Your Consulting Business Will Stay Unscalable Until You Learn These 5 Tools

The journey launching your freelance consulting venture can be a gratifying, self-enriching experience which can lead to great opportunities. It can also be the crude dose of reality that many entrepreneurial enthusiasts discover in a baptism by fire ambiance when they finally make the leap..

Those new to consulting often have a rich portfolio of problem-solving experience having spent years in a corporate setting but have to work overtime learning business development and negotiation skills as a first-time entrepreneur. To add to the learning curve are all the technical tools that you need to evaluate, learn to use, and then integrate into your daily work discipline effectively.

Having spent years relying on your IT team to make sure your software is always up-to-date, hardware is replaced when damaged and all the infrastructure you need to work efficiently is safe and functioning, it can be a big level of stress the first time you have to manage all of this on your own. Especially if you weren't 'tech-savvy' to begin with.

One of the biggest disadvantage a freelance consultant or small consulting firm has is their limited resources and ability to effectively leverage automation to get a competitive advantage. Due to the lack of time and resources for proper R&D, most small consulting firms never build a true digital operating model and stay unscalable and very manual.

In this exert from our recent white paper?Consulting in 2023, we offer five less common but key areas where automation, if leveraged properly, will bring great rewards to small firms looking to become a truly digital company.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE WHITE PAPER HERE

Your Consulting Business Will Stay Unscalable Until You Learn These 5 Tools

1. WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

If your processes are not standardised and repeatable to support each new client request, you will continue to stay working IN your business instead of ON it. Use a workflow manager to build a step-by-step framework for all your recurring activities and delegate them to your team to remove you from the daily minutia freeing up time for more important things.

In addition to the great time savings you will make across your company, you will also be in a better position to identify where there are bottlenecks in standard processes (aka process waste) and be proactive about removing them

Learning curve required (effort): High

2. CHANGE MANAGEMENT

There are many places you can go wrong here so be careful. Here we are not just recommending a task tracker or simple project management solution. An effective change management solution should seamlessly integrate your strategy with the business initiatives and the KPIs that support it. Your solution should allow you to be able to transform your Board of Directors vision into strategic objectives that translate into projects, and easily measured KPIs that can be assigned to your team leads. Sadly, most small companies use spreadsheets to manage all of this leaving them susceptible to slow and risky processes.

Learning curve required (effort): High

3. DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

Regardless of whether you are big or small, for obvious reasons there are great benefits of having all your processes catalogued digitally with their support documents visible and retrievable to anyone who needs them. In doing so, you can then easily identify & capture process improvement project opportunities to evaluate with your management team. It is crucial that when investigating an issue, you should not lose time trying to understand what documents are available to support you or where they have been saved in your shared folder directory.

Learning curve required (effort): Medium

4. CRM

After being in the market supporting small consulting firms for more than six years, it still never fails to amaze us how many small firms refuse to invest in a client relationship management and outreach system to grow their relationships. If your business relies on your ability to capture and nurture leads to convert them into paying clients, you cannot do without this. Use your CRM to manage daily sales and nurture e-mail campaigns to both your network of known contacts as well as cold leads. NOTE - ensure that you train yourself properly so your mails don't finish in the junk mail box of your clients due to excessive and reckless spamming.

Learning curve required (effort) Low-Medium

5. QUALITY ASSURANCE

As a small business owner you will be subject to countless price hikes and disputes with your vendors, clients and even staff. With a robust quality assurance product you will be able to shine a spotlight on situations of underperformance during contract renegotiation activities ensuring that your stakeholders are respectful of your time, aware of where they committed to more than they delivered and reasonable with their price demands.

Learning curve required (effort) Medium

Did you like this article? Download the complete white paper here.