How do I know when I’m ready for outside help?

You should consider additional help when you:

• can’t find time to assess how your business is doing
• lose sleep at night wondering whether you’ve overlooked something
• realize you’re encountering business areas that you just don’t know much about
• find your way to websites like this one in search of support

The advantage of working with McVane Consulting is that we can tailor an engagement to whatever level of complexity makes best sense for you.

Is my business the right size to benefit from working with McVane Consulting?

In general, McVane Consulting can help businesses of any size, but our focus is on small business. As small businesses grow, they start to need more “big company” capabilities – like accounting expertise, marketing support, financial analysis, and many others. We can help fill in those gaps with guidance, training and hands-on support.

If your concern is that your business is too small to benefit from a consulting engagement, here’s two things to consider:

1. You need to be able to afford the bill. This isn’t just a cash consideration, but also a willingness to invest in your business’ success.  You buy inventory, you hire employees, and you pay for advertising. Similarly, what McVane Consulting provides is expertise, guidance, and support to improve your chances of continued success. To make this investment more affordable, we offer the Starter Business Check Up, which is a basic (but incredibly useful) review of your overall business model, your financial performance, and you business entity set-up. It is a great way to be sure you’ve got the right bases covered and good plans for improvement.
2. More important, you need to be committed to take action. Don’t waste your money on finding out what you should be focusing on if you don’t plan to act on that new knowledge. This is really about your commitment to pushing forward. If you’re driven to be successful, we can do great things together. And if you’re concerned about having the time to take the new actions, we can help.  Think of McVane Consulting as an extension of your own personal bandwidth and expertise. Let us help you implement those improvement – to grow your business and make it more profitable.

If your concern is that your business is too big to benefit from a consulting engagement, here’s some things to consider:

1. No matter how big your business has grown, the Established Business Comprehensive Exam should provide great benefit to you – by helping you to better articulate your business model, assess your business performance and your financial system effectiveness, and clarify your critical next steps toward continued growth. Your Exam will be more complicated than the Starter Business Check-Up, but no less powerful and useful.
2. You are more likely to already have the resources in your organization to implement many of the potential improvement actions. If you don’t, then McVane Consulting can help provide the bandwidth and expertise to do so. And if you do have the resources, we can help improve their effectiveness. For example, we can train your Human Resources folks to recruit more effectively – by defining jobs better, assessing the real behavioral / performance skills needed for success (not just experience in particular tasks or activities), and create a candidate interview process to find the best people.
3. While our usual focus in on small business owners on a 1-on-1 basis, we can also work directly with your leadership team to assess your business.

How can you know my business?

You know your specific business – I know business in general. I know the questions to ask – and how to help you get to the right answers – and how to use those answers to improve your business. Much of the value I provide is in helping guide your thinking about your business.

Some of my favorite questions start with “this might seem like a dumb question, but ….”. My best “dumb questions” will challenge your assumptions and change your perspective about your business.  I love it when clients say, “gee, I never looked at it that way.”

How are you different from other consultants?

There are many great consultants, and big consulting firms, out there. We don’t intend to compete with all of them – or even many of them.  McVane Consulting is different. We believe we can provide great benefit to you, the small business owner.  What we promise you is:

• Our focus in on YOU, the small business owner – your challenges, your concerns, your opportunities.
• We help you understand your business better – across the full breadth of your business to a depth sufficient to confidently identify the most important next steps.
• Our focus is on ACTION – what are the next steps? You don’t need a 40-page report – you need to know where to invest your time and energy to improve and grow your business.
• We help develop YOU, the small business owner and leader. The passions that motivated you to start your own business will take you a long way, but at some point, you just need help. It might be training, or guidance, or just reassurance that your instincts and judgment are right.  Just as we can help in assessing and improving your business, we can also help you in assessing and improving you and your skills.
• Finally, our mission is not to run up our bill to you, but rather to help you improve your business.  If that means finding someone else to serve you, we do that too.  McVane Consulting knows debits and credits, but is not an expert CPA firm. We know stuff about taxes, but we are not tax experts.  We can help structure the data flow you need to manage your business, but we’re not IT experts.  When you need those experts, we can help you find the best ones for you.