Business Consulting

By definition, a consultant is “an expert in a specific field that functions as an advisor to an individual, group or company”.

And while that is a truly generic definition, we all know that modern businesses know well what a consultant is, especially since they anted up more than $12-billion for consulting in 1997 alone. The current figure is much larger.

Business consulting is a growing field

It’s much easier to be a consultant today thanks to new technology. Before the advent of the Internet, for example, research was a time-consuming task that ate up hours of the consultant’s valuable time and raised the total cost he passed along to his clients. The web, making the business consulting task easier and the cost to clients more competitive, now dramatically simplifies that same research task. At the same time, this technology gives rise to more competition from new consultants who find the field easier to get into now. In addition, the Internet has created major business consulting opportunities on a global scale that just didn’t exist before except for a select few.

Many companies are outsourcing their consulting needs

Thanks again to the Internet, worldwide companies are now outsourcing their need for specific expertise by hiring business consultants on a project basis. To do this, they are posting their business consulting projects on websites where the consultants can bid on given projects. This saves the companies big bucks when compared to what it would cost to add the overhead of a new employee’s salary and benefits package.

Consultants are hired for many reasons

There are dozens of reasons that motivate companies to pay for business consulting services. Here are a few of the most common incentives: They have expertise in an area not available within the company itself; they can identify problem areas objectively; they can add missing depth to the company’s staff; they can serve as a catalyst to help institute change; they can teach and train about new methods or technologies; they can be used to ‘trim’ staff employees from the payroll; they can bring new life and fresh ideas to the company’s people; they can help launch new company business efforts; they may provide valuable contacts or act as lobbyists.

Consultants command good compensation

While there is certainly no hard and fast guideline about how much consultants get paid, on the average it is about what a good attorney commands and that varies widely between as little as $50.00 per hour and as much as $400.00 per hour. In some cases, specialists in business consulting will estimate the amount of hours they will apply to an ongoing project and set a monthly flat fee against which the hours are billed.