The global strategy consulting market is anticipated to increase significantly from $44 billion in 2017 to $91 billion by 2025 after decades of constant growth. This results in a volume doubling and an approximate 10% yearly compound growth rate. What is all this talk about strategy consulting? Isn’t it just about giving advice?
This is a very good question, and for many new and especially small scale businesses, strategy consulting is nothing more than an overrated motivational session with a plenteous price tag. Well, we cannot blame you for even imagining such, but hear us out, let’s help you redefine your understanding of strategy consulting.
Imagine you run a fast food chain and you realize your uptown joint has few customers who spend a short amount of time and consume expensive meals, but your downtown joint has more customers who spend a long amount of time and consume less expensive meals. Then all of a sudden, the economy begins to hit you hard and you have to reduce costs, and probably even close one of your joints, which one would it be? This is exactly where strategy consultants come into the picture.
Strategy consulting is defined as the practice of assisting clients to step into complex situations systematically in order to achieve desired results. This process entails assessing the situation and the environment, the policies and other logistical issues, discovering and defining the vision and mission of the project, as well as setting and reviewing goals. For the most part, strategy consulting looks more like motivational speaking, only the former has data, scientific and realistic inputs that lead to certain expected outputs. See more here
That said, what exactly does strategy consulting bring on the table for a business, and why should you as a business care in the first place?
- Diagnosing challenges
This is probably one of the most important aspects of strategy consulting. Many businesses often suffer from observable effects of a workplace challenge, but while some do, many fail to see the causes, and even fewer see the sources. As author and life coach Maina Ndiritu says in his book The Missing Links to Self-discovery and Actualization, every problem/ effect has a cause and an underlying source.The work of an expedient strategy consulting expert is to diagnose the challenges their clients face, uncover the causes and the sources to deliver lifetime or long term solutions. - Opportunity management
Have you ever found yourself in a dilemma, having been presented with an offer that looks too good to be true, but something from inside keeps beeping against the offer? You are not alone, in our many years of practice, we have often found ourselves and even our customers in a similar situation, many of them trying to figure out whether to take or drop the offer. This presented another of the many needs for a strategy consulting expert who could help to conduct in depth analysis and provide data which the corporate level management could use to decide whether or not to take up the offer. For example, in our case presented above, after further analysis, a strategy consultant would come up with a recommendation that instead of closing down, a company can either diversify its customer segments, franchise one of its joints or close down altogether. This helps to protect the company from making rushed decisions. - Forecasting the future
Strategy consulting experts are a huge asset in seeing ahead of time. Many times, companies need to see or predict what will happen in the future and plan for how to respond or adjust to such changes. With the internal stakeholders swamped with prevailing situations, it is always not easy to take time off to plan for the future, and that is exactly why strategy consulting is needed, together with forecasting tools that can be used to predict the trajectory the business is taking. - Spearheading innovation
Speaking of the future, strategy consulting is at the core of business innovation, whether in product innovation or process innovation. Strategy consulting is about reinventing the market needs, customer and employee experience and even redefining the industry, which creates a competitive edge for the business. Through a deep understanding of the market and industry, strategy consulting experts guide a company into making informed, scientific and data-driven improvements in products and processes. For example, the joint above could decide as part of its strategy to venture into food delivery to cut on costs needed to keep its downtown joint open. - Driving sustainability
The core business of strategy consulting is to keep the client’s business alive by all means – of course observing professional ethics and the law. Using data and experience gathered, strategy consulting helps businesses decide on key policies and investments that will see it sail through good and bad times and remain relevant and profitable. In our case, the joint above should not only focus on surviving just this economic difficulty, but use it as a lesson to be able to know how to survive any other similar situation, and become a sustainable business.
Well, we can go on and on and on, but I believe we are not leaving here the same as we came in, right? Clearly, there is more to strategy consulting than just giving advice, it is about making calculated moves towards achieving an objective in the most efficient and sustainable route possible.
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