Doctor, Doctor; Business Consultant Needed

What is a business consultant and what do they do?

Simply put they are Business Doctors; Business Consultants provide business solutions and strategies that  improve the productivity and profitability of an organization by diagnosing problems and making recommendations on how to correct the problems.  This can begin with an overview of the business with a drill down to each department or can begin and end with one department.  The business consultant should have a degree in business with classes such as accounting, business law, qualitative research, quantitative research, statistics, market research and many more.  Many expert business consultants are MBAs and DBAs and understand business processes and how to analyze every aspect of businesses and their competitors.

In order to define a problem the consultant begins with asking many questions, these questions usually begin with how and why.  For example, how do you prepare invoices?; how do you track your customers?; how do you advertise? Then the consultant will ask why you do these things the way you do.  This is a necessary part of the consultant's diagnosis and recommendation.  The process is much like going to your medical doctor.  You know you are not feeling well; however, you cannot figure out the problem.  The doctor ask questions to determine the illness--just as the business consultant ask the organization, which is a living creature in one form or another, questions. The organization is made up of people so the consultant must ask each individual in the department or entire organization many and redundant, but necessary questions.

As the doctor takes notes, so does the consultant--here's the difference the medical doctor has one set of notes and the business consultant has many sets of notes.  This information has to be recorded in a data set that can be used to make sense of the information that has been gathered.  The consultant now puts on the hat of the scientist and draws logical conclusions at the quantitative level.  Next, the consultant becomes the mathematician, not always, but usually. The mathematician takes the data and does magical things like add validity to the diagnosis through formulas and numerical answers, because most business leaders find numbers more believable.

For instance, if a consultant told the President of the organization that the problem in operations was lack of accountability, because the data showed most of the employees had never been given a performance review and the rest had received one occasionally--the next question the President would most likely ask is what does that mean or how do you know.  If the consultant said the data showed that 75% of the employees had never been given a performance review and that the 25% that had only received one every two years over the past 5 years, the consultant's credibility and diagnosis has been verified by the numbers in most instances.

The Business Consultant's job is tedious and well worth the expense to the organization--if your business is sick just call the Business Doctor--the return on the investment is usually well worth the initial investment.  As Peter Drucker once said, "What gets measured gets managed".  Doctor, Doctor!

Discussion of recommendations coming soon!  See you in the threads!

Janice Aultman, MBA, DBA Student