It’s not easy to be a good small business consultant, but if you can do just one key thing, you can add value to your client. What is that key thing? Be honest — don’t sugar coat reality.
As a consultant to any size business, there is a temptation to paint a rosy picture for your client. The fear is that, if you don’t, the client will “shoot the messenger”. In my experience in working as a consultant with businesses of all sizes and with being on the other side — receiving advice from consultants as a client — the reality is that while you may get “shot” on some occasions, but those will be far outweighed by the number of times you’ll be hugely valued for being honest.
To illustrate the point, let’s look at a common situation that a small business consultant runs into.
It’s no secret that the drive and perseverance that it takes to be successful as an entrepreneur is often driven by ego. This is not always the case, but very often, it is. As I’m sure you know, though, ego is a double-edged sword. It’s great, on the one hand, because it can give you a great deal of energy and drive — that never-say-die attitude we see in so many entrepreneurs. On the other hand, though, ego can also cause an entrepreneur to be vulnerable to being blind-sided.
There have been countless situations in the world of small (and large) business, where an entrepreneur is successful in one endeavor, or one area of business, and that leads them to believe that they have the “Midas touch” — that whatever they touch will turn to gold. This, of course, is not always the case. I know few entrepreneurs who are successful in every business they start, or every initiative they undertake in their businesses.
So, if you want to be a good small business consultant, what do you do when your client, perhaps fresh off another successful business or launch, tells you they want to do something that you think make no sense? Do you feed their ego and tell them, “sure, that sounds like a great idea,” or do you take the risk of telling them, “sounds good, but let’s do the research and analysis before you dump a ton of money into this new initiative”?
This is a tricky situation for a small business consultant, or really, for a consultant to a business of any size. In my opinion and experience, these are the situations where you really earn your money as an advisor to entrepreneurs, senior management, and the Board. If you cannot take a stand and get all the relevant leaders, usually particularly the founder of the business, or perhaps one of his or her senior management team members, to “slow their roll” and take a closer look at the opportunity being discussed, then you are doing your client a disservice.
It’s tough to take a stand in such situations, as you can be perceived as standing in the way of a great opportunity. You can be accused of being overly conservative or having analysis paralysis. You could even be fired for the simple fact that you’re standing in the way of the ambition of either the founder or a senior manager of the business. In my opinion, if you want to be a good business consultant, that is a chance that you need to be willing to take. Going with the flow, not challenging the sugar coating or lack of understanding of a potential opportunity, may serve you and feel good in the short-term, but when and if things go sideways with the initiative, you will wish that you’d done your job at the critical moment when you had the chance. To be a good small business consultant, you have to be willing to risk your fees, even risk being fired, for giving your client the tough love they need and the advice they need to hear.
Image by skyradar from Pixabay
