I have been a digital business consultant for the better part of a decade now, and yet my wife still asks me, “What job do you do?”. For many people, the internet is a great place to go shopping online, chat to friends and family, learn about new things and plan things like dinners out, holidays, and family outings.
What a lot of people don’t see is the immense amount of planning and work that goes into building your favourite websites and apps. With more and more traditional businesses adding digital channels to their distribution model, they need someone to help them navigate the complex setup of a business in the digital world. This is where digital business consultants come in.
1. They Validate Your Business
A good digital business consultant can take something as small as an idea and tell you whether it would be worth the time and the money to create it as a digital business. They will also be able to tell you whether there is a market for your goods and services online or not.
This is not something they would be able to tell you immediately after you present the idea, generally they will need to do their research, however, if you give your idea to a digital consultant and they show immediate enthusiasm, you can take this as a pretty good sign that your idea is good enough to get them excited about its potential.
Once you have presented your business idea, the consultant may ask you some follow up questions. Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers, as many of the questions they will ask they will find the answers for anyway, they just want to see 2 things:
- How much homework have you done; Have you researched the existing market, and do you know your product or service well enough to manage the new business.
- They want to know how much of the ground work has already been covered, so that they can potentially invest less time into deep research, and focus on more pressing issues.
Obviously the easier and more complete you answer their questions, the faster they can complete the validation and move onto the next step.
2. They Help Create your Roadmap
Every business needs a roadmap, whether new or existing, to ensure that they are always moving forward. Building a digital roadmap is very similar to building a traditional business roadmap, but most of the terminology is different. For example, in a traditional business roadmap, one of the points would be location, whereas a digital business has a domain name. Essentially these are comparable, as it is how buyers will find your business, whether online or offline.
Points to include on your roadmap should cover things like:
- Company Setup – A lot of the time there is already an existing company, but in cases where the company is not established, a good consultant should be able to help you find the right corporate structure for your online business.
- Banking and Processing – This goes hand in hand with the company setup, and should not be considered secondary, but rather part of the primary business setup. Creating a company that has taxation benefits for an online business is great, but if that company cannot get a bank account and merchant processing, it is of no real use.
- Domain Name – Your domain name is the address of your business online. It is important to choose a domain name that not only represents your brand, products and services, but should also be memorable and easy to use. Traditionally every business wanted a “.COM” domain, but these are getting more and more difficult to obtain, so you can always opt for a better name with a different TLD.
- Software – Knowing what software to use for your digital business can really change your setup costs. In many cases there are simple SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions that can do everything that custom built software can do, without the major upfront development costs. Your software requirements also determine your hosting requirements, so you need to know what software you will need to use to run your business.
- Hosting – Hosting is where your business website and information is stored online. It works exactly like your home PC, but is generally more powerful, and specifically configured to have websites stored and run on it. The software your business will use will generally determine the type of hosting that you need. For example, if you are looking for WordPress hosting, there are companies like SiteGround that have specially customised packages for WordPress websites.
- Roll Out Plan – Your roll out plan, or launch plan is the part of your roadmap that contain information on how you plan to launch your digital business. It will include details on the products and services that will be available at launch.
- Marketing Plan – A good consultant will be able to tell you what online marketing channels are available to your business, as well as which ones should perform better for your specific product or service.
- Growth Plans – This is a bit more complicated, not everyone will be able to determine their growth plans early on in a new business, but working with a consultant can ensure that you are at least somewhat prepared for the growth your business may go through.
As this is just a roadmap, most of these items will just be simple pieces of information, that will be expanded on as the business comes to life. Additionally, as the business launches and grows, parts of the early roadmap will be removed as they become redundant, and additional pieces will be added as the business grows and expands.
3. They Guide You Through the Creation of Operating Procedures
Creating a digital business is only the first step of actually having a fully operational company. Each part of your online business will need to have specific operating procedures that need to be optimised based on the department / tasks they are required to carry out.
A digital business consultant will help you to create operating procedures for each section of the company. From the sales team, right down to the warehouse and shipping teams. If they are properly experienced they will be able to sit with each team and work through each of their tasks to create a unified operating procedure that will ensure each of the business units work with an internal synergy that optimises your operations.
4. They Evaluate and Optimise
The final part of a digital business consultant’s job is to evaluate the operations that are running. In many cases this could also be the first step of working with a digital business consultant, as many companies are already operational before hiring a consultant.
For evaluation, they will look at everything, from website traffic to sales funnel, right down to shipping operations and complaint handling. In each part of the evaluation they will provide reports and feedback that are designed to help optimise your operations.
In addition to being a primary reason for hiring a consultant, it is also the longest part of a consultant’s job, and involves evaluating a huge amount of data to ensure that a complete picture of the business operations is taken into account before optimisation is done.
This article encompasses the primary reasons for hiring a digital business consultant, however, it doesn’t really cover a huge part of the job, which is evaluation and optimisation. Because it is a such a huge job, we will cover this later in another article.
If you are looking for a digital business consultant, or would like some help when evaluating potential consultants, please use our Contact form, and we will be more than happy to help you out.