Why do you need a consultant for your business?

While business people typically have a broad range of skills, with perhaps some specialties; changes within the business, in the broader economic climate, or other unforeseen circumstances, can create a need that can’t be met with the existing skills within the business. When that occurs, employing a specialist consultant can provide the skills necessary to deal with the situation as well as an objective viewpoint that can help to effectively focus the team.

This is the first of three posts about needing, selecting, and managing a consultant. And in this first post we will quickly examine why you might need a consultant. At the end of this post, you can make an ‘in principle’ decision on whether to engage a consultant, or not.

First though, I must ask you to ‘support’ this definition of what consulting is about – a relationship in which an outsider makes his or her skills and knowledge and experience available to an enterprise in an advisory role, including implementation.