El Adwar Dubai

Business Consulting

Business consulting in its purest sense is the ability to magnetize a business owner, entrepreneur, professional, mature or startup business to areas of critical performance based on meaningful, experienced, and documented understanding of the issue. Those critical areas can be marketing strategy, competitive advantage, business model, any of the 9 drivers that I talk about, leverage, etc.
It's not a theoretical process and it's not only understanding the macro problem but also the nuances.
An enormous amount of consulting is theoretical and done by wonderfully-intended and knowledgeable people, but their empirical understanding of the complexities of the situation is limited, particularly regarding things that have many moving parts and multiple impact points. Business consulting is about being able to look at a problem and opportunity in a non-static way and see it dynamically.
It is to analyze in an integrative way; to understand how the problem or the opportunity, the challenge or the issue, interrelates with other factors and to be able to, from experience, council, advise, and direct the business owner to take better actions and make better decisions that will produce a greater outcome for the time and effort.

What Does a Business Consultant Do?

A business consultant, first of all, has to have the ability to understand function over form and cause over effect, because the consultant is going to either be brought in for a specific or a macro problem. A specific problem can be, "My website's not getting any traffic." The macro problem can be, "Were not getting enough sales," or, "We're getting beat in the market." And you've got to be able to be causation-focused.
You have to first look at the effect, but then determine what is really causing it. And then you've got to be able to deal not with form - "Oh, you just need better marketing" - but you have got to be able to understand function.
You have got to know that the micro, the granular, reality-base alternatives and know that one alternative doesn't fit all. Let's take a look at a complex business scenario as an example. Let's say that you're selling a supplement for weight loss. You've got to understand what everybody else in the market is doing right and doing wrong. You've got to understand the alternative means of achieving the end goal, i.e weight loss. But is the end goal just weight loss? Because it could be just a lose weight or it could be to get fit and you've got to see okay, they can buy my supplement they can buy competitor's supplement.
My competitor has certain kind of positioning, how are they selling? What are they selling? What's their mechanism for selling? How have they validated or authenticated their product? What's wrong with it? Where is a gap? And you look at all the alternatives somebody could be doing. They could be buying videos on weight loss. They could be going to weight watchers. They could be buying Jenny Craig. They could be going to 24 Hour Fitness. They could have a trainer. They could basically do nothing. You have to look at all that.
Most consultants don't have the composite perspective. I come from a very different vantage point. I look at all that contrast and I say, "Okay let's talk about what's the real issue." I know what the problem in your sense is, but what's causing that problem? You know what is the uh not the form, because you're going to need that in marketing. What's the function? What do we have to do? And I ask that question, and I ask the best priority, what's first thing we have to do, second thing we have to do, third thing we have to do, and yet people are thinking those kind of terms in a paternalistic but a tough-love sort of an authoritative way where you definitely can't be theoretical. You can't give good advice if you haven't actually done it and have dealt on the sidelines of capitalism with scenarios that parallel the issue.

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What Is the Difference Between a Good and a Bad Consultant?

I'll give you an example about Henry Ford. When he ran Ford Motor Company and they were at the absolute peak, he would take a prospective executive, somebody who he was contemplating hiring, out to lunch. And if that potential executive salted his or her food before they tasted it, he would not hire them, because he thought somebody would make a decision impetuously without really assessing the problem, probably was dangerous.
Consultants who swoop in and diagnose the problem before assessing the situation are dangerous. Assessment is a poorly-respected concept.
Most people's assessment is to look at a situation superficially. I think a masterful business consultant has to understand all the impact points and all the leverage points that are affecting something. There's causation to everything. There are forces, factors, and principles that drive almost everything. There are acts of God or things out of your control. But 98% are things within your control, but you can't control them if you don't understand the forces, the laws, the principles and the elements that are going on. And it's as if, back in the old days before they ever understood the internal workings of a human body, everyone put a leech on your chest to take care of the problem that you have on your back.

E.A.D.