Gone are the days when a professional management consultant worked on your tasks only on a large, complex and expensive project. The flexibility of my own consulting practice gives you an extensive spectrum of opportunities to empower the management potential of your business with consulting support and avoiding to initiate a long and complex consulting project.
Typically, during a consulting project, client managers and shareholders ask additional questions and involve a consultant in solving additional, albeit small, but complicated and important tasks. Having accumulated a lot of experience in such assignments, I offer you to benefit from various scenarios to improve the accuracy of decisions and enhance your management team without additional burdens and hassles, which always accompanies complex projects.
You can treat this as acquiring an expertise, management support, outsourcing of management functions, etc. We can negotiate almost any method and format. Below are just some of the most popular consulting support options.
Regular One-on-One Sessions
You may need a reliable guide to a new, uncertain and unpredictable task or situation you are facing for the very first time, and you feel that your inherent confidence may somewhat showing signs of strain.
Or you’re looking for a professional brother-in-arms, a trusted consigliere with whom you can confide and productively discuss a complex task, situation or, if necessary, a working relationship with your boss, colleagues or subordinates.
May be you are looking for a sparring partner to criticize ideas and solutions, or to generate them, a professional with diverse experience who can understand your business situation and challenge your opinions and views.
Whatever it is, we will be able to determine the most appropriate format for you to work with and what we will jointly achieve through such regular meetings.
We will communicate by phone or video, usually weekly (to be discussed), review and analyze your progress in detail and adjust the dynamics. You can look at it as a kind of “personal board meetings”, where we work on what brings you the expected result.
In the process of our communication, as the practice of such consulting support shows, you will acquire a new viewpoint on the situation and new thoughts on its resolution. Often, the managers, I perform such sessions with, develop new skills or sharpen existing ones and draw from my diverse experience.
As with various ways to improve self-organization, such as time management, meditation techniques, or writing a diary, regular reflection on the work done, the decisions made (or not made), the issues, concern, etc., has the most beneficial effect on the purity and clarity of a leader’s thinking, and therefore his or her actions. Add the perspective and opinion of an experienced consultant, feedback and, if necessary, criticism, and you will receive ongoing and reliable reinforcement in your regular management routine.
As part of the sessions, I can also take on certain complex tasks, both one-off and regular. It all depends on your situation and needs.
Contact me so we can discuss the details and start working together.
Consulting Support at Regular Meetings
I have attended a wide variety of regular meetings on various serious issues. A weekly overall planning meeting of a large holding company, a multi-month period of reorganization of a very diversified group, a multistage implementation of a complex ERP system, a strategy execution support, where I took some management functions to outsource or duplicate them to ensure reliability – are just some examples. Sometimes such meetings were attended by several company executives, sometimes by dozens of participants (shareholders and directors) from various organizations working on a common task. My role was also different. Somewhere, I had to “just” capture details and nuances to prepare a report on corrective management actions. Somewhere, I was responsible for decisions or weighed in with my opinion.
There is one thing that unites my participation in them: I was aware of all the nuances of a specific complex task and acted in the interests of the client. At some critical moments, I managed to “reverse” the situation to avoid very adverse consequences.
If you have a long (or short) and complex task that requires the involvement of many managers and difficult multi-step decisions, I will be happy to bring my experience to its successful implementation. My participation can be as rare as once a quarter or as often as several times a week. With the help of convenient consulting support for meetings, you will significantly increase the probability of a task accomplished properly.
Drop me a note to start with it today.
Professional Consulting Support for Startups
Consulting support can be very useful for a startup, even at an early stage, helping to turn your bold ideas into reality. Being an entrepreneur not only in spirit, but also with practical experience in creating and developing various businesses, I can closely relate and understand the challenges and worries of a person who creates a new one. Multiply this by twenty years of work on multitudinous consulting projects, and you will get a powerful source of confident expertise and insights to tap into to increase the success probability of your endeavor.
I can perform in different roles (or combine them), for example:
As a “pair of extra hands”:
- Market, clients, competition research and analysis
- Creating documentation for investors, such as a business plan, financial models, presentations, etc.
- Rolling updates of the product/technology requirements for agile adaptation to the market during the launch phase
- And so on
Support your team in certain situations (regularly or occasionally):
- Constructive critique and thorough analysis of the product / technology for the selected segment / niche or when pivoting
- Creating and working with you on a live pitching of your project (even participate in one)
- Independent and professional feedback
- Coaching and mentoring on specific business or management issues
- Keep in touch with management advice on a wide range of issues
As a conceptual (but practical) advisor:
- Sort out really valuable ideas from the bulk and turn them into working decisions
- Assemble or refine a business model
- Create a balanced and carefully thought through development plan, “go-to-market” strategy or a “road map” to penetrate the market and subsequent expand the client base
- Formulate a strong positioning
- Set up a gathering and analysis system for decision-making in client development and business adaptation
- Clearly identify problems in interaction with the new market and formulate workable ideas for business adaptation and development
We can determine the scope and depth of such support depending on your situation and needs. Let me know if you need support from an experienced professional with entrepreneurial experience.
