Episode 118
John Barker: 12 Reasons You Need A Management Consultant
In this episode of The Business Samurai Podcast, John gives his reasons why it is a good idea to bring in an outside management consultant to help get your business unstuck, scale, streamline, and overall get to your overall objectives at a faster pace.
Transcript
Welcome to the business Samurai podcast.
Speaker:I'm your host.
Speaker:John Barker today is our first real episode of it's more of an opinion I
Speaker:would say versus an educational thing.
Speaker:And I thought it was a good way as I do management consulting
Speaker:of 12 reasons why you need a consultant and not everybody does.
Speaker:I think there's periods when you're in some growing and learning
Speaker:phases that you actually do learn quicker by failing on your own as
Speaker:you're starting to build things.
Speaker:But as the company starts getting.
Speaker:Getting cold, you're getting into seven figures or multi seven
Speaker:figure revenue streams that I did.
Speaker:You've been in the weeds so long.
Speaker:It's hard to extract yourself from them as a manager of maybe a team or even the
Speaker:owner of the organization of it itself.
Speaker:And it's and you want somebody that's not.
Speaker:Bobos uncles, brothers, sisters, advice.
Speaker:He heard once from a tic-tac video coming in there to assist you.
Speaker:Once you've reached that level.
Speaker:You want somebody that's been there before?
Speaker:Has the credentials has the experience to back that up?
Speaker:So these are in no particular order.
Speaker:And it's my reasons why I think once you get to a certain level that it's
Speaker:good to have an external consultant to be able to bounce things off.
Speaker:So let's blitz through these real quick, number one, you
Speaker:get to accelerate the learning.
Speaker:In business time is money and the faster to be able to break through a plateau,
Speaker:figure out a bottleneck is finding someone with the experience to be able to do that.
Speaker:And it's harder to do that with somebody that, that's internal, if
Speaker:you're so up close to the problem and.
Speaker:The person with the experience can help guide you through there at a much,
Speaker:much faster pace, fix things faster and make you more agile in the process.
Speaker:But by having that experience and accelerate your learning curve as
Speaker:a business owner, number two, it's rise above corporate politics.
Speaker:Seen a a lot of.
Speaker:Corporate politics in my life where there's power struggles internally
Speaker:there's dynamics that, as somebody coming in and you're viewing this going,
Speaker:oh no wonder you guys are struggling.
Speaker:The, there's maybe a leadership structure problem.
Speaker:There's a bunch of things, but essentially it comes to
Speaker:personalities fighting each other.
Speaker:And as a consultant coming.
Speaker:It should be all about the mission, all about getting value-based outcomes
Speaker:and breaking up those log jams, because you're not subjected to them.
Speaker:You're only beholden to, whoever brought you in typically the
Speaker:ownership or executive team C-suite to come in and solve those issues.
Speaker:Not get mired down into the weeds of the corporate politics
Speaker:between maybe two teams that are.
Speaker:Number three, and we've alluded to this before.
Speaker:They're an expert advisor.
Speaker:They got years of experience, specialized training in what they do.
Speaker:Think tax accountants, CPA firms, you may not need one on all the time.
Speaker:So you go find the one that has that experience that can help
Speaker:you get through there through a process, in, in my case, I'm.
Speaker:Certified in degreed, in, in business and project management, cybersecurity
Speaker:and technology and being able to pay, bring all of those together
Speaker:under the umbrella of smoothing out business operations to help you scale.
Speaker:So if you've never done that before, and you find yourself in a rapid growth
Speaker:situation, you've reached a point of going I'm stuck and we flat-lined here.
Speaker:You want somebody that's got that years of experience to be able to come in there and
Speaker:say, okay, we see what you got going on.
Speaker:Here's where the problems are, right.
Speaker:Here's where the bottlenecks are at.
Speaker:And you're gonna hear me use the term bottlenecks quite frequently.
Speaker:Here's how we're going to break through.
Speaker:Again, going back to the experience they bring industry best practices.
Speaker:I'm part of PMI project management Institute with a PMP certification.
Speaker:I mold that to as a best practice to.
Speaker:Project to a team I'm also now taking that and applying it to the
Speaker:organization as a whole, think of it like portfolio management, you may
Speaker:have a couple of lines of business, a few revenue streams in there.
Speaker:What is that?
Speaker:Essentially?
Speaker:It is a portfolio management process for your business where you've got accounting.
Speaker:You've got budgets, you've got internal, external stakeholders.
Speaker:You've got communication plans.
Speaker:So you want industry best practices that can be molded to fit your situation.
