Startups need advice and implementation assistance from knowledgeable and experienced professionals in a variety of business areas, including growth strategy and competitive analysis, as well as operations management, human resource management, and financial planning.
While entrepreneurs may have the vision and the drive – as well as the great ideas – needed to start a business, they often lack the basic business and management skills they will need to run it, help it thrive and still keep doing whatever it is they do best, the work that led them to found the business in the first place.
This is where management consulting for startups can prove invaluable. At Pearl Lemon Consultants, this is one of the areas we truly excel in. We belong to a group of companies – the Pearl Lemon Group – that are firms that are not so long out of the startup phase themselves.
Our consultants have recent experience with – and memory of – the challenges that startup businesses face today. Unlike large, faceless consulting firms, who usually only understand the theory behind starting up a business in the 21st century, we bring a ‘been there, done that’ – and often learned the hard way – mindset to everything we do in terms of management consulting for startups that is – we are told by our clients – both refreshing and effective.
In short, we feel your pain, we really do know what you are going through, and are uniquely positioned to help.
Why Hire a Business Management Consultant for Startups?
There are all kinds of good reasons to hire consultants like the startup consulting team at Pearl Lemon Consultants. If you want to hear them all, give us a call, we’ll be happy to explain them in detail. For now, however, here’s a look at some of the biggest benefits startups stand to gain when they work with us.
Adding the Missing Ingredients
Perhaps your team excels at design and coding, but you lack marketing expertise. Perhaps you’re a marketing expert and your co-founder is a creative, but you require assistance with the business plan. Consultants are ideal for short-term, specialized work in a variety of situations like these.
It’s the rare startup that can afford to hire on everyone they really need to keep their business going and growing. They need to get creative until that position changes. Management consulting for startups can show you how to handle the legal side of starting a formal business, how to manage your finances properly, how to stay on the right side of regulatory bodies and more.
Helping You See the Big Picture
Often, when working with startups, we perform what we like to term a consultancy intervention.
Every startup needs a vision, and a plan. As in a formal plan, not just the one stored somewhere in the founding partners’ heads.
It should be a priority to reflect and get away from the daily grind to formalize these plans, but it never is since there is a business to run.
You have to keep your foot on the gas, attract more customers, deliver the product, do the accounting, and provide lunch for the interns. And that’s only the beginning. That is why you need an outside force to compel you to take a break from your daily routine and address the big picture. Otherwise, it will never happen, and your business will stall, or, worse still, fail.
Most startup founders are aware that the odds are stacked against them, and that the majority of new businesses fail, and fail fast. Having a plan in place for business management and development is one of the best ways to help ensure business survival, and our management consulting for startups team helps brainstorm those initiatives, get them up and running and then map out a strategy that will help you stick to them.
Gain Access to Our Powerful Contacts
Professionals at the pinnacle of their fields have spent years establishing strong networks; no one worth paying a consultant’s fee would be where they are today without them. That is certainly true of our management consulting for startups team, as all the people that have helped them build their businesses are available to our clients who need them too.
Our consulting team encompasses a wide range of expertise and experience – everything from accounting to legal work to specialist techniques like Lean Management. And if they don’t quite know enough about something, they know someone who does, and can help you tap their expertise too.
Learn From Our Mistakes
If you are going to hire someone to provide management consulting for startups, as we alluded to earlier, it is crucial that you work with someone who has been where you are right now.
That is certainly true of Pearl Lemon Consultants. That fantastic concept you have that’s never been done before? It hasn’t worked for us after five attempts. That hotshot hire you’ve been eyeing? We’ve made that exact hire twice now, and both times it’s been a disaster.
That joint venture you’re contemplating? We signed on to similar ones a dozen times and know how a minor change in one clause can make or kill a business. Should you build or buy? Should you bootstrap or seek out investors? Should you sell or keep your stock? Should you even be issuing stock? We’ve made similar choices before and know how they turn out.
Making money aside – which everyone wants to do of course – most people, our team included – get into startup consulting because they want to help others avoid the mistakes, missteps and general pain they’ve already been through. And it is the rare person who has spent a long time learning something, who then does not want to showcase that knowledge by sharing it with others.