Business Consulting Services SEOS_BCS
Although people may feel intimidated by the idea of offering Business Consulting Services, this is actually an easier business opportunity to get into. Entrepreneurs tend to be busy people with “little time to waste on necessary tasks” that still need to get done, and that therefore are prime hunting ground for business services entrepreneurs. The purpose of this section is to show the self-employment potential that exists by preparing yourself to get into this market with the right suite of tools and services that the entrepreneur may not want to do personally, or that they may need help with because they lack the expertise to perform those services personally. Either way you have the potential of being very busy in your community while you free up time for clients that can use that time to attend to many other urgent business duties.
The scope of services is actually broken into two main streams:
Bookkeeping & Accounting Service
this is simply doing work that a lot of entrepreneurs must do, but that takes them away from other pressing business issues. As a service provider it is much easier to work small business customers into a regular schedule of taking their invoices or receipts and transforming that into a well-organized set of accounting records. This is traditional service work that is easy to sell: you may even be able to perform the clerical work for some local accounting firm from home, delivering the organized information on a regular schedule so they can then provide the appropriate financial statements.
The other stream is more unique, although you can still offer the above service as your base plan for a steady cash flow. The services below depend on your technical know-how to provide the information your customers using the training you receive in “Business Management Training – Business Management Courses” as follows:
Develop marketing plans
based on the process outlined in the course workbook you have the tools to help aspiring entrepreneurs to create the appropriate marketing plans to show that there is an excellent opportunity for the kind of business they intend to open (or you help save them a bundle by showing that the opportunity really has little chance of coming to fruition).
Develop business plans
based on the process outlined in the course workbook you have the tools to help aspiring entrepreneurs to create the appropriate business plan to show that the proposed venture will be profitable and attractive to investors. If you do a solid marketing plan first it is unlikely that the details show a high risk of failure (but if they do then the entrepreneur is saved from sinking their investment into a pipe-dream).
Develop Budgets & Financial Plans
we have expanded on the course materials noted above to create a more advanced set of tools for highly detailed financial plans and budgets that dig deeper behind the business plan. These tools are also very useful for evaluating an existing business operation, either as an investment opportunity, or to recommend what actions should be taken to protect the owner’s investment.
The services below depend on your technical know-how to provide the information your customers using the training you receive in:
Develop workbooks with cell formulas
this is the traditional way of developing models in Excel™ to “number crunch” many forms that a business owner may need to complete, such as profitability analyses and franchise fee calculations.
Develop workbooks with basic VBA
this is a more sophisticated way of developing software in Excel™ that can rival any commercial product by adding Visual Basic for Applications to a workbook. In this case you can even complement standard workbooks as above with driver logic that allows Excel™ to perform many alternate “What If” simulations to help assess the best business decisions under specific conditions and/or risk assumptions.
Everyone knows that businesses need to keep track of transactions, and it is well known that this takes time and effort to concentrate on. That is the challenge business-owners face, and the opportunity you have to enable them to collect transaction information in a plastic box so you can retrieve it daily or every couple of days, enter the transactions in your system, and then deliver the results (an updated workbook with reports) to the client. We do have an Excel™-based accounting system that is used in our training course on in one of two programs:
Bookkeeping & Financial Accounting Finance --- Theory:
Our study of accounting theory aided with basic accounting software in Excel™ used to illustrate the concepts that are being demonstrated. We recommend a thorough understanding of the subject before you start to provide basic bookkeeping services for business clients.
Bookkeeping & Financial Accounting Finance --- Software:
Our “how to” course on using the bookkeeping & financial accounting workbook to run your accounting rather than to just illustrate concepts learned in theory. It is a much shorter course for students that already know the basic theory.
- Of course you can use any accounting system, like QuickBooks or Sage, to provide these services: some clients may insist. However, you can convert verified Excel™ data into the proper transactions that feed into formal accounting systems. Most accept comma-delimited or tab-delimited data that is easily generated from our accounting software.
Budding entrepreneurs may not always be the most objective evaluators of an opportunity. You can help them to create a marketing plan by stepping them through the elements of what has to be in the plan, and asking the pointed questions they should consider. Is there really a call for what they have in mind? Are they focused on the right region and demographic for the opportunity to be successful?
Developing a Marketing Plan
This is a hands-on course in marketing that gives students the opportunity to thoroughly explore a business that they envision starting once they complete their training, or a business that runs in the family or that they are otherwise familiar with. Through a series of exercises and assignments you learn to create a solid plan or come to the conclusion that there really is no opportunity for the venture to succeed.
