I truly admire business consultants who strike out on their own and start their own business consultancies and I wish I was brave enough to do so myself. The truth is that it’s a lot of hard work operating your own business of any kind – this coming from a business consultant who’s employed fulltime to give advice on how entrepreneurs and businesspersons can improve their operations.

I can see why this raises a few questions which have undeniably been circulating the rumour mills for as long as business consulting has been around, but I have a couple of pointers to cover in my defence of exactly what makes business consulting and business consultants relevant.

First let’s get the fact that there are many business consultants and consultancies giving the industry a bad name out of the way, but these get found out very quickly and have their weaknesses exposed in no time…

A B2B-induced vantage point

Often the solution to one client’s problem who is seeking the services of a business consultancy resides in the simple act of pairing them with another client of the same consultancy, making for what is clearly a business-to-business (B2B) vantage point that would otherwise have never existed were it not for the fact that those two businesses share a common business consultancy service provider. If one of these businesses is perhaps projected to burn through its cash supply as a result of a supplier perhaps having raised the costs of the raw materials they’ve been providing, the business consultancy in the middle of it all is in a better position to recommend a better supplier that works out cheaper.

Now, business consultancies which have been in the game for a good amount of time thrive on this type of behind-the-scenes networking, but it goes way beyond just pairing businesses with each other. Some expert industry practices are applied to this process, such as professional data analysis and the likes, ultimately refining the process at expert level.

A focus on streamlining the operational process

As a result of the typical business consultant or business consulting company working with many different businesses and essentially getting a real feel for the operational process as it plays out in different markets, there is no party better suited than the business consultant to suggest improvements that aim to streamline that operational process. Businesses should endeavour to focus on their core operations while the business consultant focuses on streamlining the operational side of the business itself.

For example, if your company is contracted to provide some services around the operation and maintenance of railway infrastructure, you want to be able to focus on the technical side of things like making sure every deployed solution is of a high quality and functions efficiently. A business consultancy roped in to streamline the operational side of the business itself would then perhaps take care of matters such as collaboration with some solid train accident lawyers to take care of the legal side of things, with regards to compliance and the formulation of safety procedures such as worker conduct, etc.