Support with implementation of an IT system
At the dawn of my career in management consulting, I worked with business processes for several years in-depth. I modeled, described, optimized business processes and was engaged in their design, reengineering and regulation. My experience with business processes includes a contribution to UES reform, building an operational risk management (process based) for a national-wide telecom operator and optimization in a large holding company.
Through the lens of such experience and a deep understanding of the process approach, I sometimes shudder when witnessing how IT systems are being implemented in various companies. With rare, single exceptions, the decision to “cement” business processes (the operational essence of the business and its competitive advantages!) is made by IT specialists, rare of whom have economic or management education and experience. In some cases, companies get a “working IT system”, which is designed not in terms of your goals (even not long-term), but in terms of “hassle-free” implementation. In some cases, the business is no longer able to function successfully in the new “Procrustes’ bed” of a freshly implemented IT system.
You can avoid such errors with the help of consulting support.
If your plans include an implementation of an IT system that will affect all or a significant part of your business, I can stand by your side and help you with the right decisions for such a complicated and challenging task. The formats and depth of my involvement can vary. At a minimum, participate in discussions about common approaches and plans, as well as key decisions. Or take on the organization of work on business processes in your company, clearly define the tasks and plans, build a team and provide regular supervision to support the implementation of an IT system in a way you profit from. I can also be very useful in setting tasks for the IT company, and even in choosing one, with subsequent regular support during design and implementation phases.
Depending on your company’s accumulated competencies and needs, the role and degree of consulting support can be quite different.
Send me a message to start discussing how I can be useful to you with IT implementation.
Business support
Sometimes it happens that you are facing a task for which the company does not have a manager with the right competencies, or he / she is already overloaded. The task might be one-off, but serious, complicated and important. And to postpone it is not an option.
I often, at the request of clients, had to solve all kinds of complex management tasks that any business can face. Sometimes such tasks were a novelty for me, and I had no experience with such before. However, “the client is always right” and I always found a way (and time) to solve them within a scope of a certain project.
Most often, it was a job to structure and analyze complex, sometimes chaotic information and draft a clear structured analytical report to make a certain decision to be as informed as possible. Sometimes it was participation in the general meeting of regional dealers, clarify a complex management situation, search for potential strategic partners, buyers or sellers for mergers / acquisitions, etc.
But it can be any other task that requires serious skills, knowledge and abilities of a professional management consultant.
Let me know if you need to solve such a task and we will find the right consulting support that suits you in order to solve it successfully.
Other consulting support options
The examples listed above are only a few of the usually asked for. If you have another idea of how a management consultant can help you with consulting support, send me a message. I am sure we will find a way to implement your ideas. It’s hard to surprise me with your ideas about a possible format of a consulting support!
In case you need more than just consulting support, our cooperation can take various forms.
My work has already helped
to improve management in companies in 11 countries, operating in 137 cities
The Clients Are Saying:
Vitaly’s opinion sometimes dissonates with our well-established ideas, but he knows how to be very convincing
Besides the impeccable content of the study, I would like to note a vivid and convincing presentation of the results. Impressive!
Excellent response to suggestions and comments in the course of the project and an in-depth knowledge of the “Strategy Development” theme. Much was beyond my expectations.
In the project “Strategic Management Design and Implementation” it is especially worth mentioning Vitaly’s commitment, despite the external circumstance. All promises were fulfilled timely and in full. Even a bit more!
We are grateful for the high-quality and honest work and looking forward to new cooperation!
In the “Strategy development” project, the result exceeded expectations in terms of depth and quality. Professionally done work!
The results delivered actually exceeded the required scope: we received a greater degree of detail on the criteria and a more complete list in the questionnaires. The result exceeded our expectations.
I can’t help but praise Vitaly’s determination. The project has always returned on its way to the planned results, despite all the objective difficulties.
Working with Vitaly is comfortable and productive
The consistency and persuasiveness of Vitaly’s actions helped us to carry out a difficult and complex business reorganization without complications. We learn first hand how much a solid experience in a transformation means.
Your musical tastes are so-so, but your vision is impressive, complex and has a long horizon.
Strategic changes are always a challenge. With Vitaly’s participation, we felt confident in their implementation.
Apparently, Vitaly’s experience in the Norton-Kaplan’s company was not in vain. The developed Balanced Scorecard facilitated greatly our long-term management and mobilized leadership.
Thanks to Vitaly, we began to manage the company strategically
We have made organizational changes faster and more efficiently than expected from the start. Everything was very professional.
In developing and implementing the Balanced Scorecard, all the work was done in good faith. Our expectations were either met or exceeded.
Our project was not typical, as it focused on criteria for evaluating the strategic process in a broad context. We are quite satisfied with the result. We received all the information we needed.
Vitaly’s excellent quality is his ability to become quickly integrated into the team and look at the company from the inside, which allows him to achieve maximum results in the task at hand.
Vitaly really knows how to solve complex business problems!
The consistency and persuasiveness of Vitaly’s actions helped us to carry out a difficult and complex business reorganization without complications. We learn first hand how much a solid experience in a transformation means.