Importance of Strategy Consultation for Your Business

The very definition of Strategy can be “a plan with the aim of realizing long-term goals," and business organizations regularly engage with strategy consultants for support in developing and implementing business strategies. Strategy consulting firms emphasizes on private sector clients and helps them in developing strategies in the corporate, organizational or functional field and also helps government sector organizations and institutions with economic policy.

Strategy consultants are hired by clients to support them with decision making in strategic format, which includes the development of strategy and sometimes the execution of strategic plans. Strategy consultants specifically work for executives and high-ranked managers. By doing so, strategic advisors can help companies by redefining their vision, mission and strategy. They support them with market entry into a new market or with a shift towards a new business model. Government and institutions are bit different from in taking benefit of strategic consultancy that evolves mainly around economic policies. But in the case of mergers & acquisitions, strategy consultants typically support in strategic activities of the M&A process such as setting the M&A strategy, executing the commercial due diligence, creating the merger business case and/or designing an unified roadmap.

At the same time, the work of a strategy consultation firm can cover all major functional strategies, spanning strategic work across the full value chain. For instance, strategic consultants are often asked to define commercial strategies in various domains like sales & marketing, draft pricing, customer channel and product market combinations. In the case of HR, consultants can also contribute to human capital strategies, including talent management business cases. In the field of operations, strategy consultants are picked to draft operating models and tie them with higher-level business objectives.

With the rise of digital and technology as the new player in the sector of strategy, or even a key competitive differentiator according to some, digital strategy has grown into a large service area within the sphere of strategy consulting over the past few years. Digital strategic consultants support customers with business functions that are well positioned to adopt systems and tools, as in the method of high-level IT architecture work.

The point is, the strategy consultant would probably focus on a single, pressing management issue and do everything in their power to address it. It is that kind of phenomena where all strategy consulting is technically management consulting, but not all management consulting is strategy consulting. The difference between the two really comes down to the specification of services.

Strategy consultants usually work for the company’s CEO, and with the firm’s most pressing and broadest issues. The engagements they would work on are more likely to be short (3-6 months), high-impact (one of the CEO’s top 3 issues) and relevant (time-sensitive), which means they have a direct impact on the future of the company.

A real positive side for strategy and operations consulting is that it offers opportunities to work on a variety of projects, and firms like BCG boast about their creative approach that is new for each company. For an avid learner, his/her intellectual curiosity will be stretched and their hunger for meeting new challenges as they will always be doing something new (at least for the first 2 years).

Across the globe, thousands of strategy consulting firms are there. Yet, the number of firms that have a global reach and reputation is limited to a much smaller number who are capable to place themselves in the top chart of the market. So, there is always this demand for good strategy consultants in the market but the supply is definitely limited.