Value for money consultants

One of the biggest problems for small businesses is managing time and cash flow. You can see the need for getting a consultant for developing your business in a specific direction, but you don’t put the time aside later to use the information you have gained from the consultant. As a result, you don’t realise the benefits of their advice and your longer term perception of the consultants’ value for money is decreased.

But that isn’t their fault.

The reasoning is that most consultants are advisors not doers. They will investigate the current situation in your business within their specialty (marketing, finance, business development, research etc) and then provide you with a report of what you should do to rectify or improve the current situation. If you have chosen the right consultant then it is all good stuff, but it doesn’t happen without your participation so the good stuff ends up collecting dust or taking up valuable disk space.

So next time, before you invest in a consultant, make sure you have the time available to digest and act on the information you receive. This will mean that the outcome has real value for you and your business.

Climate change

I was recently reading the October 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review. Its key focus was climate change.

On page 23 Michael L Porter and Forest L Reinhardt say “A company needs to understand the emissions it causes its business partners to produce, as well as those it generate itself: Both types are important targets for reduction.”

For a while now, I have been an advocate of businesses improving their understanding of their relationships with their suppliers. So many businesses undertake customer/client and staff satisfaction research, but miss out on improving their understanding of their suppliers. As cash flow is one of the main ways that a small growing business can fall over, understanding and improving their relationships with suppliers is critical. If one of your key suppliers is changing their focus, producing in an environmentally damaging way or not aligned with your philosophy then these aspects could significantly impact your business through a change in quality, timeliness of delivery, service, or decreased customer/client satisfaction from an increased desire for environmentally sustainable suppliers themselves.

I suggest business leaders take an active stance on this by getting feedback from their suppliers either formally or informally. You can then assess whether they are the right supplier for you, and if they are, then you can use in your marketing that this is one of the selection criteria for you in selecting a supplier.