At Mut-Con, we are business consultants. But what does a business consultant do? Put simply, we help our clients start and/ or grow successful businesses. We have developed our complete service catalogue around that philosophy.
It’s not so much what we do but what you need us to do. What we could do that would help you achieve entrepreneurial success, and we continue to evolve our offering to keep up with the ever-changing business world.
You can rely on us to help you streamline your business and build for growth with solutions for business planning, business funding, financial management, digital marketing, operational management and much more. Furthermore, we strive to be knowledgeable.
We invest time and effort in knowing all the facets of a successful business. With the support of Mut-Con, you can focus on what matters most in your entrepreneurial journey, meeting your client’s needs. And you can rest assured we’ll take care of the rest.
While traditional consultants are experts in one field, we continue to add to our expertise. As the adage goes, too many cooks spoil the broth. We strive to be the single source of insights you need to succeed. We leverage our knowledge of your business to give you incremental solutions across all departments that help you grow.
How Does Mut-Con Business Consulting Help Clients?
As business consultants, we pride ourselves on a data-centric approach to everything we do. We leverage existing data within your business and enrich it with industry data we have gathered over time to give you business insights that work.
After all, why invest in a partner to engage in guesswork, when you can do guesswork just as well yourself? The simple answer is you can’t afford to. Moreover, you don’t have to. The modern business environment generates tons of data for you to take advantage of. From our service catalogue, here’s what we can do for you as a business consultant:
Identify and Solve Potential Threats
Business failure is always looming over businesses, whether they are new or growing businesses. Business threats are so ubiquitous as business consultants that it can feel as if we spend more time helping you avoid failure than helping you grow.
It is however a role we fully embrace nonetheless. Because of the failure rates businesses face, particularly small businesses, it’s a necessary service. Generally:
- the business failure rate is 20% in the first year of operation
- a further 45% of businesses will fail within the first five years, and
- 65% of all businesses don’t make it to the ten-year mark.
The numbers can be even more daunting for a tough economy like our South African one. As a business consultant, we need to stay aware of any potential threats that could trip you up if we are to take you to the ten-year mark.
These could be threats within your business or external threats faced by the economy as a whole. Not only do we help you identify potential threats, we help future-proof your business as well. There are numerous reasons why businesses fail, and some could be unique to your business.
That is why we are always invested in staying ahead of the ever-changing business landscape and keeping your business protected. In as much as we build our solutions to help give your business the advantage and make the most of opportunities, we also build them to help your business navigate threats and future-proof you against potential failure.
The statistics and probabilities don’t look good for small businesses, but with a business consultant like Mut-Con, they are just that, statistics and probabilities.
Identify and Take Advantage of Potential Opportunities
While as entrepreneurs we are always haunted by the spectre of failure, it’s not all doom and gloom. Businesses present us with opportunities every day. You need the support of a seasoned business consultant to quickly identify and take advantage of these opportunities.
Not only are there always competitors looking for the same opportunities, but opportunities also tend not to last long. Our role as a business consultant is 2 fold when it comes to opportunities.
Firstly, we help you identify opportunities to take advantage of. Secondly, we help you make the most of these opportunities. The first step is somewhat more difficult. Business opportunities are not always easy to identify.
It’s marginally easier when you actively research new opportunities, but this is not something businesses are always able to do. Particularly small businesses. It’s costly and very time-consuming.
As a business consultant, we help you unlock business opportunities during the regular course of business. You can find plenty of business opportunities in your daily operations.
Reviewing customer feedback, interacting with your products, revising your original goals, looking at your competition, exploring new technologies, looking into partnerships and much more can be sources of overlooked opportunities.
Not only is this process more sustainable, it’s also a gift that keeps on giving. It’s a process you can repeat often to consistently come up with new opportunities. Once we’ve helped you build a system for continually identifying opportunities, we then help you take advantage of these opportunities.
Our skills as business planners shine in this regard. We can help you develop a quick lean business plan to help you map out your opportunity. This plan includes everything from financial planning, profit analysis, market and competition analysis as well as everything this new direction for the business will entail.
The best part, we have built a lean business plan template you can try for yourself. Once we have ironed out the details, you can count on us to help you make the most of your opportunity. And we are here to help you with every opportunity you uncover.
Facilitate Business Growth
It’s said that sharks need to keep swimming to stay alive. While this doesn’t hold true for all species, it holds true for a large number. Their respiratory system is designed around movement to circulate oxygen-rich water, meaning even as they sleep, some extent of motion is necessary.
This holds true for a lot of businesses as well. They need to keep forward momentum to survive. Except, in this case, forward momentum is growing. Your business needs to continue growing to survive.
The business landscape is always changing, and your business needs to change and grow with it to stay relevant. Beyond just survival, growth is a good thing for your business. It’s desirable.
Just as not all sharks need to stay in motion to survive, not all businesses need growth, but an overwhelming majority do. From our experience, you are likely looking to grow your business as well.
