Why a Growing Business Can Benefit From a Strategy Consultant
I am frequently asked by CEOs and founders, “Why should I hire a strategy consultant for my fast-growing business?”
More opportunities to miss opportunities
A business is born to solve a need in the market. But, growing and scaling any business is complex. The original challenges a founder set out to conquer now share oxygen with other obstacles. For a marketing services business, those could be anything from a disproportionate client concentration, the tight equilibrium between talent management and revenue to curating and launching new products and services.
In the early stages of a company, CEOs and founders are deeply intertwined in the curation and execution of growth strategies. However, as the business continues to grow, being bogged in minutiae could lead to more opportunities to miss opportunities. Faced with a tsunami of potential business growth projects coupled with the reality of all-consuming day-to-day decisions, can push the formidable tasks of ideation, prioritization and execution to the back burner.
The Four Elements of Strategy Success
For growth strategies to flourish, they require four essential elements:
Design - Frameworks, methods and experience to ensure the strategy is designed for maximum business impact.
Prioritization - An objective view of the strategic benefit, financial benefit, and feasibility to assess value and priority.
Flexible Execution - Adaptive strategy implementation and execution leveraging a broad set of skills and experience.
Communication - Stellar communication of the strategy to excite and engage stakeholders.
Strength across all four elements is rare. And while many CEOs and founders typically have a natural inclination, the issue limiting successful growth strategy execution is often simply available bandwidth and sustainable focus.
The Skillset Required
Why should I hire a strategy consultant for my growing business?”
The simple answer is that strategy consulting provides the ability to obtain support and deploy expertise across all four elements strategy success. Whether it is fractional ownership of an initiative, training existing resources, coaching/advisement or professional facilitation of strategy offsites and the deployment of frameworks to empower existing employees, the key is that every business situation is unique, and areas that limit achievement will vary to create order out of chaos.
What you should look for in a strategy consultant:
A broad but finely tuned set of skills - Every strategy will require broad context across many disciplines and will need to appeal to many different stakeholders.
Deep market expertise - Market expertise results in actionable strategies versus academic strategies that merely look good on paper.
Blend of art and science - Strategy is both art (vision, blue ocean, and opportunity) and science (details, frameworks, process).
Conclusion
Consulting is not just for large enterprises. It’s leveraging a specialized resource on a fractional basis to create a business outcome.
Ask yourself, "As my business expands, do my strategic initiatives continue to meet my growth goals?"
If not, a strategy consultant may be the fresh lens needed.