Owning a business is sometimes like being Ralph Hinkley in the early ‘80s TV show The Greatest American Hero (which you might know if only by its catchy theme song.)
Aliens give schoolteacher Ralph a suit that turns him into a superhero, but he immediately loses the instruction book for the suit and spends three seasons blundering along as he tries to use the suit for good.
As consultants, we often work with business owners who feel as unprepared as Ralph when it comes to getting their business to do what they want. They have so many victories under their belts: A critical mass of clients and assets, a partnership with other advisors, and often a steady stream of new client referrals. But they have run into a hurdle on the way to the next phase of their business’ growth and, like Ralph, aren’t sure how to use their resources to clear the obstacle.
Often, an outside perspective can be critical to overcoming a challenge facing your business. There are generally two places people look for guidance: coaching programs and consultants. Both can be helpful, but it’s important to know which you need and why.
Coaches often have a program they’ve found to be successful for many and excel at guiding clients through its adoption, usually with an emphasis on progress and accountability. When a need is targeted, like adopting a client experience model or improving communication skills, coaches can be a smart option.
Our team of consultants at The Ensemble Practice engages in a process similar to financial planning, beginning with discovery to ensure our client’s stated problem or objective is truly the crux of the issue and not the symptom of an underlying issue or an outcome with multiple dependencies. Rather than delivering a program and accountability, we develop custom solutions to complex problems and opportunities. Consulting shines when a one-size-fits-all approach will not suffice and when problems are interconnected.
Our consulting focuses on helping owners build a solid foundation for sustained growth by addressing the issues that most often impede it:
- Lack of a strong, shared vision for where the business is going
- Need for the development of, or clarity in, governance and management structures
- Compensation that is not aligned with the firm’s core values and desired outcomes
- Roles and career paths that lack definition
- Ambiguity around when and how equity will change hands and partners will be created
- Holes in or absence of a concerted business strategy
- Excessive reliance on one or two key people
- Capacity constraints and a lack of leverage to maximize the impact of top performers
As with most problems that lend themselves to consulting, we frequently find the symptoms a firm is experiencing result from several or all of the above issues being present. Just as financial planners do, we first dive deep into a firm to ensure we understand how it is performing and the perspectives of the owners. We get to the bottom of the challenges the owners face, then work with them, often over 6-12 months, to bring them to resolution.
Our objective is like that of the unlikely superhero Ralph: understanding what makes your business work and making it work better for you.