Your Business Needs Outside Help When…

15 Situations When It’s Time to Hire a Consultant or Freelancer

It feels great to build your business from the ground up.  Along the way you learn quite a few new skills, try out new tools or apps that make it easy for ‘anyone’ to - build websites, create advertising, take ‘professional’ photography, send marketing emails, build a social following, fulfill orders, keep track of finances and accounting, manage projects, and basically “DIAY” - you got that - “do-it-ALL-yourself.  

Too bad no one has created that cloning app yet. You are still only 1 person - or maybe a very small team of people.  And you are probably not an expert in all of the things needed to run your business.  That’s not to say you didn’t do an excellent job up until this point putting it all together.  But there is that point in every business where is it no longer sustainable to keep running with the DIAY mentality.  

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Here is a list of key indicators it’s time to bring in outside help:

1. You need the time to focus on higher payoff work - when DIAY “do it all yourself” distracts you from what you do best.  It’s always to the detriment of your business.
2. You need to focus on fewer priorities - when everything is a priority nothing is. An expert can help you identify the biggest area of impact.
3. You need specialized expertise to help you know what to do to keep your clients happy.  You can read 10 articles on each topic you need to dig into, however that will not only slow things down but also put you in a state of information overload.
4. You don't have experience to know what to do with your KPIs and customer trends. Great you have data! Now what? Which areas are healthy, which aren’t and what actions/initiatives will make the biggest impact the fastest?
5. You need someone to help you gather information and feedback about and from your customers. You’re missing data! Without key insights into your top performance areas, customers and their behavior, you will miss the mark so when growth slows there’s no way to get it going again.
6. You don't want to commit to permanent employees to get your various priorities complete (whether it’s marketing, development, design, finance, or any other full-time position). Maybe it’s not enough for one person to do or you simply don’t feel ready to bring someone on with the big risk that you might need to let them go in only a few months.
7. You need someone to look at your data and give you solid recommendations on where to focus. Not everyone is a data person! Bring in the right people to make sure your data isn’t misleading and validation is completed so recommendations make sense to your business.
8. You're not sure what type of new full-time expertise you need at the current point in your growth. So test the waters! Think you need a marketing person, but not sure what level or what focus? Try out several different marketing consultants with different areas of focus. By working with various experts, you can get a better idea of what you and your business needs. 
9. You want a guru to teach you how to fish instead of hooking customers purely by trial and error. Bring in an expert who will increase your knowledge base and leave you in a good place. 
10. You and your team are blinded by bias - a fresh set of eyes will help you better understand what your customers are seeing.
11. You can’t see the forest through the trees - having someone help you step back and question some of your actions can be a great thing.  You might have a big ‘Aha’ moment when explaining the why or what of some part of your business to your outside partner.  You might also come to the realization that a lot of what you have been doing isn’t critical to the growth of the forest and has only served as a distraction or time-suck!
12. You need someone to help you stop wasting money on bad marketing.  As statisticians love to quote, ‘correlation does not equal causation’.  Get a better idea of what is really working and not working in order to save time, energy, sweat and tears.
13. You need someone to push you (or your team) a little outside of your comfort zone. We all get stuck sometimes! There are things we know really well or like to do, but these are not always the things that will make our business successful. An outside expert can fill the gap by teaching us a new technique or do it for you in the short term allowing you to become more comfortable with it or to decide to hire someone else to do that task permanently.
14. You need help understanding your target customers’ needs better and how to best interact with them. Broad targeting might work at first but as you improve efficiencies, whether for your own wallet or your investors, it’s time to narrow the focus to get really good at bringing in customers without overspending while keeping them engaged for many orders to come.
15. You don't have the time to spend going through the hiring process for a permanent employee. Hiring takes a lot of time! That’s not to say you shouldn’t be diligent when finding the right outside resource, but you might be able to get away with a lot fewer ‘interviews’ than with hiring an employee.  Many outside experts can also get started right away and know exactly what they need, so you don’t have to invest as much upfront time getting them up to speed. 

Fits like a glove

At the end of day - hiring an external partner is about finding the right fit.  You need to find not only someone with the right set of expertise and knowledge, but also someone with whom your personality jives; along with other members of your team that the person will be working closely with.  I’ve seen relationships with outside partners fail simply because internal team members didn’t know how to work with the external team members. See how flexible that person is to meeting your needs, do they have a package that works in your budget and delivers a valuable return for your business? Do they have a way for you to ‘trial’ working together?  How easy will it be to start working with this consultant?  Hiring the wrong partner can be a costly mistake, but hiring the right partner will be a huge asset to your business, complimenting your strengths and filling your gaps, while showing you a valuable return.

Stay tuned for our “Shake Off Your DIAY Mentality Series” where we will dive deeper into the what and how of the above indicators.

To discuss your project (those areas you need to bring in outside expert for), fill in our project request form. Start to dispel the need in your organization for DIAY today.