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Introduction

Would you like to be a part of a fast-paced career where you solve big business problems for companies? A career where excitement and a rewarding compensation are matched by the
exposure to various domains and to senior management even in your early years? A career where you advise governments on policy, CEOs on strategy, and help generate huge business value for your clients? Do you have good inter-personal skills with exceptional analytical thinking? Then, a career in business consulting is the right one for you.

Business Consulting is primarily based with helping organizations revamp their performance using external consultants to get both subjective and objective view, and to tap across the experience of consultants in various domains to gain from best practices. Consultants are hired both for their domain expertise in a particular industry or practice, or as temporary staffers for a one-time project for which permanent employees need not be hired. Business Consulting is increasingly used by governments too to improve efficiency. While big consultancies offer many practices, smaller business consultants called 'boutique' consultancies specialize in one or two practices or domains.

The earliest consultancies were Booz Allen Hamilton, which was the first to serve both industry and government clients, and Mckinsey, which pioneered the practice of hiring fresh MBAs rather than only experienced people. Even information technology companies like Infosys and Wipro are trying to get into the lucrative field of business consulting, as it commands higher billing rates and also influences key strategies of the company. There are multiple kinds of business consulting and they are elaborated as follows: -

Types of Business Consulting

1) Strategy Consulting - In this, the consultancy uses existing or proprietary frameworks to look at business problems / existing processes and then improves business efficiency by re-engineering them. This is also used more for making recommendations for improving not just the immediate profitability of the company but also for the markets or businesses the company should enter or exit from, technology upgrades or improving talent pool within the company.

2) Domain Consulting - This is specific to domains like telecom, pharmaceutical or manufacturing. This involves bringing in experienced people from the same domain and who have experience across the industry or globally to give recommendations based on best practices and how to execute them. Thus, the client gains access to world-class expertise for a short duration, in which he gets the inputs to make his future strategy or improve his business.

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* Ajay Ohri is an alumnus of IIM Lucknow, and has worked with some of the largest BPOs in India (including two BPOs listed on NYSE).
Currently, he is running his own database consulting firm, and is the founder of his website business
http://decisionstats.com.
The views expressed in the article are his personal views.