Strategy consulting can be a huge investment for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). When investing in consulting SME business leaders — often boards, senior executives, or management — bring in an external company like ours to offer an outside, expert perspective on their business growth gaps and opportunities. Strategy consultants usually have considerable industry knowledge and are expected to provide high-level assessments and recommendations for business issues based on their areas of expertise. Needless to say, quality strategy consulting that yields results comes with a commensurate price tag. This is why before you invest in full on strategy consulting for your company, we recommend that you do this so that you get the most out of the investment:
1. Develop An Internal Task Force
This is your internal team that will be tasked with implementing the strategies recommended for your business. An organised and competent team is likely to ensure efficient and timely implementation of strategies.
2. Practice a Disciplined Approach to Strategy
This means that you should have a structured approach to ensure you stay within budget and timelines. It is not uncommon for companies to invest in strategy consulting from world-class companies only to end up shelving all the work done because there is no structure and discipline to see implementation through.
3. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
How will you know your investment in strategy consulting is successful? What will constitute success? What will constitute failure? Having these in place will set the tone for strategy consultants to ensure they work with your KPIs in mind.
4. Test the Task Force, Together with the Strategy Consultants, By Tackling a Small-scale, Non-critical Challenge First
Team work makes the dream work. Before taking a deep dive into the most critical issue for which consultants are called in, test the compatibility and competence of the task force and strategy consultants by letting them tack a small-scale challenge together.
Are you looking to invest in strategy consulting for your business? Would you like to speak to someone to learn more about its benefits before investing a chunk of money you would rather not spend? Get in touch with our team HERE to schedule a consultation.
