Boutique consulting firms: what is right for your organization?

Boutique consulting firms are well-known for offering a wide variety of customized services to organizations than what large consulting firms do. Experts argue that customized solutions, which will be attached to customers’ needs, can be offered more readily by boutique consulting firms, as they add a more personal touch to them. Moreover, boutique consulting firms tend to offer consulting advice for a specific niche market, building expertise on that and therefore building reputation too. BizXL Solutions is one of those boutique firms and offers various consultant services in several industries, such as financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.

Boutique consulting firms are usually building their expertise and reputation by establishing a good network of consultants, a good portfolio of case studies, and a personal brand that might become even stronger than the brand of a larger corporation, as their expertise is built around one or several niche markets. Often, the owner builds this personal brand of the firm, which is all about the reputation, the networking, and more importantly the high-quality consulting talent. Most large consulting firms have experienced managing partners, sent to the initial meeting with the client, and once the contract with the client is signed, fresh MBA grads are taking up with consulting projects. Those fresh grads are often presenting unrealistic and not achievable recommendations. On the other hand, boutique consulting firms have experiences managing partners for the whole consulting project with a client, not only to convince the client to close a deal, making realistic and “down to earth” recommendations, all customized for the specific industry and organization (i.e. the client). BizXL Solutions send experienced consultants on every project and has a managing partner overseeing every project.  Allowing their expertise in their recommendations to show through as to what is really achievable.

Most of the boutique consulting firms target a specific and relatively narrow number of industries. They are highly focused on those industries just because their expertise is built around specific consultant services. In that way, boutique firms are hiring experienced consultants in specific industries, or past leaders in those industries to take over critical consulting projects. For example, boutique consulting firms, such as BizXL Solutions, are considered also as healthcare consulting firms, just because they have several customers in the healthcare industry, developing in that way expertise and a good reputation around the people working in this industry. In reference to the networking part of a boutique firm, networking builds the personal brand, established by the owner or partners but also builds the reputation within a specific industry. Drawing on that example, usually, healthcare consulting firms acquire most of their new customers through networking and through word-of-mouth marketing (i.e. spreading the reputation).

Informal culture is not unusual in such firms. Organizational hierarchies are quite fluid and relatively relaxed, all employees stay more connected through every-day meetings when brainstorming and the flow of ideas are enhanced. Openness and collaboration are preserved, and it all starts again from the owner or partners. This helps in building up project proposals and the actual consulting projects more efficiently, with much more creativity and innovation. Roles within the firm of course matter but they are usually all treated as equals so there is no barrier in communicating new ideas in order to maximize results and performance.

Keeping up with the latest market trends is essential too. Each boutique consulting firm needs to know where each niche market stands in the targeted industry, how its competition is doing and how the potential customers are performing. Working in marketing research and analysis is definitely in favor of the firm’s and the customer’s advantage. Many managers in such firms are asking: where will the next deal be coming from? This is a challenging question to answer. A firm may have all these amazing consultant services, but where to find the customer is equally important. Networking of course works quite well, events are also effective in presenting services, ideas, innovation, especially when they are targeting a specific industry. In addition, digital marketing, through social media, Google ads and email campaigns, has been proven to be working well, but not yet in the level that networking and events work. Competing with the top tier consulting firms which spend huge amounts of their budgets in such advertising, can be difficult. This is why, word-of-mouth promotion, good reputation, customized and targeted services along with “value for money” consultant services should be the main elements of the positioning strategy of any boutique consulting firm.

About This Author

BizXL Solutions Inc. BizXL Solutions is a boutique management consulting firm. Joined: January 24th, 2020