Small Business Consultants at Comprehensive Consulting Solutions for Small Businesses consult and coach business owners in Arkansas and across the country to help them resolve an issue, increase efficiency, handle an upcoming change or transition, overcome an obstacle, etc.
We focus on small businesses because we understand their challenges and opportunities and feel like small businesses are an under-served market. Our Founder, Mollie Watkins, has worked with small businesses throughout her career from dealing in the day to day to long-term planning.
What she noticed through her experiences is that small business owners are usually experts in a specific capacity of their field. For example, an insurance agent excels at sales or customer service. They can sell or service policies like nobody’s business, but the other areas or puzzle pieces of the business are much more challenging.
We have mentioned before that a small business is like a puzzle (the small business puzzle) and there are a lot of pieces that must work together, so the business is both effective and efficient. Puzzle pieces include marketing, sales, customer retention, operations, training, recruiting, processes, and more. When a puzzle piece is misaligned or out of place, it can hamper the business’ ability to increase operational efficiencies and maximize profit.
According to Fundera, "about two-thirds of businesses survive two years in business, half of all businesses will survive five years, and one-third will survive 10 years.”
Cash flow was cited as a main reason – what we don’t know is why cash flow was an issue. Was it because the business owner didn’t have enough start-up and/or operational capital? Or were processes manual and time was wasted on admin instead of activities that earned revenue? Or was money wasted on marketing that had no return?
We could think of a lot of possibilities for a lack of cash to run and operate the business or we could focus on how that statistic will not happen to us by planning, executing, and measuring.
To reduce that risk, utilize a small business consultant to help you identify and work through opportunities, challenges, trends, budgets, automation, marketing, and more.
The expertise of the owner is valuable to the growth of the business, but without other areas of the business being in alignment – the business will not meet its full potential. Some small business owners know they have known unknowns (they know they do not know) and others have unknown unknowns (don’t know it’s even a thing). A Small Business Consultant can work with a small business to sort out both the known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
A Small Business Consultant walks the business through a discovery process, which usually uncovers both. This process can be eye opening to business owners in terms of low hanging fruit, execution of operational processes, opportunity for automation, inspecting what expect, and the list goes on and on….