At Mut-Con, we are specialists in business growth. We have helped a lot of entrepreneurs like you find business growth. We have learnt from these experiences, and we are now positioned to help you find growth in your venture.
So whether you are looking to increase revenue, produce more products or services, expand your customer base or market, increase your staff complement or increase your profits, we are the partner you need to talk to.
Manage Change and Transitions
Whether you are tackling threats, pursuing opportunities or growing your business, change is an inevitable part of entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, change is not only difficult to implement but hard to embrace as well.
Change can be a very painful process, in any aspect of life. We have built ourselves to prepare, support and help your business through change. At our core, we are business change management consultants because we believe in transforming clients.
We have built a systematic approach to helping you change your processes, technology, goals, values, and even your vision and mission. As business consultants, we go beyond the internal implications of change.
We extend our services to manage the market impact of your business transformation. A business transformation exercise with Mut-Con should always win you a bigger market and put you ahead of your competition.
Our main goals when it comes to change management are to:
- Ensure complete buy-in from all your stakeholders to any change program.
- Ensure demonstrable improvement across your organisation from any change program.
- Minimise disruptions to your operations from any change program.
- Draft, communicate, implement and improve the best strategy for any change program you may be looking to implement.
Staff Training and Upskilling
The success of your business is largely built on the strength of the team you put together. Even with a business consultant as good as Mut-Con, with time, you will need to build a team of your own to carry your vision.
That means building a team with a diverse set of skills. We can help you bridge the gap between the generic skills of an educational qualification and the specific skills your team needs to drive your business forward.
Moreover, we can help you keep your staff skills up to date and in line with your changing business environment. Whether you are adopting new technology, exploring new markets, faced with new competition or introducing new products and services, we can help you keep your staff upskilled and ready to face any challenges.
Because we work with your business in other aspects, our training is not generic. We tailor it to your specific needs and make sure it’s designed to help meet your goals.
We believe in people over tools, but for people to drive goals, you need them to understand not only tools but also what those tools are meant to achieve. Who better to train your staff than a business consultant with a full understanding of your vision, mission, goals and values?
Bring Fresh Ideas into the Business
An often overlooked advantage of working in a team is the ability to bring in new ideas. Even the brightest among us eventually run out of ideas without a soundboard to bounce off of. Sometimes a new perspective is needed to refresh ideas.
Sometimes, even the worst ideas being brought to the table can spark a new train of thought that restarts the idea mill. We pride ourselves on bringing ideas to the table as business consultants.
Our business is built to generate ideas. Naturally. We like to analyse, experiment, and research. Ideas are a by-product of our work and we bring ideas to the table for our clients.
In addition, we help you generate business ideas just like your own team would. As your business consultant, we are invested in every aspect of your business, beyond just what you engage and pay us for.
We believe it’s an important part of providing you with the best service. With time, we gain an intimate understanding of your business, just like an internal team would. That’s what makes our ideas great.
They are not built on ideals, speculation or fancy. Instead, they are built on what happens in your business every day. They are ideas you can easily implement to grow your business.
Bird’s Eye View of Businesses
Business success requires an entrepreneur to know every aspect of their micro and macroeconomic landscape. For small businesses where all responsibilities rest on the same shoulders, this can be overwhelming.
Sometimes all you want to do is produce your product or service and there’s nothing wrong with that. A love for business doesn’t mean you love everything happening in the business world. A love for what you do, your clients and your industry should be enough.
That’s why we are business consultants. We invest the time to get an understanding of what’s happening in the business world so that you don’t have to. We offer a different perspective.
Because of this, we are a consultant you can use as a sounding board to measure the potential impact of your decisions before you go all in. And with that, you get the best of all worlds.
You get the freedom to focus on what you know, hone your skills and become the best at what you do, while also running your business in a manner that takes into account all the external factors that could affect the success of your business.
Mut-Con Solutions
Our solutions are designed to provide a complete suite of products a modern business needs to succeed. We continue to grow and evolve these solutions, all with the singular goal of giving our clients an advantage.
We not only invest in tools but also have an in-depth knowledge of applying those tools to drive results. Mut-Con partners with brands on a similar mission to ours, growing businesses. Through this never-ending process of growth and re-invention, we have identified the following solutions as key to our client’s growth;
New Business Insights
At Mut-Con we love entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship and everything business. It’s the reason why we are business consultants. As business consultants, there are few things we love as much as helping entrepreneurs start a business.
New business consulting was our first business solution. We continue to fly the flag for entrepreneurship and we look forward to helping more entrepreneurs pursue their dream.
Our new business consulting is designed to give you everything you need to get a new business started. This is perhaps best exemplified in our business starter package. We designed it with new entrepreneurs in mind. It’s a collection of all the services that have been crucial for all our new business clients in the past.
We will carry you through every stage of starting a new business, including:
- Validating your business idea
- Conducting your feasibility and viability studies
- Registering your business
- Drawing up a good business plan and company profile
- Seeking funding for your business
- Getting started with your business
We have built ourselves to be the only business consultant you need to start and grow a successful business.
