Top 5 Reasons to Seek a Consultant

The world of business is unpredictable and fast paced.  Consultants and contractors are people who are available to help keep you abreast in fields your company doesn’t focus on.  Figuring out how badly you need a consultant can be tricky.  Here are some basic guide posts to guage whether you need one or not.

• Fresh Perspective:

Often relying on entirely internal resources  leaves you  thinking entirely within the box.  You need to bring in a fresh set of eyes onto some problems to make sure that you are thinking creatively.  Other times, when presented with a limited number of options which aren’t stellar, bringing in a third party can provide a valuable new line of thought.

• Short term help:

If there  is a very particular event or period of time for which you need assistance, hire a contractor or consultant.  If you know that you’ll need similar assistance time after time, be sure to build a solid network of people to call or carefully cultivate a relationship with a particular contact.

• Special expertise:

Some problems just need fixin’ and some people just know how to fix ‘em.  That doesn’t mean you want to hire a permanent on-staff IT person or a crew of accounting specialists.  When something comes up that requires a particular eye, bring in the person with that particular talent.

• Short on Cash:

Start up companies often need to keep a closer eye on their purse.  While you may one day want to bring on a top notch SEO person into your company, a full time legal analyst,  a team of IT jockeys, you may not have the money to at the moment.

• Crisis Mode:

Hopefully you’ll never need to hire someone for these reasons.  There are consultants and contractors in the pool who enjoy, specialize or – at least – will do emergency projects.  If your company needs to do damage control, recover a project, or deal with any kind of crisis, reach out to these specialists.

When your company can tick off any of these boxes, look in to hiring a consultant.  Moving quickly is better than waiting until the situation has progrssed to crisis mode.  Make sure you move when the opportunity is ripe, rather than when the time has passed.