6 Reasons Your Startup Needs a Business Consultant
Running a startup is a long journey from ideas on paper to their on-ground implementation to achieve the required business results, while developing and utilizing the required resources along the way. A right business consultant can prove to be a real asset in this journey.
Startup founders can all agree to the fact that running a startup is an uphill task. Thanks to the uncertainties and the ever changing nature of business today that your startup needs constant attention to be successful. Moreover, you cannot simply copy the business model of existing players and competitors, as there are many factors that affect ways of running a business - things that works for them might not work for you. The factors include company culture, team dynamics, product, services, market, consumers and many others. Furthermore, the startup risk increases further due to the fact that most of the founders are inexperienced and straight out of college or with just a few months/ years of work experience.
A few startups may resist to hire a business consultant and consider them as an added cost to their startup. But you really need one for your startup. Not only you need a business consultant, but you need the right one with the relevant experience and exposure in your field of business. The gains of hiring the right business consultant outweighs the costs incurred to hire them, by manifolds.
Every founder aspires to make their startup a success in the market. If you're wondering how an amazing business consultant can play an important role to help you and your startup reach your goals, keep reading!
Choose the right business idea and assess risks
Before you invest in the startup, the most important step is to choose the right business idea and perform risk assessment – whether the business idea is practical, implementable, scalable, has a unique value offering and the potential to provide the requisite return on investment (ROI) for the risks assumed. Business consultants can help you to choose the right business idea and fine-tune it to make it a great business idea.
Finalizing the business strategy and the road-map
Business consultants – due to their expertise, knowledge and experience – shall play an important role in finalizing the business strategy for your startup. Since they have spent years in the market, working with various businesses and people, and learning new things they are better positioned to have insights into preparing the right business strategy. The road-map prepared by them shall include the insights that are almost unthinkable and out of reach for the inexperienced founders.
Right utilization of time, funds and efforts
As you begin your startup journey, there are three major hurdles in your way – lack of experience, lack of time and lack of funds. Hiring a business consultant shall enable you to leverage their long corporate experience to ensure that you use the limited resources – funds, time and efforts – in the right direction to achieve your business goals. In today’s ever evolving highly competitive business environment, a startup shall not have enough time to learn everything by trial and error. Hence, leveraging expertise of business consultant may seem a very good idea.
Handling difficult situations
As a startup, you shall face challenges on a daily basis – more so on certain days than others. As you may face several difficult situations for the first time, tackling these situations can be overwhelming and exhausting. It may even inject you the thought of giving up on your startup. In these situations, having a business consultant for your startup may prove to be a boon. They are likely to play an important role in overcoming those difficult situations as may have come across the similar situations while working with other businesses or may know the right people who have been in similar situations and can help you out. In difficult circumstances, a business consultant can prove to be an invaluable asset for your startup owing to their knowledge, skills, expertise and experience.
Managing business expectations and being pragmatic
Startup founders – young women and men – bustling with energy, may be impatient and look for quick business results. Impatience may sometimes be helpful for quick on-ground implementation, however, when it comes to business results, it is very important to have the right expectations. At times, startup founders may have incorrect expectations about the revenue, product/service acceptance in the market, visibility in the market or investor interest in their startup, which may lead to dejection and disappointment when the expectation bubble bursts. To avoid or minimize such situations, through their experience, business consultants are more likely project the pragmatic picture in terms of expectations. They shall bring to the table the required patience and pragmatism.
To keep the ship moving in the right direction
In today’s fast changing environment, there is a lot of noise in the market and information bombardment, with even experts having divergent views; this may confuse you as an inexperienced founder of a startup. Sometimes it may lead you to knee-jerk reactions, make wrong or ill-informed decisions, which may prove fatal for the business. Business consultant shall play a crucial role to ensure that the data-driven, well-informed decisions made and things go in a planned and structured manner cutting though the market noise.
