Start-up executives often ask the Market Operandi team, "Why hire a consultant when I, or my team, could do this ourselves?"
Being an entrepreneur requires that you make pragmatic decisions about your start-up's ability to execute strategic initiatives internally or outsource them to the pros. This is a balancing act; you must consider the currencies of money and time and the risk of potential missteps if you decide to handle them in-house. Or the cost if you hire the wrong consultant. So, what criteria should you use when you have to choose?
While it often starts with a question of budget, the calculation only works if you compare apples to apples. The following example demonstrates that the result is often surprisingly in favor of consulting if you are a growth-phase company.
Here's how it goes:
If you are going to do something with your organization, your strategy, or your implementations that require decades of experience, and you're only going to do it once or twice in the lifecycle of your business, then you almost certainly must put this in your consulting budget.
Why? One option is to hire someone full-time. And, you'll need someone far more experienced at putting complicated processes and strategies together than you actually need for your day-to-day operations. Otherwise, the alternative is that you'll try to execute it with your existing team, which will take six to nine months to implement; you'll need to experiment, you'll need to teach yourselves, and you'll need to build up capability while you're doing the work. So, in the end, you took nine months to do something that may have produced less than optimal results. And guess what? Now, you're an expert at something you'll never use again. In either case, you will use up resources (who may or may not be experts) vs. hiring a consultant or team of consultants with a breadth and depth of expertise.
With the team of consultants at MO, you could do in nine weeks what took you nine months to do on your own. And here's the other math we did:
Nine months of work from a full-time employee could easily cost upwards of $100k, whereas hiring the team of experts at MO will cost considerably less.
Therefore, use this as your simple Occam's razor:
If you need decades of experience to do this successfully, and if you're only going to do it once or twice in the company's lifecycle, then give MO a call. We can do it more effectively, more efficiently, and at a fraction of the cost.