Developing a Marketing Plan --- Modeling
How does the entrepreneur expect to start the business? Unless you are a lottery winner, you probably need financing to start a business, so you are required to explain to people how you expect the business to succeed if properly capitalized. If you do not get financing you may never be able to turn the idea into an actual business.
Developing a Business Plan
this course provides the template and an opportunity to actually build a plan that describes how you intend to get your business launched. We have used the training program to enable people to create a viable business plan for something that they wanted to do, and some people were able to actually get their businesses launched.
Business Plan Modeling
if you already know how to build a business plan this short review course to show you how to use our business plan software based in Excel™.
Develop Budgets & Financial Plans that can be used to explore alternatives that can benefit or harm the business opportunity. In this opportunity we explore many “What If” scenarios in a set of simulated financial statements that we drive through the paces by using an embedded Excel™ simulation engine. This process is documented as part of:
Financial Planning & Budgeting
We use a sophisticated set of VBA software as a framework for implementing detailed financial planning and budgeting models that complement a new business plan. In this course we assume you already know the theory of how to build the business plan, but you need to learn the technical implementation of how the tools are used to produce customized analyses for different business organizations. This can be quite valuable to many business organizations, not only during the initial business planning stage, but also to periodically review the health of the business to see if it can measure up to initial expectations.
Many established business organizations want to structure internal reports in ways that allow them to collect information from operating units. Often the tool they use is Excel™, but not everyone is able to convert the need into a workable tool that benefits the business operation. You can build a structure of worksheets with cell formulas and macros that streamline the necessary calculations and/or help a client company to maintain workbook based internal reporting whenever any changes must be reflected. While basic Excel™ knowledge is common, the ability to create a solid process in an Excel™ workbook structure is not. The traditional use of Excel™ forms the foundation of the following courses:
Excel™ Cell Formulas – Introduction
A guided tour through Excel formulas and functions, and how to use them to establish powerful tools customized for a specific business. This course shows that you do not need complex programming to achieve complex results in a worksheet setup.
Excel™-VBA - Worksheet Macros
A guided tour through Excel VBA generated by the macro recording process, how you can benefit from the automation of repetitive tasks, and how you can learn VBA concepts from the code that Excel™ internally generates.
There are limitations to what you can do with cell formulas and macros, so the next opportunity is to offer skills in Excel™-Visual Basic for Applications to create more complex solutions. For more advanced VBA programming we recommend two sets of courses:
Excel™-VBA - Programming
when you are ready for a challenge this course is about writing VBA macro code that may go on for pages on end, to achieve complex programming results.
Excel™-VBA - Data Management
building on the programming skill we explore how to use an Excel™ workbook as a stand-alone database for more complex business applications. In our courses we illustrate concepts with Excel™ VBA driven processes, so it is logical to explore these processes and how you can incorporate some of them within your own custom applications.
Excel™ Simulation Engine
- we often review to Excel™ models that are used to explore “What If” scenarios. This simulation engine can drive 100’s of scenarios through an Excel™ worksheet with cell formulas, and at the end arrange the outcomes based on user defined sort criteria. You can do some serious damage with this little brute, but it can be eye-opening.
Excel™ Projection Engine
- we can take existing financial information and project it into the future. This engine is typically used to show curves in an economics course, but it can have business applications as well.
Excel™ Demonstration Engine
- this little hybrid can be used to take one of many simulated results and feed the information into a worksheet, so that you can actually see each case under a given scenario. We can add a series of graphs and “slides” that can transform the information into a set of “views” that can be more revealing than plain worksheets.
Excel™ Data Management Engine
- this mini-brute will take data in different formats (worksheet, comma-delimited, tab-delimited, or even a space-delimited text source, or a keyword-delimited report image source) and deliver a “clean” worksheet that you can then process as a database.
Depending on how you want to proceed with this business opportunity it may be necessary to select some of the courses recommended under the previous tabs. You need to understand what there is to learn before you can go out and offer to provide the related services to local businesses, or you will fall flat on your face. When you register for selected courses add a note that your real interest lies in developing a business consulting service that you want to offer in your local community. We will be able to provide you with extras and specific advice on how to proceed, and if we have an information seminar in your general area we will send you an invitation to learn more about the opportunities that exist.
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