As a business owner or executive, you invest tremendous energy, valuable resources and precious time into your operation to ensure your P&L shows results along with establishing a performance driven culture for all employees to thrive. However, there is never enough time in one day or one week or one quarter to accomplish everything on your list and it is hard to delegate or rely on others internally. Collaborating with a business advisor is the missing piece to catapult your business. An experienced business advisor can have an everlasting impact on your company’s growth long-term. They provide a new lens and expertise that is results and solution oriented. According to Matt McDonald’s article “5 reasons Why You Need a Business Advisor,” we first need to understand the key differences between a business coach versus a business consultant versus a business advisor:
- Business Coaches: tend to work with businesses to help individuals build their own skills, eg as leaders. They don’t generally deal directly with business challenges.
- Business Consultants: typically work alongside business owners and leaders short-term, to solve a very specific problem, sometimes getting very ‘hands on’ and often using highly specialized technical skills.
- Business Advisors: usually provide broad advice to business owners and senior leaders over the medium to long term, to help identify and address strategic, ‘whole of business’ challenges that usually call on wide-ranging expertise.
McDonald explains “of course many of the best business advisors are also very skilled consultants and coaches as well – they often start their careers in a narrow area of expertise, like accounting – but it doesn’t always follow that great coaches or specialist consultants have sufficiently broad skills and perspectives to be terrific business advisors. In fact we think that great business advisors have to be strong across all Six Pillars of business health, working as individuals or as a close team.” According to McDonald, “if you have a healthy business but a leader needs advice to personally succeed in role, get a coach. If your business encounters an isolated problem that it can’t fix yourself, hire a consultant. And if you need help across the business as a whole, especially when you don’t have a strong Strategic Plan, engage a business advisor.” Business advisors provide more value and can assist in all areas of the company’s operation. One may ask how does a business advisor actually help? According to McDonald, here are 5 areas of assistance:
- Strategic Planning
- Accountability with Flexibility
- Your Second Pair of Eyes
- Learning & Development
- Clarity & Confidence
At Osprey Advisory, we would enjoy being your business advisor where our passion, business acumen and unrivaled experience will propel your company to reach higher heights. Our vision is to form a long-term, mutually beneficial, relationship that is results- and solution-oriented. Please call or email us today! For more information regarding Matt McDonald’s article “5 reasons Why You Need a Business Advisor,” please visit https://www.advisorycollective.com.au/5-reasons-why-you-need-a-business-adviser/
