WHY WOULD YOU HIRE A STARTUP CONSULTANT?
Hire a startup consultant if your business is early stage startup and looking to find your first customers. A startup consultant is essentially a sales and marketing Swiss army knife to grow your business. A good way to think about a startup consultant is like a Director of;
- Digital Strategy
- Digital Marketing and
- Inbound Sales
When you start a business you have a lot of work to do but a limited budget of both time and money. You need a broad base of skill sets and expertise but can’t afford to hire several people, let alone take the time to recruit and train them too. Hire a startup consultant to save time, money and learn from someone that has been there done that.
“Good entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes, GREAT entrepreneurs learn from other peoples mistakes!” – Unknown
WHAT STAGE IS YOUR BUSINESS AT?
Idea Stage
The intent of a market research study is to determine if a broad market opportunity exists for your business idea. The results of the study is a solid understanding of the competitive landscape and a well-defined market opportunity.
Early Sales
The intent of a market opportunity analysis is to determine if specific sales opportunities exist within a market opportunity. The results of a market opportunity analysis is a good understanding or your target customer and qualified sales leads.
Grow Sales
A market entry strategy is a plan to acquire customers and grow sales. A good market entry strategy will take into account your available resources, constraints and plot the fastest path to grow sales. If you have a small team and limited resources, we can help!
HOW DO I KNOW IF I SHOULD HIRE A STARTUP CONSULTANT FOR MY BUSINESS?
The startup consultant service tends to be a good fit with customer funded (boot strapped) startups that have early customer revenue. Our expertise is in growing revenue with limited marketing budgets. We help our clients generate excellent customer lifetime value returns and understand their customers better. One of our super powers is learning to speak your customer’s language very quickly.
For pre-revenue startups, our Opportunity Assessment will help measure the size of a market opportunity with an eye to finding the shortest path to new customers. We will cold call and interview your potential customers with the intent of learning what is important to them. The purpose of an opportunity assessment is to discover your value proposition and put it in a language that your customer will understand. An opportunity assessment will enable your startup to start conducting marketing experiments to generate leads and acquire customers.
If your startup or small business is a little more established and has early revenue our “Market Entry Strategy” may be a good fit. If you have early revenue and a few paying customers we can help you connect the dots and spot the common trends. Successful market entry is the subtle art of balancing available resources (time, money and people) with cost effective customer acquisition. When you are starting out often the most important thing isn’t what you do, but what you choose NOT to do. If you are a customer funded startup then focusing scarce resources where they will yield the greatest return is essential. As consultants specializing in working with small businesses, we can help you objectively assess your market entry options with an eye to picking the path with the greatest probability of success.