There Are All Sorts Of Consultants…But Only One Kind That Makes You Money

Three Unique Attributes of a Skilled Business Development Consultant Translate Directly into Increased Revenue and Profit for You.

1. Someone to Think About You.

As a business owner, you’ve probably noticed that no one other than top management thinks proactively about how you can grow your business. Sure, you can call a consultant or professional advisor to get advice on specific problems, but those projects are discrete and limited in duration. Once a problem is solved, the consultant is gone and focused on someone else’s issue. However, marketing, innovation and business development is a dynamic problem that is never “solved.” The job of a Marketing and Business Development Consultant is to think proactively about you and ways you can continually innovate, market and build your business. Consider how much more you could accomplish if you had a Business Development expert focused on your company…one whose compensation was tied to results evidenced by your increasing growth and profitability.

2. Someone to Think With You.

After years in business, you know a lot. However, you don’t always “know” what you know. Said another way, you can’t access all you know without someone outside your company to think with. A skilled Business Development Consultant knows how to elicit and extract your valuable knowledge and think with you about how to apply it effectively. In addition, if you don’t have someone to think with, to challenge you, to bring out your best and to be accountable to, you probably are not doing everything you already know to do. Consider the results you would achieve if you could regularly access and use more and more of what you already know as a consequence of your work with a Business Development Consultant.

3. Someone to Think For You.

There’s only so much time in your day. The ultimate form of leverage is turning over chunks of your thinking in certain areas to someone capable, so you can focus elsewhere. You can delegate big chunks of marketing-related thinking to a competent Business Development Consultant. Things that neither you nor your management team have the time, expertise, energy or bandwidth to properly address. You know…issues like customer surveys and competitive intelligence, marketing strategy development, marketing material preparation, sales tool design, strategic alliance formation, cross selling relationships…that sort of thing. Consider what it would be like to run your company knowing those were being handled or supervised effectively by your Business Development Consultant.

Other kinds of consultants can be very valuable. Attorneys keep you out of legal trouble. Accountants save you money on taxes. HR experts help you stay out of the sights of the EDD. Computer guys maintain your network. All those elements of your business are certainly important. However, as management expert Peter Drucker said, “Only two aspects of a business make money: Innovation and Marketing. Everything else is just a cost.”

Innovation and Marketing are the domains in which a Business Development Consultant works, and that’s why a good one makes you money.