The Business Strategy Consultant: A Job Profile

The business strategy consultant helps companies engage in strategic planning and fresh methods of business development. The business strategy consultant has come to be seen as increasingly important in today's business world because increased wealth has led to increases in the sheer number of businesses, which in turn has led to more competition within industries. At the same time, the increased demand for employees in the business world has led to a watering down of the talent pool, resulting in a loss of original thinking that business strategy consultants seek to help companies regain through their highly informed outsider perspectives.

Whenever any endeavor becomes too loaded with information and data, it becomes necessary in time for there to be specialists, so that each specialty can manage the large amount of data within its sector or subdivision. Businesses are no different. However, the inherent danger with specialization is that the different groups become less and less able to communicate with each other, and the forest gets obscured by all the trees. This is where the business strategy consultant comes in. The business strategy consultant, while a kind of specialist in his own right, focuses on the overarching strategy so as to unite the different specialists in a given company.

As Fred Gluck, managing director of McKinsey & Co, stated in 1994 at the dawn of business strategy consulting's rise, ''The more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've concluded that what really leads to outstanding consultants — and I think then outstanding performance in almost anything you can think of — is the willingness to really take risks, take risks with your thinking, to take risks in how far you're trying to push the client, and not to be conservative and too cautious. I had a conversation with a colleague recently who was learning how to ski, and he said that, in the course of his ski week, he concluded that, if you weren't falling, you weren't learning, and I think that's, you know, a general rule of life. You've got to take risks and be willing to fail.''

Bill Gates, one year later in his book The Road Ahead, wrote, ''As technology makes it easier for a business to find and collaborate with outside expertise, a huge and competitive market for consultants will arise.''

The Process

One of the most highly touted tools of the business strategy consultant's trade in the last 20 years has been the Six Sigma methodology developed by Motorola's Bill Smith in 1986 in order to reduce or eliminate defects in products.

The basic assertions of Six Sigma are the following:

Continuous effort to reduce variation in process outputs is key to business success
Manufacturing and business processes can be measured, analyzed, improved, and controlled
Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management

The business strategy consultant would seek to implement something like Six Sigma within a company, customizing it to suit the particular needs and objectives of that company. According to Motorola’s Six Sigma Dictionary, this strategy would be implemented at all levels, from the Yellow Belts — employees who have been trained in Six Sigma techniques as part of a corporate-wide initiative but have not completed a Six Sigma project and are not expected to actively engage in quality improvement activities — all the way up to the Executive Leadership, which includes the CEO and other top management team members. These latter employees are responsible for setting up a vision for Six Sigma implementation. They also enable the other role holders to have the freedom and resources to explore new ideas for breakthrough improvements.

Business strategy consultants also seek to implement strategic planning and new methods of business development by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research techniques. They generally use computer programs in conjunction with their own notes and thinking to help them clarify, organize, and analyze their conclusions.

Fair Isaac Consulting, which specializes in serving Fortune 1000 corporations, defines the business strategy consultant as one who provides a company's leadership ''deep insight into what…customers want, what they are willing to pay for, and how valuable each customer is to the business [in order to] help…determine target segments, identify the sales and service proposition for each, and develop an execution plan.''

Some business strategy consultant positions may entail just working with a certain department within a company. It depends on how deep a company perceives its difficulties or needs to be.

Compensation

Seen as highly knowledgeable professionals, business strategy consultants can make a pretty penny. The average yearly income for this profession is well above $70,000, and in many areas, especially metropolitan areas like Boston, the average is six figures. While certain positions under the umbrella of business strategy consulting, such as HR consultants, pay on average between $45,000 and $50,000 per year, others pay over $200,000 per year in some areas. The broader the scope of implementation, the greater the pay.

Conclusion

Business strategy consultants can make a great deal of money, and they will remain important for some time to come. Consequently, this is certainly one career worth considering.

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The Business Strategy Consultant: A Job Profile