Consultants 101: What Small Business Owners Need to Know

For small business owners, investing in the right in-house talent is just one half of the equation when it comes to business growth and development strategising. You also need to invest in the right tools of the trade to support your staff and your brand reputation.

Yes, oftentimes these tools can be literal tools, or even software investments – but sometimes these tools are human resources themselves. This is where consultants come into play.

Although consultants aren’t on your payroll like permanent employees, their specialised expertise in particular fields makes them a great asset for business owners looking for advice or insights from experienced professionals. By hiring consultants on a contract basis, small business owners can take full advantage of their expert level insights without having to bear the brunt of an executive salary.

If you’ve been curious about how consultants can help elevate your business but are yet to pull the trigger, then this guide is for you.

What are consultants?

Consultants are experts in their field hired by business owners to provide specialised advice, analysis, strategy, or solutions. Consultants typically step in within a clearly defined timeline to solve particular problems for businesses and/or offer insights into existing business performance, practices etc. using their specialised expertise within that field.

Different types of consultants: most commonly sought after

Consultants operate across virtually all industries (i.e. business, finance, healthcare, education, etc.), as anyone at the height of their field can offer consulting services. The most commonly sought after types of consultants include:

ISO consultants

Given the intricacies and details of ISO certification, ISO consulting is a demanding area of expertise. The service also offers major benefits to businesses across all industries, as ISO standards are internationally recognised as a sign of quality operations.

You can find ISO consultants in your area through local business directories or even via Google (i.e. if you were looking for ISO consulting services in Sydney, a quick search online of the service + location can point you in the right direction). If you were looking to partner with an ISO consultant based remotely, this is also possible, however your consultant may opt to travel to you in order to conduct any informal audit processes on-site.

Business coaches/management consultants

For business owners looking to build a strong management team, management consultants help provide crucial training to elevate senior staff into leadership positions. 

Whilst business coaches and management consultants can deliver executive coaching and training for big corporations, these consultants also frequently extend their services to small businesses looking to empower senior staff and redistribute managerial responsibilities across both the business owner and their growing management team. In this regard, business coaches and management consultants are a strong investment in business expansion and growth strategising.

Marketing consultants

As business marketing grows increasingly digital and data-driven, marketing consultants offering specialised skill sets are naturally worth their weight in gold. Most business owners are likely to look for digital marketing consultants with experience managing digital ad campaigns or even social media management. 

Alongside digital channels, however, marketing consultants can also include traditional advertising specialists with experience in broadcast and print advertising, or even PR and event management.

HR consultants

Although many small businesses often don’t have their own dedicated HR personnel, they can still reap all the benefits of HR by investing in fractional HR services – or HR consultants that grow with your business.

On top of supporting business leaders in enforcing company policies and maintaining operational standards across staff, HR consultants also play a major role in improving business recruitment, onboarding, and training processes, ensuring small business teams can scale more sustainably and with reduced friction, and supporting small business owners in enjoying stronger staff retention rates. 

In essence, HR consultants are an investment in company stability, supporting small business owners in finding the right talent, establishing the right policies, and maintaining the right training, performance review, and conflict resolution practices.

How do you hire a consultant?

As you can see from the list we’ve provided above, the role of consultants can be broad and vary in scope (depending both on their field of expertise plus the breadth of the project they’re working on for your business). In all cases, however, consultants are tasked with providing solutions to problems for business owners, their staff, and their stakeholders.

Maintaining this perspective makes it easier to review any prospective consultants before you sign any contracts with them – which ultimately means that hiring a consultant doesn’t need to be too dissimilar a process to hiring a professional at any level. Even if you as a business owner do not have a strong baseline knowledge in the same fields or disciplines as your consultant, you can still gauge their proficiency and capability to take on your project by their ability to answer your questions as a laymen, but also as a business owner who’s looking for a very particular outcome.

So when it comes time to hire a consultant, the single most important thing you can do as a business owner and prospective client is to keep your expectations and goals as clear cut as possible. This clarity will ensure adept consultants have a strong foundation to proceed from – and it also ensures that ill-equipped consultants have nowhere to hide their inability to take on your project.

Keep in mind too that reputable consultants should be able to provide you with a robust portfolio of past projects where they were able to meet the expectations of their clients. When you’re reviewing consultants or consulting firms, be sure to explore the ‘Portfolio’ or ‘Case Studies’ page on their website. If they have no such page, it may be due to legal reasons (i.e. they’ve signed an NDA), in which case, you still have the right to request case study materials be sent to you in your review process. Remember that any reputable consultant should be more than willing to send through their case studies.

To sum, the best way to hire a consultant is to ask them:

1. What is your level of experience with this particular task?

2. What would you recommend as your ideal approach to achieving this task, and why?

3. What would you feasibly need from myself and my team in order to achieve this desired outcome?

4. Do you have any case studies from your professional experience where you were previously able to achieve this same outcome using the same (or amended) strategy?

Find the right consultants to support your business growth and development

Having a plan of action is essential for making the most of your consultant – especially for small business owners, who can anticipate allocating more financial resources on consultants comparative to medium- and large-sized enterprises.

Thankfully, it’s not too tricky to work with reputable consultants, as they take pride in making their collaborative process as streamlined and sustainable as possible for busy business owners. In all cases, just remember that keeping your expectations and goals as clear as possible can help ensure your consulting project stays on track, and that your partnership delivers all the outcomes you were looking for.