There are many good reasons why hire a consultant, but here are three extremely darn good reason really why you need to hire professional consultants on any project. These three reasons are: fees, expertise and objectivity. A good consultant (or consulting firm) will be able to match your requirements to their offer and work extremely well with you to bring your project forward. Professional consultants, or even part timers, are able to bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table; so much so that once everything is completed you’ll wonder how you could have completed this without them.
There are varying levels of consultants so you won’t always be paying an arm and a leg, and the best ‘fit’ of a consultant will be a bargain price to you (in terms of return on investment) while he/she thinks they are getting paid very well. Also, consultants also don’t have to be full blown professional consultants, they can be just about anyone brought in to give advice, help around and offer their knowledge and expertise!
Let’s talk about the purple elephant in the room first: fees.
A consultants fees are a real investment!
So treat a consultant like a proper investment, nurture the relationship and it’ll give you an extremely good return on investment. So why hire a consultant for his fees? We all know consultants charge a fee depending on their work, so you won’t expect to pa $1.00 for a million dollar project, but you should expect to pay a fair amount for the work being done.
This means you are paying for extremely high quality advice, assistance, problem solving and solutions.
If, for example, your company has a 20% attrition rate where each new hire costs $40,000 to train, then it only makes sense to have a consultant come in and fix your $800,000 a year cost problem (assuming 100 new hires per year). If the consultant brings your attrition rate down to 5%, or let’s be conservative and say 10% then he just saved you $400,000 per year. His fee of $100,000 is rather justified.
$100,000 to save you $400,000 per year which ends up being $800,000 in two years, 1.6 million in four years and so on … any sensible investor would just on that opportunity in a heart beat.
Consultants have experience, expertise and knowledge that you and your in-house team don’t.
I don’t know everything, neither do you, the guy next to you sitting in traffic nor the President. So why should we constrain our businesses and our solutions to that limited knowledge set that we have? In many cases it’s possible to learn a new skill set and create a new business solution from scratch, though at what cost? How much time, money and energy will it cost you (or your team) to learn everything? There are situations where that is the best way to go. Though in most business situations, if you aren’t an expert in fixing your own attrition rate, for example, then the only course of action is to bring in outside help.
Let’s say you’re a window servicing business and your latest project involves shipping new windows (and all) overseas but you’ve never done that. Your choices are attempt this alone, learn from scratch and possibly screw something up in the process OR hire on a professional who knows international shipping of sensitive materials and can guide you in the shipment process. Would you be willing to risk it alone? Wouldn’t it be safer to get a professional in to help?
If you don’t know SEO, web development nor graphic design why should you as a business who is focused on building your core construction business, need to or even attempt to do SEO when that’s not something that’s really your core expertise? As a business you need to focus on your business strengths and let professionals handle that which you are not so great at.
Unbiased attention and advise.
There is a good chance that your employees will not tell you the truth because they are afraid (for one reason or another). They will, most likely, be biased towards keeping you happy and keeping their jobs. Also, most of us (myself included) have a hard time looking at yourselves objectively. So it’s very important to have an objective, unbiased view of your projects, procedures and processes.
This will give you a real look at your operation and yes the truth sometimes hurts, but it’s a good hurt because you then know exactly what is wrong and you can then go about fixing it.
Since consultants do not have emotions ties to your projects, like you do, they are more likely to give proper feedback that is informative, useful and beneficial.
When you need unbiased, professional and expert help for your project give us a call and we’ll see if we’re a good match.
