There are many reasons why you might be considering hiring a growth consultant to help improve your agency’s performance. Perhaps your current sales performance is below where it needs to be; maybe there are operational challenges which are hampering your delivery; or maybe you are keen to find out whether there are unseen challenges lurking below the surface.
Your goal with a consultant is to find solutions to the problems that you’re facing so that the agency gets into a better place, either by making more money, or by doing better with what you currently have.
A growth consultant will help you analyse your business from top to bottom, feedback honestly on what the situation is, and use their experience to advise you about the best way to proceed. You don’t have to agree with their advice or implement their changes, but you should listen to their opinion and put into practice what works for you.
Ann external growth consultant is someone from outside your business rather than a current employee, and in most agencies, the size of the operation means that when it comes to business strategy, getting someone in on a contract or ad hoc consultancy basis is more resource effective than hiring a full time person.
So, what are the key benefits?
1 Expertise
Without a doubt the number 1 reason why you should hire an external consultant is their expertise and experience. Choosing a specialist from your sector (I work almost exclusively with marketing agencies), means that they will bring insight from other businesses that are close to yours and are more likely to have seen the precise problems you are facing so can aid you in identifying and solving those problems more quickly.
2 Fresh eyes
The viewpoint of an external consultant is detached from the day to day operation of the business. They will see where an inefficient workaround to a problem is being used rather than a more elegant or indeed brutal cut through of that issue is required.
The key benefit of getting a set of fresh eyes on a problem with your agency is that the consultant will be able to view the bigger picture because they’re not prejudiced by the internal, microscopic view that staff directly involved will have.
You tell the consultant what your goals are, they find where the barriers are, and hopefully help you to remove them.
In short, an external consultant can be more objective than an internally driven review would be.
3 Management Efficiency
In a busy marketing agency, everyone has a full time job to do, and taking time away from that work to try and solve problems that they might not be aware of is rarely possible.
In fact, having an external consultant means that they can observe things “as they are” rather than seeing them as they might be.
4 Cost Effectiveness
Hiring a good external growth consultant for your agency isn’t necessarily cheap if you look at it in terms of an hourly rate, but it will cost less than the full time salary equivalent of hiring that same person into an ongoing role.
The value add of an independent consultant is that they provide your agency with the growth advice and efficiency improvements and then they’re gone – you get the benefits without the long term costs. We offer a range of packages from remote advice and sounding board sessions through to longer term engagements structured to deliver full transformation.
5 Flexibility
Around half of UK senior management say that flexibility is the main reason they choose an external consultant because of their flexibility – they can get advice about specific areas of their business as they need it without the involvement in the day to day politics of the business.
What’s Next
Reviewing your business’ performance is an essential part of evolution and growth. An external growth consultant will help you do this, taking a top down view of the organisation, identifying barriers, and finding solutions based on their experience with other similar organisations.
Talk to us about how Ex Fonte can help you to drive your agency forward in 2023.