Why Business Advisory Should be an Investment for you in 2023
Let us assume you are an entrepreneur or founder running a small or medium-sized business and you have a lot of factors to consider for growth.
There are a lot of numbers to consider, growth opportunities that you know you should leverage but you still get caught up in the day-to-day activities: production, inventory, meetings with clients, meetings with staff, and other areas which are necessary for sustainability in the short term but do not contribute to your chances of scaling.
So what do you do in this case?
The wrong choice of action would be to continue in “business as usual.” Remember, the business scene is brutal, and changes occur which can negatively affect the business, so you need to stay a few steps ahead.
The right choice of action would be to seek business advisory.
What Is Business Advisory and Why Should You Care?
Simply put, business advisory is a service offered to entrepreneurs and other businesses that helps them measure and prioritize the most important strategies that will foster immediate to long-term growth for the business.
Most online repositories refer to business advisory on just the financial or accounting side of things, but it is so much more than that. Granted that a lot of businesses seek advisors majorly for financial purposes but if you also aim to grow in Talent Management, Data Analysis, and Sales and Marketing, then business advisory is for you.
According to Nephos, a digital diagnostics firm, business advisory is an investment you make as a business owner to obtain knowledge that helps you make informed decisions.
What Are The Benefits Of Business Advisory?
Of course, before you make an investment, you must ask, “what’s in it for me?” Here are the benefits of business advisory.
1. Objective Expert Insights
Keywords being ‘Objective’ and ‘expert’. As a business owner, you are too close to your business and while that may be a good thing in some cases, in other scenarios like confronting data that suggests your business model may not be ideal for growth, accepting the reality may prove difficult.
Sure, you have been doing this for a while and no one knows your business better than you do, but that’s exactly why business advisory is the best bet, as these experts view your business from a completely objective standpoint, analyzing the data and most importantly, ensuring brutal honesty and clarity leads the way as they offer predictive insights for growth.
2. Reduced Wastage of Resources
You would agree that trial and error is an essential concept for growth. While this can be harmless for personal development, the fatal truth for businesses is that trial and error costs time and money. Time and money that could be saved or better still channeled to a lucrative venture.
For you to scale, your resources need to be maximized and wastage reduced, and business advisory offers help in that regard. By investing in business advisors who offer risk management, industry insights, and guidance, you avoid going into the playing field blind; saving you time, money, and even talent.
3. Data-Driven Approach
The numbers rarely lie and data is highly valuable to every business including yours. But data is a lot more than excel sheets and numbers on a screen, it is not about the data but the decisions that are made despite that data.
For instance, if you aim to expand your vegetable oil business to a new region and the data shows that that region is saturated and customers are loyal to established vegetable oil brands already, what will you make of the situation? There are multiple answers to this but these answers or approaches exist because the data exists as well.
By investing in business advisory, you can be sure to get data-driven suggestions that will inform you of your decision-making process on business operations.
4. Industry Knowledge at Your Fingertips
It can be hard to keep up with multiple news insights and run your business at the same time. Laws and policies are ever-changing and the tendency to stay abreast of these insights dwindles over time.
In Nigeria, for instance, there was a recent regulatory update to Value Added Tax on businesses and this raised a lot of dust, how were businesses supposed to navigate this law and what would it mean for them? If something of the sort occurred to you, your business advisory team would be your guiding light to ensure that you are following the law and your business remains afloat.
The aim of this piece was to demystify business advisory and its importance for business owners like yourself. We hope we have been able to shed some light on the subject and broaden your perspective on the importance of this concept.
We are eager to hear your thoughts on the subject, let us know in the comments.