Consulting is not a fashion trend, but an effective tool that helps businesses grow and develop, successfully overcoming crises. The market of consulting services in Ukraine is developing rapidly. This is facilitated by the conditions of instability in which the country’s economy finds itself. When every wrong decision can be fatal for a business, many owners view the cost of consulting as a profitable investment. The main thing is to use it wisely, then the cost of attracting a consultant will pay off by achieving the desired goals. How to choose a consultant for the company who will help to overcome difficult challenges?
In which cases the company needs consulting services
Consulting as a professional activity has been created for business from the very beginning and is part of the B2B services sector. The general reason for turning to a consultant is one – your experience and knowledge are not enough to achieve a certain goal.
In addition, consulting is in fact the only tool for solving problems or development for small and medium-sized businesses, which simply can not afford to keep a specialist (team) in the staff, which will continuously monitor and identify problems, seek solutions and ways to grow. And in conditions of high dynamism, competitiveness and constant expansion of the market without people who analyze and know business (even small), it is practically impossible to build a successful company.
How to choose a consulting company
The process of choosing a consulting company for cooperation can be divided into two stages. First you need to make a list of several potential partners, and only then choose one company that is best suited to solve the tasks.
To select possible applicants, you need:
- find out whether the company provides the necessary services;
- get acquainted with cases, read feedbacks of real clients;
- assess the qualifications of employees and make sure they have practical experience;
- order an initial consultation or send an application with a question about the task;
- ask to prepare a commercial offer.
Based on the information gathered, a list of five or six potential partners should be compiled. Then determine the acceptable terms, conditions and cost of the project, talk to each applicant (representative of the partner company) to evaluate the company’s approach – how it plans to perform your task, how to identify problems, how to evaluate the result. To solve complex problems, it is better to choose companies focused not only on development but also on implementation of change.
Looking for a potential partner, you should pay attention to the ratings of consulting companies that will help find the best professionals.
When choosing a consulting company, you can follow the same rules as when choosing any other company in the field of services, taking into account the specifics of their activities. These rules provide:
- collection of general information – reviews on social networks, the history of the consulting company, the presence of lawsuits, the time spent on the market, whether rebranding was done (if so, why) and in general everything that can give the almighty Google, various registers and databases. It is important to find out who started the company and whether it is affiliated with non-consulting companies. Ideally, the consultant should be independent;
- staff analysis – the consultant should know more than you or your employees, so consulting companies consist of top managers, specialists in a narrow field and with practical experience and graduates of prestigious universities;
- portfolio evaluation – any company, especially consulting, has a portfolio of completed projects that reflect the effectiveness of work in specific figures. The portfolio allows you to quickly assess who the company works with, what problems and how it can solve;
- monitoring the client base – in addition to studying the portfolio, you should additionally find out which clients the consultants work with, which industry or region they are focused on and whether their clients have gone bankrupt. This should be done also because only the best works that do not reflect the full picture of the activity will be included in the portfolio;
- research of pricing policy – the cost of services should correspond to the class of the company and be formed taking into account objective factors: the complexity of the problem, time spent, possible outcome, etc. Examine the average market prices in advance and in case of a strong deviation, ask what is the reason for this.
A professional consulting company usually has all the above information in the public domain or provides it at the first request to the client. The lack of data on a particular evaluation criterion should be alarming, especially if there is no objective reason for refusing access to it.
