Business Development Specialist

This is the second in a series of blogs explaining what it is I do as a Small Business Consultant in Christchurch and follows on from Building Strong Relationships.  Once the relationship has been established my primary goal to to understand more about the clients business, so how do I do this?

Armed with a note book and pen I asked lots of opened ended questions about the business in general, questions like:

• What service / product does your business provide?
• Who do you provide it to (establishing current markets)?
• How many staff do you have?
• What do the staff do?
• What is your job role (the business owner)?
• If you had one overriding issue in your business what would you say it was?

Identify your goals, your business will have a focus

This list is by know means exhaustive and will vary depending on the conversation but the idea is to try and establish quickly why I am sitting in front of the client (there is always an underlying reason, which is not always apparent) and for me I use it to decide whether I have what it takes to help or will the client be better off with a consultant with different strengths.

Generally within half and hour of the meeting started there is enough of a picture drawn by the client of their business for conversation to flow and even a few basic ideas exchanged to help one or two immediate concerns, when this happens I introduce a scoping document which I have devised; this is left with the client after the meeting for them to complete openly and honestly, this will give me a much greater and clearer picture of where the business is at; what it’s goals are and it also helps identify areas that may need developing.  This document looks at the following:

• Clearly defines the industry the client operates in.
• Clearly defines the staffing and locations the business operates from.
• Establishes the reasons for meeting with me.
• Establishes how the client found out about me (for my own marketing benefit!).
• Companies Strengths and Weaknesses (business owners perspective).
• Establishes the businesses unique selling point (if the business owner knows this).
• Identifies the image projected by the business to its chosen market.
• Asks what the businesses suppliers and customers think of their product / service.
• Identifies which companies the business owner views as competition.
• Identifies what the business does better than the competition and what the competition does better than the business.
• Identifies what the current goals are for the business, it’s staff and the business owner.
• Establishes how the business promotes itself to its chosen market.

These are the main areas I ask the business owner to look at, again this list is not exhaustive and is tailored to the business in question, but by getting the business owner to answer these areas honestly it then gives me the information to go and research the industry in greater depth.  Once this has been done it will often materialise areas that the business can work on or even identify alternative markets for the business to look at.

In many cases the next step is to ask the owner to perform a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats (SWOT) analysis on one or more aspects of the business but more about this in the next blog.

By the end of this process both the business owner and myself will have already identified potential areas for improvement and added to existing or created new goals for the business.

If any of this resonates well with you, please feel free to contact me.

Tags: Small Business Consultant and Business Development Specialist Services