Speaker:Where there are no, I don't want to say there's right and wrong to what
Speaker:to what you're trying to accomplish, but there's probably most efficient
Speaker:and resources will help you get there, but you want to align it to a good
Speaker:person will align it to a good state.
Speaker:Number five, accurate execution oversight.
Speaker:Again, going back to the PMI PMP thing.
Speaker:If you've got something that a consultant is helping you with,
Speaker:they can provide the oversight.
Speaker:They can provide the structure for your team to execute those projects and ensure
Speaker:the changes that you were looking for, an acted properly fast in the way that they
Speaker:need to be again for you to get success.
Speaker:A nice view of the forest.
Speaker:Consultants are not the firefighters.
Speaker:They bring in a fresh perspective and they get your mission back on track.
Speaker:This is something I've seen before where the company, they, again,
Speaker:you're starting to get your hit.
Speaker:You've hit seven figures.
Speaker:You've hit, $3 million, $5 million, $10 million.
Speaker:And the ownership the team is so ingrained on firefighting, fixing that
Speaker:next client, the growth stagnates.
Speaker:And it's good to be able to have somebody coming in.
Speaker:Bring that fresh perspective in there and be able to sit there
Speaker:and go, Hey, all right, guys, you got to keep pressing forward.
Speaker:Yes, you do got to do the firefighting, but there needs to be some time
Speaker:dedicated to setting up to take you from that 10 to 20 to $50 million range by
Speaker:putting in the frameworks in there and recognizing where you're getting stuck.
Speaker:Seeing this quite frankly, I've seen this a lot.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:They are an agent of change.
Speaker:You do not want to bring a consultant into your operation to sit there
Speaker:and just pat you on the back there, recommending new advice is pretty
Speaker:much the exact definition of what a consultancy is when you go look that up.
Speaker:So don't engage with an agent of change.
Speaker:If you're not ready for the change.
Speaker:And in my case, I'm getting ready to implement a pretty.
Speaker:Extensive questionnaire because as kind of purposeful friction I know
Speaker:some other people that are, that have done this to a great success, because
Speaker:if you're in such a state of needing change or you think you do if it's
Speaker:that, if you found somebody, you truly.
Speaker:And it is that painful for you.
Speaker:You'll go through those steps.
Speaker:And that's one way for me to vet that you truly want the change that you're speaking
Speaker:for, not a pat on the back, not getting caught up in your internal dynamics,
Speaker:but you really want to make that.
Speaker:A consultant will assist you in navigating the decision-making process.
Speaker:A decision unmade is a stressor.
Speaker:I, there are people that I know that run small businesses that will
Speaker:sit there and not make the call that they know they need to make.
Speaker:I would say I'm even guilty of this at times where I've reached out to other
Speaker:people and say, what do you think?
Speaker:And they're like, you know what you need to do, make the call.
Speaker:Why'd you wait.
Speaker:And so they can help you work internally to combat that struggle or bring your
Speaker:teams together to reach a consensus in the direction you need to go.
Speaker:But at the end of the day, it is still your decision.
Speaker:There's been times that I have been brought in where
Speaker:I did not feel comfortable.
Speaker:I was like, they wanted to offload the decision making to me.
Speaker:And it's it's not my company.
Speaker:It's this is what I would do if I was in your situation.
Speaker:And here is why, but it's on you as the owner or the leader of your team or your
Speaker:department, depending on how someone like me is necessarily engaged with you to go.
Speaker:You're the one that have to live with this day in and day out.
Speaker:It's still your decision at the end of the day, but I can assist you.
Speaker:With making the decision that you feel is best appropriate.
Speaker:Pattern recognizer.
Speaker:This is what is great about having somebody outside of your organization,
Speaker:come in to help break up again.
Speaker:Those log jams having been in, worked in over a hundred environments.
Speaker:I can sit there and now friends of mine used to joke with me that I
Speaker:could almost predict the future, but I had seen these patterns.
Speaker:And right now, I feel like that's a lost art.
Speaker:There, there are, it's one of the times, it's one of the
Speaker:reasons I started the podcast.
Speaker:Again, it's so you can take the principles that somebody may be doing
Speaker:in a marketing company and apply it to your software as a service company.
Speaker:That there are principles are inherent to go, oh, that works.
Speaker:How can I take that principle, that framework and apply it to what I'm doing.
Speaker:That's making them successful.
Speaker:And I, and that is what a good consultant can do after having
Speaker:been in a bunch of environments.
Speaker:I have met a lot of people that have worked in gigantic organizations.
Speaker:That I want a job that where I would have like 20 responsibilities, that
Speaker:person had only experienced the one.
Speaker:So they didn't have that pattern recognition, the building and that
Speaker:ability to apply those principles.
