Tips for CEOs: hiring consultant agencies
Who is a CEO, and why is hiring a consultant agency an advantage to your business?
A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is the highest-ranking executive in a company, whose primary responsibilities include making major corporate decisions, managing the overall operations & resources of a company, acting as the main point of communication between the board of directors & corporate operations, and being the public face of the company.
Occasionally, even CEOs tend to face business challenges and require advice. Here’s where an external resource can prove beneficial in building growth plans. CEOs can consider hiring a management consultant(s) or specialized senior-level professional(s).
Business owners are entrepreneurs, life-long learners, super smart, and in many ways brilliant, however… (Brace yourself, this may sting) they “Don’t Know Everything”. Their approach to business can be one where you learn from past mistakes made by others. For instance: remember how at times when you’re dealing with an issue in your life, you turn to friends and family for their opinion? Business owners & companies often need this too, especially when they are making tough decisions.
Clients often have a perspective on how to solve the problems they face, yet want to ascertain that what they are thinking is correct. They turn to consultants to offer a second opinion. This isn’t just any opinion, as these consultants have worked with many different companies and have waded through such waters in the past. They provide a robust perspective based on what they have seen work ‘or’ not work. Given this experience, consultant agencies can often bring new and innovative ideas ‘or’ possible challenges to the table that clients probably would not be able to perceive on their own.
3 Basic Steps to Finding the Right Consultant
- Define Goals: The first step to find the right resource is to identify what you need, understand your project goal(s), what you hope to attain, and most importantly what help you needed. For instance, you may have set a goal to generate 50% of sales from new accounts. This is not enough to hire a consultant. You need to understand your current marketing & sales efforts, and identify what new resources will be needed to diversify.
- Identify Potential Consultants: Reach out to professional colleagues, industry associations, local schools, and economic development groups to find potential consultants.
- Evaluate and Score Your Options: When making a selection, you need to evaluate the written proposals along with your impression of the consultant based on your interaction(s). Your in-person impressions matter as part of the process.
Consulting Benefits
- Enjoy the Guidelines from a Specialist: Your consultant will likely have an experience in your field, and will possibly have past projects that may mirror your situation. This helps give you the satisfaction of knowing that your business is being guided by an expert who has witnessed and handled your situation before.
- Get an Outside Take on Your Operations: Sometimes all it takes is to “See the forest through the trees”. Get an outsider to offer his/her view of your current state of business may help clear things as to how to achieve growth, and improve overall efficiency instead of trying to improve operations from the inside out.
- Cheaper than Hiring a New Employee: Hiring an employee rather than a consultant can prove costly, as you may end up paying for benefits, work space, technology and more. Comparatively, consultants are often hired to tackle a particular project within a specific timeframe. Simply put, you’ll end up paying the consultant far less than you would pay a new full-time employee. Of course, the cost will depend on the type of consultant you hire, and the scale of the project.
Conclusion: While consultants are often hired to focus on one project, their success in that assignment can lead them to be kept on board for a longer duration to help in other areas. This would be an ideal situation as both parties would benefit equally and they will work with dedication.