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Why You Should Hire a Strategic Consultant For Your Startup

It’s true. A recent trend forecast by Gartner points out that the global IT spending will be reaching a staggering $3.9 trillion by the end of this year. What’s not surprising is that the growth in spending for cloud-based offerings will be significantly larger than in traditional IT offerings through 2022, according to Gartner. What does that mean?

For one, disruptive, next-generation business models are emerging in part due to a growing number of enterprises that dedicate their IT spending to cloud adoption.

Tech startups are currently  at higher rates than ever before, primarily because of innovative trends and vast opportunities that the cloud computing industry has created. New tech brands are eager to dominate their niche markets, however it’s fair to say that with every great beginning comes its many challenges.

Things like identifying promising further opportunities, delivering effective solutions for your customers, or bringing life to your products and services -you must agree that the implementation of these goals and many more requires exceptional market expertise and knowledge.

Enter: strategic consultancy for startups

There are so many definitions of who exactly is a strategic consultant. When people first hear of this term, a stereotypical image comes to mind: a self-proclaimed white-collar industry expert giving theoretical recommendations in a room full of business officials.

But strategic consulting is so much more than just that.

In spite of so much confusion around this topic, we gave ourselves a bit of liberty in coming up with our own definition:

A great strategic consultancy will not only be able to provide your brand with right decisions but also with directions to implement them.

And that can be applied to virtually anything: product, customer experience, technical strategy or company’s digital identity for instance.

Strategic consultancy firms are especially relevant in the cloud computing sector. In fact, there is a prevalence of cloud strategy consultants in the market today. The services offered range from building optimal solutions for cloud migration to proposing a great cloud architecture or application.

Strategic Consultancies also help businesses with something called DigitalTransformation. This process represents a major foundational change in which companies deliver value to their users. It’s all about adopting the right digital technology to transform the core of the said company (think: manual non-digital processes being replaced with new digital technology).

Digital transformation is therefore a rather necessary disruption.

Another great advantage strategic cloud consultants offer their clients is a cloud transformation. In this process, the consultancy creates a comprehensive roadmap to an optimal cloud environment. Your consultant will carefully analyze the current state of your business and technical requirements, only to later create a plan of action.

Some of the potential benefits of such a transformation includes significantly cutting on your cloud costs, increasing the use of analytics to measure your operational success rates, and so on.

Many will argue: do startups actually need strategic consultancy?After all, adding another expense might sound like too big of a burden for a company that is still in its launching phase, with a limited amount of operations and resources.

The short answer to that is: yes, they most certainly do. And here’s why:

Accurate Milestones

A great strategic consultancy can aid your business in creating an effective market strategy. Your consultant will gather insights and data to build both customer and competitive analysis, something that can help you with breaking down your company vision into accurate milestones and building a comprehensive product roadmap. 

Proper Mindset

It’s fair to say that starting a business is no easy game. There is a set of proper practices that are followed within the tech industry, as well as any other. They are implemented to keep a company’s operations efficient and streamlined, and by following them you and your team ensure to focus on growing your business the right way. Not every startup is equipped with the expert knowledge that is needed to stay on the right mindset. But a strategic consultant can most certainly help you get there.

Know The Market

Strategic consultancies possess deep expertise across the several industries that they work in. As a tech startup owner, you might know your sector to an extent, but having someone knowledgeable of other niches that your company might potentially expand into proves to be beneficial.  

Lots & Lots of Data

Consulting firms have exclusive access to a stupendous amount of data, countless analytics for businesses to make the right choices, as well as hundreds of case studies that can certainly map back to your startup.

SMEs

Subject Matter Experts, also often referred to as SMEs, are individuals who have authority in a particular industry or area of knowledge. When you’re launching your startup, you definitely want the most output from your limited resources. As consultancy companies are the ultimate SMEs in certain industries, a startup could potentially benefit from their services to handle its operations, marketing, development, finance and other areas.

Another Perspective

A strategic consultant is also providing your startup with a valuable third perspective, which could in essence, help you and your team contain your subjective bias and differences and instead focus on what really matters: driving value for your company.

CONCLUSION

So, to hire or not to hire?

Considering the many valuable advantages of getting a strategic consultancy team to help your startup, this might or might not be a relevant question anymore. At the end of the day, the ultimate decision of whether to seek a consultant should be fully based around various needs of your business.

Prism Cloud is all about creating unique digital solutions. We are passionate about transforming the digital space through our unique strategy led, design driven services.

Learn more about Prism Cloud by getting in touch with us.