’s a recipe for success.
How Do You Measure the ROI of a Business Consultant?
Good question. There are numerous possible metrics to ponder here, but your net profits in the previous quarter versus the one(s) in which you work with a consultant are often most telling. After all, the amount of money entering your business is a clear indicator of success!
If that figure’s gone (or going) up considerably following a consultant’s intervention, then they’ve arguably been worth the money.
What Makes Business Consulting So Important?
As we’ve seen, business consulting’s a perfect solution for any busy business owners who have limited resources, obstacles in their way, or a simple desire to grow faster than their current rate of progression.
If any of that sounds familiar in relation to your efforts on Pinterest, then hiring a Pinterest consultant could be a sensible way forward! We’ve helped countless people in your shoes and would love the opportunity to take your content creation to new levels of success too. Get in touch today if you’d like to learn more about our services.