How Do You Know When Its Time To Hire A Consultant

First you have to understand what a business consultant does.

A pet peeve of mine is how many marketing consultants call themselves business consultants.

This leads to a lot of confusion. In the year that I’ve made the transition from mostly serving corporate clients (who definitely know what it means to run a business) to serving early stage businesses, the biggest surprise to me has been the profound lack of public knowledge around what a business is and what it does.

Think about this: Have you ever walked into any company’s office and seen that the marketing department took up 90% of the square footage? And yet over-whelmingly, when people think they need to hire a business coach or consultant (the difference being the inclusion of implementation assistance with the consultant), they are thinking 100% about getting help with marketing.

And when it doesn’t work? Their solution is to seek more or better marketing. Never does it occur to them that the problem is that they don’t have a company around their marketing efforts.

So criteria number one for being ready for a business consultant is that you know that a company is more than just a product or service and marketing to promote it.

Number Two…

Criteria number two would be that you actually want a company. Maybe what you really want is freedom over your time, but you had the misfortune of being born without a trust fund. There is training that can certainly help you, and it focuses on creating passive income, or what is often called a freedom business. (I offer online training courses on my Freedom Business Launchpad to help those people who are wanting that.)

But you don’t need a full-fledged business process and systems to help you achieve goals with that process if all you want is to set up a passive revenue stream. You really just need to learn to make and market those sorts of products. This is the one area of business in which nothing but products and marketing can really take you about 95% of the way to success.

Not every business can be run as if it was a passive income generator, though. If there is a service you long to provide, you are going to need to be trading hours for dollars. At some point you may be able to leverage the hours of others, so that you are making dollars for hours you aren’t personally working. If that’s your goal, so much more the need for you to develop an actual business model around your offerings.

That you want to build and run a business, and want help doing so according to best practices or with some unique experience, skill set or perspective your consultant can contribute, is the second criteria for being ready for a consultant. Moreover, you expect an “expert” to be able to provide you with concrete measurements for what acceptable progress looks like, and a clear system for evaluating their performance as you work together.

And Three…

Lastly, you should hire a consultant if you believe in the value of what you are doing enough to be willing to invest cold hard cash in ensuring your success at it.

I always say, “You didn’t teach yourself to read, so why would you expect to teach yourself how to run a successful business?” Clearly people can’t teach themselves this, as evidenced by the fact that so many people fall for the label “business coach” being used by marketing coaches.

Now there is an aspect to this that is just about dollars and cents. If you knew for certain that for every dollar you invested in business development consulting services you would increase revenue by 5 dollars, you couldn’t invest enough money. You’d do that all night and day, if you’re smart. It’s simply math.

It’s more complex than that because: A) You don’t know for sure what the return on your investment will be (which is why clear deliverables are so important); and B) You may not know for sure that you deserve to be more successful than you currently are.

You read that right. The biggest obstacle to most people taking the step of hiring the help they need when by all measures it is clearly what they need, is that they aren’t comfortable with a life that looks radically different from their current life. And that is because they aren’t up to speed with how it will feel to live a bigger life.

Until within yourself you can hold the immensity of Spirit’s vision of you, how can you take the steps that would move you into living that vision? You have to not only see it before you can live it, but FEEL it before you can allow it.

With a background as a psychotherapist, clearly I’m aware of quite a few reasons why a person might have such internal blocks to success. I won’t try to cover them all at the end of what is already a fairly long article. But let me just say that if you want to be free from those inner hindrances, one of the most productive places for you to focus is on the importance of the impact you are trying to create and the evidence of your competency with the needed skills to create that impact that can be found by taking a look at what you have already done.

So if you have a block there, start there. Make sure you believe in the vision of your business, in its importance. And know that you are worthy of that. (Take a look at my “Success Strategies” series of coaching videos at Spirit Led Lifers for more help developing skills to move past internal blocks to success.)

In Summary…

If you do want to develop a successful business that will allow you to leverage your success and achieve whatever goals you have for yourself (or that your Spirit can imagine for you), then you should definitely complete one of the Awaken assessments, so that we can explore ways I may be able to assist you.

If you are an early stage entrepreneur concerned with revenue stabilization, then complete the business health check assessment. If your business is more mature and the goal is creating a greater impact while simultaneously growing revenue into the next tier, complete the Awaken Discovery assessment. Either way, I look forward to connecting with those who are ready to experience something grander and open to receiving the help they need for the most joyful and auspicious path to their goals.

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Isabel Miller is the prime contributor at theeggs.biz. She graduated from the University of San Carlos in 2015.