Speaker:So a good consultant will have had that experience.
Speaker:They're going to bring other industry connections in there.
Speaker:So in my case I don't like doing compliance work with cybersecurity.
Speaker:I like when implementing The cultural changes.
Speaker:I still would like to find another word for culture.
Speaker:When somebody comes in saying, you've gotta be compliant and here's your NIST
Speaker:801 71, you've got a hundreds of controls.
Speaker:And there's three ways that you've got to validate these things, but the company in
Speaker:and of itself operationally is immature.
Speaker:The tech is not in place.
Speaker:There's no standard operating procedures everywhere that's coming in out of the
Speaker:gate with that is going to freak them out.
Speaker:So in my case, I like to come in let's evaluate, make sure the business
Speaker:officer because they're put in the SOP, do we have the tech start molding
Speaker:in those cybersecurity requirements that you will need to be compliant on?
Speaker:And then when push comes to serve, I've got a Rolodex of people.
Speaker:The only thing they do is compliance to certain frameworks.
Speaker:So it makes their jobs easier.
Speaker:To be able to come in here and do those sign-offs and to get you across that
Speaker:threshold, if I've worked in there at a broader scope, getting your mindset,
Speaker:not freaking out when somebody comes in there with the heavy hammer, which
Speaker:is something that I typically see now in the cybersecurity industry, because
Speaker:there's the big Delta between small businesses and the big large ones.
Speaker:And everybody has those experience in the big large ones, but we need to bring that
Speaker:and scale that down to the small ones.
Speaker:So anyway, it's bringing in the industry.
Speaker:Experts as needed in a deep dive niche, as well as being solutions agnostic.
Speaker:In my case, I am not adhered to any one of the Rolodex is
Speaker:finding the one that suits you.
Speaker:I'm not going to sit there and shove a particular software
Speaker:solution down your throat.
Speaker:But I probably will have recommendations for that.
Speaker:Another reason for an external advisor or consultant coming in
Speaker:is they can be long-term if you've got a trusting relationship.
Speaker:Or get in and get out there.
Speaker:There's no commitment based on that.
Speaker:So there are times I've been brought in to do a very specific short term
Speaker:project that may be just weeks where I'm specking out the strategy of something.
Speaker:And there are other times, like with a hand, a handful
Speaker:of clients that I have now.
Speaker:Maybe I started out on that initial engagement, but now I'm just the trusted
Speaker:advisor that I keep in contact with them.
Speaker:I know what is going on within the business.
Speaker:And they know they can reach out to me with questions or we set up
Speaker:dedicated times to do little check-ins to see what's happening, to see what
Speaker:is there a new initiative we need to take to get you to the next level,
Speaker:but there's no commitment either way.
Speaker:I've done both and other people do both.
Speaker:That's an advantage of having that and also allows you to find somebody
Speaker:that fits your company personality.
Speaker:Cause there's times where I've had a client where I'm going, all right.
Speaker:I want to get through this.
Speaker:They're not necessarily fit for me, but maybe they're a fit for somebody else.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:So I definitely live in the realm of collaboration versus competition because
Speaker:not everybody's a fit for everybody.
Speaker:The last one.
Speaker:Most of the time you don't need to be taught something.
Speaker:Do you just need to be reminded of it?
Speaker:I can't tell you how many times I watched a YouTube video or how often I've read
Speaker:a book and I'm going, oh yeah, I forgot.
Speaker:So a consultant and a lot of times we'll just remind her of things
Speaker:you've forgotten along your journey, because you've been so deep in the
Speaker:weeds and that's what helps them get.
Speaker:You get, you pushed out of the rut that you're in and go, remember,
Speaker:this is what you initially set.
Speaker:You've got stuck in this path.
Speaker:Let's get you back on the growth trajectory by doing X, Y, Z.
Speaker:So a lot of times that's not bringing something new.
Speaker:It's just reminding you of where you want it to go.
Speaker:All.
Speaker:Again, just a quick wrap up.
Speaker:Those are 12 things they're not in any particular order.
Speaker:Not everyone needs a consultant.
Speaker:I'll probably do a reverse list of this at some point down the road on
Speaker:the circumstances I, or the companies and teams, I don't think need that.
Speaker:And also, they help when you get stuck and that's one of the best things
Speaker:that, that you can ever help hope for is to have someone that you can call
Speaker:to say, here's the issues I'm dealing.
Speaker:Personnel.
Speaker:I'm stuck.
Speaker:These processes are taking too long to be able to identify that and get
Speaker:you on the path that you want to go.
Speaker:So until the next one, I'm John Barker.
Speaker:Appreciate this.
