Stubii: Helping good companies do great things.

In today’s workforce hiring freelancers, short-term contractors and consultants is common practice.

We see it every single day.

Whether it’s large companies bringing in help to oversee strategic and operational directions, or small businesses hiring consultants to help formulate their business development and lead generation efforts, it’s happening.

Even though this practice of bringing outside help within is very common, there are still many people who remain uncertain about this type of model.

Taking it a bit further, there are still misconceptions as to why companies hire consultants (along with freelancers, etc.) and as to what it really means for the business.

Well, that’s exactly why we want to clear the air.

After doing a bit of our own research, we’ve managed to find three very common reasons as to why organizations hire consultants and what it means to their business:

1 | Gaining an Outside Perspective

What we call fresh insights, or gaining an outside perspective, is a very common reason as to why companies seek consultants in the first place.

The root cause?

It’s not particularly tied to one thing specifically, but there are a few reasons.

Tunnel vision, getting caught up in the day to day small tasks, a lack of focus when it comes to driving value and understanding customer needs.

The reality of it is that many businesses have difficulties knowing when, how are where to allocate resources due to the fact of being consumed in the day-to-day repetitiveness.

There isn’t anything wrong with that. In fact, having daily routines and daily checklists can be lead to success. However, it can also take away from the long term vision and eventually impede growth.

Hiring consultants allows many companies to regain focus, re-structure their workflow and focus on results.

2 | Hiring Subject Matter Experts

The second reason we’ve found and noticed is that organizations are looking to hire subject matter experts. Those individuals with very specific skill sets and who are known to experts in very specific areas.

This could be individuals who have been leading successful marketing teams for 20+ years, or even accounting professionals who have been in the industry for only 2 years but are known in the industry as experts.

As an example, we recently worked with an organization that was looking to improve and build out their sales process. This included being able to properly identify leads, qualify them, move them through their pipeline and have some sort of customer retention/ loyalty in place.

As such, we ended up setting them up with an individual known to have a track record of implementing successful sales strategies for companies from start to finish. This included all of the above needs from the client, as well as properly documenting everything, setting up the CRM and showing the client’s team the ins and outs.

This eventually led to increased confidence in the team’s overall sales strategy, their efforts, understanding of their own clients’ needs and one another.

The above, of course, is only one example. But we think it paints a very clear picture as to why companies hire consultants and what it can essentially mean for their business.

3 | Hiring For Specific Time Periods

The third reason we’ve noticed is that organizations are often looking to hire professional support for only specific periods of time.

Whether it’s year end and small businesses without an accounting department seeking to hire financial consultants to review their fiscal year, or large organizations hiring digital marketing consultants for an upcoming product launch.

Hiring personnel based off the need for a specific amount of time, is in fact very common. This also means that there are not any long-term commitment expectations for both parties (as long as everything is addressed and laid out in contracts, of course).

Well, there you have it!

Those are the three most common reasons that we’ve identified as to why organizations hire consultants and what it means for their business.

The bottom line is that it allows business owners and executives to work on their business, not in it.