Opening a One Stop Business Advice Shop
What does it take to set up and run a local powerhouse of knowledge and advice that can provide everything that any business could possibly want or need?
Let’s look first at what business advice is
Any business needs to carry out the following to become and remain successful so it’s here that problems arise and for which business owners commonly seek advice:
Find a steady supply of new customers (Marketing)
Provide existing customers with a reliable product or service (Operations)
Efficient working through use of technology (Systems)
Productive and committed people (Productivity)
Positive profits and cashflow (Finance)
If all these are always done well then that’s a business anyone would want to buy, thus commanding a high market value.
But I’ve never seen a business doing all of these things well all the time, which is why there is a £multi-billion business consultancy market, and always will be. The phenomenon of ‘entropy’ means that everything in the world is constantly decaying.
We all get older and weaker, customers die off or leave, competitors arise with something newer and cheaper, staff retire, contractors leave, people become demotivated, technology fails, sales decline, cashflow reverses, profits disappear.
It’s a fact of life and when such events hit a business, suddenly or gradually the owner may not have encountered it before, so seeks advice.
Generally, the smaller a business the more likely it is to seek advice at a late stage because they either didn’t see it coming, didn’t know where to look or were scared at consultancy costs and hoped to muddle through.
Ideally, business advice is most effective when sought early, as in medicine, because at that stage it usually can be fixed at low cost and with time to spare.
It is also the case that most small business owners are expert at making and delivering their product and service, otherwise they wouldn’t have a business. So, their insoluble problems show up mostly in Marketing, Finance, Systems and People where they had little or no previous management experience.
So how can one business advisor know the answers to all these problems?
First, understand there are two sorts of consultancy:
Expert consultant
Typically, doctors, lawyers, accountants. You have a problem which requires a very high level of expertise to solve which has dire consequences if you ignore it or try to deal with it yourself. In business terms it’s mostly about legal compliance and has little to do with trading, which makes the money.
Don’t be fooled by the ‘expert’ TV consultant who marches around a business interrogating the people, looking at machines and products, then tells the boss where he’s gone wrong and what he must do to put things right. That’s theatre, not reality.
Process consultant
So, businesses are mostly about trading which makes the money. By which I mean, buying, selling, pricing, negotiating, pitching, managing expectations, gut decisions, priority setting, juggling, firefighting, to hire or not, and so on. No-one is more expert at doing all that than the business owner. No consultant can tell him / her how to run the business, but many try, and end up as ex consultants.
The major attribute needed is the humility to understand that the client is better than you are and that listening is more important than talking.
But what a business advisor can usefully and rightly bring to the owner is the discipline of operating processes that in themselves solve or avert problems by introducing logic and consistency. Here, the consultant’s role is to assess the situation and advise the introduction of an appropriate process that s/he will facilitate until the owner has mastered it and then exit.
Thus, it is a form of hands-on training where the pupil starts with conscious incompetence and moves through stages to conscious or unconscious competence before the trainer departs, on time.
But in a crisis, the client will push the advisor to become the expert
…and take decisions that the owner should be taking. That is a danger moment for them both where the advisor wants to help but recognises (hopefully) that s/he will be taking responsibility for the consequences and the owner gives up responsibility for their own business.
Now, that’s OK if it’s the deal, ie there is a project management agreement that sets out the obligations for both and is time limited. But the advisor is usually best advised to suggest an expert in such a crisis eg insolvency practitioner, web developer, IT consultant.
So, to operate a one-stop business advice shop takes process consultancy skills and knowledge
But where and how to get them?
It’s necessary to begin with real business management experience. There is no shortcut like doing an MBA or a DMS. These do not give you the real-world empathy and knowledge that let you understand the business owner, their realities and earns their respect. The only way around such lack of experience is to be apprenticed to a professional and learn from them.
Assuming you pass this test, you now need an understanding of the personality types you will encounter and how to deal with them, matched to your own. Simple DISC system access and training will suffice.
The next step is to either access or develop a set of business processes that you can use with prospects and clients. It isn’t good enough to rely on what worked for you in corporate life, because none of it works for a microbusiness which has just an owner and a handful of employees or contractors. 90% of all businesses are in this category, so they are your market.
The root processes you will need are those that help business owners to:
Get more customers
Retain more customers
Operate efficiently
Manage people productively
Make a profit
Manage cashflow
Manage a crisis
Each of these can be delivered by implementing 10 practical action plans in a logical sequence that takes the client from having zero competence in the subject to a competent operation. So, you will need 70 implementable action plans in your armoury that you can share with them, starting at the first one in which you assess that competence is too low.
For example, if your client wants more customers but has no useful knowledge of their market, you will implement marketing action plan one, which teaches them how to research their market, with you coaching them through it. And then you will implement the remaining 9, taking your client to full marketing competence.
Where will all these practical, implementable, action plans come from?
Either you must construct these yourself from your experiences of owning and running a small business or collaborate with people who have, such as recently retired business owners. This is a very big gap in the market.
How will new clients be found?
By developing a reputation for being empathic, practical, affordable, and fast. Naturally, it starts with marketing that persistently reaches small business owners with these messages and useful stuff they can take away for free.
The most powerful of these is a ‘no strings’ assessment of their business showing the owner where it has Strengths to build on, Weaknesses to fix, Opportunities to exploit and Threats to defend against.
If that can be done online in a matter of minutes with any business owner, anywhere, anytime, it will get lots of new relationships started and the nurturing of these will lead to long term clients paying monthly subscriptions to access and implement the action plans with coached support.
What about pricing and profits?
Ah yes. The service must be affordable to the smallest of businesses yet able to be delivered profitably by the business advisor. That’s a conundrum that has exercised many minds including KPMG who pioneered a low-cost, but loss- making accounting and business advisory service online.
The UK microbusiness market is huge. 5.8m of them spend a total of £10bn pa on emergency advice of questionable value. A one stop shop business advice shop can sit in the middle of 3000 of them, spending £5m-£7m pa and at 10% market share generate annual revenue of £500,000-£700,000 from 3 advisors, handling 100 clients each.
How can it be affordable and profitable at the same time?
By automating the business assessment process and the delivery of the action plans.
It’s a revolution waiting to happen. Take a look at the future here
By Duncan Collins
Founder of Runagood.com Ltd