Performing a Health Diagnostic – When and How Should Small Businesses Know When to Ask for Help?

Unfortunately, many small businesses do not reach the decision to leverage outside expertise until they have met critical mass.  While it would behoove most business owners to think proactively and forward-thinking about how they can bolster their business activities by hiring outside consultants before problems manifest themselves, too often these businesses engage outside help in reactive circumstances.  When businesses are reactive, they lose the liberty to think strategically about which aspects of their venture could benefit from expertise – the freedom to focus on operational efficiency, financial controls, or resource constraints – these facets of strategic improvement are lost when small business reacts impulsively to issues and problems.

In instances where business owners are judicious and thoughtful about where they want to optimize results, they often times uncover a broad array of improvement opportunities.  And most importantly, they identify these opportunities before issues become pervasive and potentially compromising to bottom line results.  The Japanese philosophy of “Kaizen” focuses on continuous improvement and introspection.  It is a philosophy that has been adopted by a number of Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders; small businesses alike can benefit from the adoption of Kaizen’s key tenet.  Reliance upon past performance is a precursor to mediocre and stale future results.  Businesses that want to be perceived as agile, intelligent and savvy need to place a penchant on continuous improvement.  Often times this means seeking out the help of business professionals who possess expertise in diagnosing problems and driving remediation.  A proper health diagnostic by an impartial third party is a mature decision that will not only identify risk, but will propose solutions to mitigate those risks and highlight opportunities to grow within the marketplace.