Business Planning and Documents
Your business needs the right documents to communicate with the right stakeholders. A business plan is not only a great operational document to manage the growth of your business, but it’s also a great document to present to potential funders.
A business profile on the other hand is a great marketing tool to sell your products and services to potential clients. Whether you need a helping hand in crafting the right business documents or you need a business consultant to craft them for you, we have a solution for you.
Our business documents are comprehensive. They have helped many entrepreneurs like you get funding, win clients, and successfully run their businesses. As Winston Churchill said:
“He who fails to plan is planning to fail”.
Our business documents are not just meant for your stakeholders, they are great planning tools. Through your business plan and profile, we not only establish your company’s identity but also detail your vision, mission, and goals as well as how you intend to achieve them.
As a business consultant, these documents allow us to not only buy into this vision but also make sure we are actively helping you achieve it. Your business documents are a guide post that can align everyone to the same goals.
Online Presence
The online world has brought so many new opportunities for small businesses. Not only has it opened up business opportunities that never existed before, but it has also allowed small businesses to compete with their larger counterparts.
Small businesses that build and promote the right online assets gain an advantage over their competition. Regardless of size. We offer a full range of digital marketing services to help our clients succeed online.
Our digital marketing services are built to establish your business online and help your clients find you. We offer everything from website development to social media marketing, email marketing, paid advertising and everything in between.
As your business consultant, it’s not enough that we get you found online, we want you to stand out. We want to make the kind of impression that makes clients want to engage with your business.
Mut-Con leverages as many free tools as we can to help you get your business in front of clients while managing costs. We can, for example, help you leverage a free Mailchimp account to help you send emails like the best in your industry.
Alternatively, use your free social media pages to build a strong community for your business. We are a business consultant that strongly believes in the value of an online presence. Because of this, we make sure to help you build one no matter what resources you have.
A strong digital presence matters, and we are committed to helping you build yours.
Business Financial Management
Poor financial management is one of the reasons small businesses fail, one of the top reasons. It’s pretty understandable, small business financial management can be a catch-22.
While it’s very important, it can be very expensive. Accountants don’t come cheap, especially the good ones. We not only provide our clients with financial management services, but we also help them get started with their financial management.
While you’ll likely need an accountant sooner rather than later, you can always get started on your own. This is not only important because you need to start keeping good financial records for your business from day one, but it also helps drive the cost down when you finally get an accountant down the line.
It may be a little daunting, but it’s not as complex as it may initially seem. With a great tool in hand like, say Zoho Books, you can take care of a lot of the busy work in your accounting.
When you finally bring in a professional, you’ll have cut down the workload and effectively managed the cost. A business consultant like Mut-Con should help with more complex tasks, not recording transactions.
These could be producing financial statements, ensuring tax compliance, analysing financial performance, and more. However, these are tasks you should invest in as well. We help our clients identify key areas to analyse in their business finances to ensure a growing business.
Data Analytics
We believe in a data-based approach to business decision-making. We are gamblers as much as the next guy, but we just don’t gamble with our client’s businesses. Guesswork has no place in the Mut-Con strategy.
As business consultants, we encourage our clients to adopt this approach as well. We open every engagement by establishing the right measurement and analysis protocols with our clients, and we share these resources so they can improve their decision-making as well.
We can help our clients improve their business from top to bottom regardless of size or industry. And we help our clients adopt a data approach across all their operations. The best data strategies are the ones that leverage all the data produced in an organisation.
We help clients build this cross-organisational data culture. It’s time to take the guesswork out of your decision-making and use all your data to make informed decisions that grow your business with Mut-Con.
Informed decisions that come from good data analytics can improve your bottom line while reducing your risks.
Research and Testing
Research and development have long been an advantage businesses leverage to dominate markets. Unfortunately, research and testing don’t always work as well for small businesses.
In fact, it’s one of the advantages large businesses continue to hold over their smaller counterparts. Historically, it used to be very time-consuming and expensive to conduct research and testing.
Thankfully, the barriers to great research have come down significantly. Thanks mostly to the internet, it’s never been easier to leverage the voice of the customer in your decision-making.
Tools like Survey Monkey, Google Reviews and more help you get invaluable feedback directly from customers. However, you don’t need to stop there. Tools like Statista, Google Trends, and Google Market Finder help entrepreneurs of every size explore their markets beyond just the data they produce internally.
Now, launching new products and services or exploring new markets doesn’t need to be a stab in the dark. In addition, a great business consultant can help you make the most of these tools. We help our clients compile, analyse and apply the right data to give all their business efforts a greater chance of success.
We are committed to bridging the gap between our small business clients and their larger competitors and as your business consultant, research and testing is one tool we bring to every level of your organisation to make you more competitive.
So what does a business consultant do?
Business consulting is a discipline that has evolved to take on a lot of meanings. As such a business consultant can take a lot of forms, but at Mut-Con, we have a very simple definition. With a great business consultant, you can find business success. And that’s what we do. We help you start and grow a successful business. How can we help you grow today?
