Management consultants and low cost ways to improve your business

If you are looking for management consultants who will actually help you improve your business profits we should talk. I have been in business for myself since 1975. I have created 5 successful companies and then studied for two years with Robert Fritz, to learn how to turn this experience into effective consulting. There are low cost ways to improve your business and some that will cost you money.

management consultants don't have super powers
Consultants don’t have super powers but may be able to bring out the powers you have.

Our focus is on start-ups and companies less than 3 years old. While we do have clients with businesses over 20 years old and have been working with some companies of over 10 years, our focus is on those first critical years. This is where the foundation is laid when the business owner has the least experience and the most time can be wasted.

Hiring a consultant will take an investment of your time and your money, but the return on that investment can be very high. I bring together over 30 years of experience in the trials and tribulations of running a business, with decades of study and training into how to communicate solid principles for success. And with over 20 years of work in the Information Technology and software world, I can help you marry sound planning and management techniques to the constantly changing world of automation, digital marketing and social networking.

Many management consultants simply decided on a career to be a consultant and have a lot of book-learning to offer but absolutely zero experience in the realities of market fickleness, working with employees, resource challenges or not having enough time in the day. I can help you clarify exactly what you want to accomplish and when you want to achieve those results as well as the best steps to take to get there. But for any real results, it will require time and effort and perseverance from you. At first, it will be additional work, but over time you will discover that you will get more done in less time as you learn to leverage your time, learn methods and techniques and understand what factors truly drive success. More information you may get in-depth knowledge about from a management consultant can be found by clicking here

management consultants can’t do it for you.

What a consultant can do is help you to see things that you may be missing, not exactly x-ray vision, but the second set of eyes that see your business from a different perspective. And a perspective that brings decades of experience and success with it. Also, they can provide proven methods for moving from where you are now to where you want to be.

There are many kinds of consultants, people who specialize in finance, or marketing or strategy and planning. But before you look to management consultants, there are some inexpensive actions you can take. Some of these actions don’t require any money, just effort, and some simply involve buying some books and taking the time to read them. Consultants can be expensive. While I only charge $100 USD for hourly work, I can only charge this rate as I am mostly retired and only work with a very small number of clients to keep active and do my best to share what I have learned in over 40 years of running my own companies. I am not trying to support a family, pay a mortgage and afford expensive cars. The mortgages have been paid off long ago and I just don’t care about fancy cars anymore. But I did spend many years “learning the hard way” and some years learning from people much smarter than me.

Low cost ways to improve your business

Cost is something that can take many forms. There are costs in dollars and costs in time and the costs of taking time away from other activities. But some of the things you can do may actually not cost time or money but simply require focus and discipline.

Under the heading of easy to say, harder to do, some low cost ways to improve your enterprise:

  • Disciple
    • The simple process of establishing routines, doing things the same way every time, can help immensely. It can amplify your efforts, help avoid mistakes and also give you a way to better have a feel for the progress you are making.
  • Focus
    • Being clear on exactly what you are working on at any particular time can be very helpful. These days this is often related to mindfulness, but simply paying attention to what you are doing and not getting distracted from your purpose, in the long-run as well as in simply completing a task can be one of the most powerful ways to keep moving forward.
  • Motivation
    • The importance of this topic somewhat hard to convey in a few words. However, it is possibly the most important element of your success or failure. We will talk about this in greater detail on other pages, but it is key. It is very important for you to understand why you want to start a business or stay in business and why you set the particular objectives you set for yourself. Do you know why you are doing what you are doing, what is driving you? It is very important to not only understand but separate why you do something, be clear about what exactly you want to accomplish and understand that only then can you really determine how you will go about achieving the results you want to achieve.
  • Read some books
    There are a lot of books out there, and you can spend too much time reading and not enough time working. I have read well over a hundred books on business, process improvement, consulting and marketing. Many if not most books are just rewrites or plagiarist attempts at conveying the wisdom you will find in the books listed below. Many of the books I have read were not worth reading, some were pure trash with a great marketing effort behind them. Check out these books, look at the reviews and ratings they get on Amazon. There is pure gold in these books. These books will provide you with unchanging principles that are worth taking the time to learn.
    • Reading books does take time, but for the cost of lunch, you can access the knowledge and wisdom that people have spent thousands of hours mining and then formatting for you to consume. Stephen Covey does a masterful job of teaching this principle of focus in his training on beginning with the end in mind and putting first things first.
    • If you have not read The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People you should take the time to read it.
    • Another must-read book, if you are really interested in basic principles and not just tricks and trending hype, is by Robert Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance for Managers these books will bring to light fundamental principles that are as true today as they were 9,000 years ago. This is the kind of knowledge and wisdom that is the real foundation of long term success and prosperity.
    • The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber. This book is packed with information that is somewhat less universal and more applicable to the modern age but is not trendy as so many books are today. The problem with trendy is that while it may take you on a quick ride up, the ride down may also be just as quick. If you build your future on a solid foundation you can still ride the trends, but you will better understand when to jump on and when to jump off. If you build your whole enterprise around a rising trend, the business will only last as long as the trend. And too much success too early has been the cause of the destruction of too many businesses to count.
  • Social networking
    You might be thinking this should be first, well without discipline and focus your message to other people will simply not be as effective as if you first take the time to know what you intend to do and how you intend to communicate it.
    • Facebook – you already know Facebook is free and you can also pay for advertising. But if you don’t already have a Facebook profile, then set one up. Then set up a personal page and a page for your business.
    • Old fashion networking – The STP method. – See The People. Make a point of seeing people in person when you can. Let people know what you do. Beam your information to them, even have some business cards, they are better than writing on a napkin and from Vistaprint or other sources you can get them very inexpensively.
    • Post regularly on Facebook. Set up a business Facebook page. This is different than our personal profile or personal page. Facebook will provide many business tools on the page Take the time to verify the page if you have a business that is registered in some way.
    • Linked-in and Twitter are also a must.
    • Be sure there are social share links on your blog posts and website pages so people share valuable posts.
    • But with all of these tools, unless you have something of genuine value to offer, then you may be just selling smoke. Most certainly many people have gotten wealthy selling lies or worse, things that harm people. But if you have read this far, then that certainly is not you. Nevertheless, it is something to keep in mind.
    • More information on improving website search rank can be found here.

LOW COST WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS
Time is a non-renewable resource

Besides 30 years of making business work, I have studied many techniques and systems to become more effective. Some are better than others, but all of the many systems or methods worth learning share some common threads. After trying many approaches, in about 1999 I came across Robert Fritz and his system of Structural Thinking. This is the backbone of how I would engage with you in a consulting role. You can find a very helpful video here, that will explain a lot about the techniques we use. If this seems interesting to you, please use the contact page to arrange a phone call or a personal email exchange regarding your specific goals, challenges and budget.

How your spend your time is very important. Most people who have created successful business worked well over 40 hours a week. Or worked 40 hours a week then spent another 20 or more hours studying, learning or testing things out. If you want to move things forward you have to put in effort. Effort takes time. Just watching YouTube videos or chatting with friends on Facebook may not be moving your plan forward. But if you are spending time on Facebook building your network or writing posts about your services, or using YouTube to learn from that may be time well spent.

If you have found anything in this article helpful and would like further information, I am glad to arrange a phone call, or exchange ideas via email or online chat just use the contact page to connect. Also if you found this helpful it would really help us if you could share the article or like our Facebook page.

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