7 reasons to hire a consultant
Hiring consultants is sometimes controversial. Are you a large company, an SME or a VSE? Or a start-up? You've come to the right place. And you're probably asking yourself these questions:
- Why should consultants know the business better than we do?
- How can they deliver value in just a few weeks?
You're wondering whether hiring consultants will help your company, aren't you? You should know that studies carried out over the last ten years have proven that management consultants improve a company's performance. We'll look at the 2012 World Bank-Stanford study later. Note also that consulting firms have embraced the digital revolution and reinvented themselves. Their consultants are just a phone call away!
Are you facing these problems?
- You don't have the time to carry out certain tasks or missions in your company
- You don't have the resources
- Your employees don't have the required expertise and you can't train them (for various reasons).
You probably need a consultant! But what can he do for you?
Advantage 1: Indispensable help
You need this consultant. No one in your company can accomplish the mission you have in mind. It could be a lack of time or skills. Or it could be that you don't have the right resources. The consultant can take on the tasks that are burdensome for you and your staff. This will lighten their load and yours, and your employees will have less pressure on their shoulders.
Advantage 2: Expertise
In fact, the consultant represents a certain expertise in one or more fields. They have the experience, knowledge and skills to accomplish what you need. The consultant also has the advantage of knowing your competitors well, having certainly worked with them before. He also has a good vision of the new market trends in your business. This person will therefore be able to give you sound advice and guide you towards an effective, innovative strategy, whatever the purpose of the assignment. ERP software is an indispensable project management tool that can help you identify the consultant with the right expertise for your assignments.
Advantage 3: Innovative solutions from an outside perspective
As well as being experienced, the consultant's viewpoint is external to your company, and therefore much more objective. The consultant has no personal interests and can remain impartial in his decisions. He'll bring another perspective to the table, and help you achieve your goals with an approach you might not have thought of.
Stafiz is a powerful tool at resource planning that lets you manage your employees and subcontractors simply and efficiently. With a complete overview of candidate profiles and skills, find the best person for your projects!
Advantage 4: You'll save money!
A consultant can be expensive. But it's still a good investment for the company. Firstly, you won't have as many costs as if you were to recruit employees with these skills (overheads, material costs, vacations, insurance, etc.).
Secondly, the consultant is highly efficient and can complete an assignment quickly. You only have to pay them for a limited amount of time. You'll save time on these tasks, as training employees can be time-consuming. However, you can consider hiring a consultant to train them on a long-term basis if you wish.
Finally, you may be eligible for government aid to co-finance the hiring of a consultant. For more information , click here
How do you demonstrate with facts and figures that a consulting project delivers the expected value?
This is not always obvious. An experiment conducted by a Stanford professor for a World Bank study in 2012 provides some interesting findings. The aim of the study was to answer the following question:
- Can management practices explain productivity differences, especially in countries where the performance gap is particularly wide?
To investigate, the Stanford team organized a field experiment.
Medium-sized Indian textile companies were selected. They were offered a free 5-month management consulting project with Accenture to modify their plant processes. The results were compared with a set of similar Indian companies that had not modified their factory processes.
-> The results are indisputable: companies that followed the consultants' recommendations improved their productivity by 10%. They also improved product quality and inventory management. They have managed to speed up production.
Is this only in India, you may ask? Well, the same professor had worked on a similar study with two LSE researchers and had collected data from all over the world. The results were similar.
How can management consultants remain relevant in a world that is changing at such a pace?
Let's take a closer look at the four main advisory functions: information, expertise, intuition and execution. It's abundantly clear that management consulting firms have taken radical steps to maintain their competitive edge.
Let's look at each of these functions and understand how consulting firms are adapting to each of them:
Information :
- All the expertise that Accenture and other consulting firms bring to their customers comes from the vast amount of data they have collected over the thousands of projects they have carried out.
- Nowadays, access to large volumes of data has become much easier. A single consulting firm's historical data is less valuable. How do consultants reinvent themselves to remain the information gurus they once were?
- Many consultancies have set up in-house data science teams to take advantage of the abundance of data available.
- McKinsey recruits experienced data engineers. They support our teams in the field.
- BCG has set up a BCG Gamma data science team. Because even though searching for data has become much easier, it's now difficult to calculate it intelligently so as to be able to provide the right recommendations.
Expertise
- Most consulting firms prefer to hire generalists rather than experts. In particular, larger consulting firms hire MBAs who can work on a supply chain project one month, and a pricing project the next.
- However, they have developed a vast network of experts who join the team whenever a project calls for it. Leveraging this network is a powerful way of providing better information to corporate customers.
- Every consulting firm must strive to expand its network of independent consultants.
Insight
- There is always a hope of financial return when a company hires consultants. The information provided by consultants is supposed to generate significant or clear improvements.
- Increasing shareholder value has always justified the high project fees charged by consulting firms. BCG's famous Growth Sharing Matrix was called the "$1 million framework". It provided information so useful that it justified charging $1 million for such a project.
- With the growing number of strategy books and the rise of business schools, classical strategic analysis has become more accessible.
- But the most important information from consulting firms is now focused on their vision of industry changes and what companies should do to increase their competitive advantage, rather than simply providing a strategic framework.
Execution
- This is a field in which consulting firms began to adapt a long time ago. Consultants have always offered to help implement the strategy they have defined.
- But the gap between insight and execution is wider now than it was a few decades ago. Strategy execution has become increasingly technical. And the world is becoming increasingly digital.
- For example: if the strategy recommends "developing an e-commerce website and increasing search engine optimization (SEO)". Or to "create a cross-platform analytics tool to predict customer demand". The client company may not have adequate internal resources. Nor the resources to execute this strategy.
- This is where good consulting firms can help. Only if they have the resources in-house, or in partnership with the right experts.
A consultant is flexible, adaptable and responsive to his customers' needs. They work quickly and efficiently, and will add real value to your business. What matters to him is your satisfaction. If the two of you work well together, you'll have the advantage of having this consultant in reserve for other assignments.
With a tool from resource planning, you can collaborate even more effectively with them, and integrate them into your team. The project management tool will enable you to manage your subcontracting successfully, and track performance indicators in real time.
To find out more about the Stafiz platform, request a demo.
