If you have your own business, your own activity to grow and evolve, you will certainly know how unsustainable it is to take care of every single aspect yourself: sales, purchasing, personnel management, marketing, technological innovation, digital transition, are all activities that require time and experience to be organised in the best possible way and to generate results in line with your objectives.
It is therefore essential to be able to delegate the tasks that you can’t manage independently to competent people inside and outside your company. In the case of the latter, we refer to business consultants, professionals with specific skills to help you relaunch or simply evolve your business.
However, in today’s market, where everything is changing at an incredible speed, the world of business consultancy has had to, and above all must, evolve in order to meet a constantly changing demand from entrepreneurs all over Italy and the world, learning to offer services that are increasingly tailored to the needs of Italian companies.
So what are the scenarios for business consultancy in the near future? First of all, consultants will increasingly have to abandon a model focused exclusively on problem solving: companies in general, and most probably you too, do not need an expert who solves a specific problem with short-term effects only. Instead, they need a professional who knows how to work together with you, fully understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your business, and then providing you with the means and strategies that will set your business on the path to future success, to be pursued independently, without depending on your consultant, at least on that specific aspect. Business consultancy must therefore become increasingly able to offer services focused on “how to do something” rather than on “what to do” in the immediate future.
Business consultancy must then be able to focus on three fundamental aspects, which have become indispensable in today’s world and the new means of communication and technology available to entrepreneurs: reorganisation, internationalisation and digitalisation.
The first aspect takes on a fundamental character today, after all the unpredictable events that have characterised 2020: we hope that your company has been able to resist the effects of the pandemic, perhaps you have even been able to seize some opportunities, but many businesses need to rethink, from the foundations, the structures of their business, and they will need professionals capable of following them in this process.
As far as internationalisation is concerned, we are talking about an aspect that has become increasingly relevant due to globalisation and the evolution of the means of communication: today you have more and more means at your disposal to expand your business abroad, so why not seize the opportunity? However, you will need a consultant who can guide you and above all help you to understand whether it is already time to internationalise your business, or whether you still need time to strengthen your presence on the domestic market.
And finally, you will probably need help in understanding which technologies can really boost the success of your business, technologies that you may not even know exist. This aspect, which is not very compatible with hiring specialised staff within a company, should be one of the focuses of the business consultancy.
Certainly all the aspects listed above are fundamental for the business consultancy of the future, but there is one aspect that, in our opinion, will be truly essential, and which must be the primary objective of any company or freelance professional offering business consultancy services today: the ability to make their services accessible to SMEs and, above all, to be able to communicate the value of their services to the managers of Italian SMEs.
In fact, SMEs make up 76% of the companies in Italy, a market share too large to be ignored. However, unlike large groups and multinationals, often in SMEs, business consultancy services are not considered fundamental and a budget dedicated to these costs is hardly ever allocated, often not in line with the business models and financial capacities of the individual activities. Business consultants will need to be able to offer SMEs more targeted, rapid and cost-effective services, as well as help them choose which consultancy services to prioritise. Knowing how to restructure their offerings to meet the needs of SMEs and start-ups, which are now numerous in Italy, will be the real challenge that business consulting will have to face in the near future.
Here is an overview of the challenges and prospects that await the business consultancy of tomorrow, but also of the new opportunities it can offer you in the evolution of your business. What about you? Do you agree with our vision? What do you think are the aspects on which business consultancy should be able to push to meet the needs of entrepreneurs like you?