When you start a consulting business, you dream about having many projects, many satisfied customers who recommend your services and hire you again. Now that your dream has become a reality – you are known in your field, you are well-positioned on the market, you have a good income, the demand is growing – you may find yourself with too much to do, only 24 hours in the day, and no time for anything else.
This is when it’s time to scale your business. In simple words, scaling means creating and implementing tactics and strategies that will help you increase your revenue without significantly affecting your expenses. And to scale your business, it’s crucial to focus on increasing efficiency in every aspect of your business. This means spending less time and resources and getting the same or better quality, which will yield the same or better results.
Table of Contents
1. Sell More Efficiently
Prospects form an opinion of you and your services, which will affect their decision whether they will hire you or not, in steps. First, they learn about you – by researching consultancies, through recommendations or marketing, then they contact you, they meet you, they look at your proposal. At any of these steps, they may see something they don’t like and abandon you.
It can be argued, however, that proposals play the most significant role in prospects’ decisions. They can help you close more deals, leave a good impression on your prospect, avoid having to work for low prices just to stay in business. So, to make the sale process much more efficient you can create a consulting proposal template using software designed to guide you through the process of creating professional proposals.
This way you will be able to finish every proposal faster but without compromising on quality. Selling in such businesses is not easy and takes a lot of work. A well-prepared template will help you finish the proposal faster, without compromising on quality.
2. Outsource Where Possible
Small business owners have a lot of work that has nothing to do with the services they provide, whether they are working alone or they have partners or employees. This is one of the reasons why outsourcing is such a good idea. One of the best examples of the importance of outsourcing is marketing. You may know how to create a free website or open accounts on social media, you may even know how to run it, but marketing experts can do everything better, faster, and with better results.
You can hire an external company for many different tasks that are crucial for running a business, but take a lot of time, and even more so when you consider that they are outside of your area of expertise. Some of the things you can outsource include marketing, accounting, administration, IT, cyber security, or research. By entrusting other companies with such tasks, you will be able to focus on your job better. More importantly, professionals are better suited to perform any of those functions and will save you time and money. Outsourcing improves efficiency and, ultimately, allows you to offer better quality services.
3. Use the Appropriate Software
Many small businesses today succeed thanks to the possibilities for improving efficiency that come with technology. They rely on technology for processes that are time-consuming, critical, repetitive, etc. Like outsourcing, automation can be used for many different aspects of your business, and it can help you avoid mistakes, and save you a lot of time and money.
Aside from the previously mentioned software for preparing proposals, consulting businesses can also use software for billing and invoicing, for project management, customer relationship, etc.
Without an efficient way to collect a payment, the process can be very difficult and time-consuming, both for you and your clients. This is why it’s a good idea to use billing and invoicing software.
You can use project management software for a more efficient, mistake-free workflow and better collaboration within teams if you have more employees. Consultancies use customer relationship management (CRM) software, as well. These tools are cloud-based applications that can help you stay organized, finish tasks on time, report, analyze, collect data, create client databases, monthly or yearly agendas, schedule emails, and so much more.
Conclusion
However full of challenges, running a consulting business can be gratifying. But without the right tools and the right help, it can also be frustrating and exhausting. You can dedicate all of your time and strength to your business, and it can still be stagnant. It’s simply impossible to run a business completely on your own. To scale your consulting business, you may need to start using software, hire full-time employees, and outsource some services – depending on your business’ size, your needs, your goals.
