Business in the windy city is good! There’s something about Chicago that makes it stand out among the finer cities of the world. There’s a spirit here that permeates through every street, every iconic building. Living here is unlike living anywhere else in the country, and the people here need to be treated as such. As you can see here, Chicago is a booming, diverse economy full of potential. This is nothing short of the greatest city in America, and those that call it home are nothing less than the greatest people in America. They deserve your absolute best as a business leader, and you deserve to give it to them.
If you’ve decided to start a new company here, or you’re interested in strengthening the one you have, there are a few steps you’re going to need to take. The old saying that no one is an island is apt in this situation, as you can’t be expected to do everything on your own. There are bound to be areas where your expertise doesn’t lie. Part of being a good leader is knowing when to rely on your own strength and when to delegate something to others so their strengths can carry the day. While you’ve hired people to cover the holes in your business’s internal operations, there are areas where a consultant can help your business succeed.
Consultants can help increase your business’s efficiency. There are many advantages to hiring a consultant to handle parts of your business that you can’t, or that would take up energy and resources that would be wiser spent elsewhere. Chances are good that you’ve already used a consulting firm or two in your career! While a good external expert can help with almost any element of your company, there are two areas where hiring a consultant can help modernize your business in unintuitive but important ways: search engine optimization and remote restructuring.
SEO Utilization
One of the first and most important areas to consider hiring a consultant for is in applying the benefits of SEO to your brand. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a catch-all term for methods of organically driving more traffic to your brand’s online presence (such as social media or your website). This not only increases the quantity of traffic but ideally the quality of that traffic as well. SEO accomplishes this by utilizing keywords and phrases to organically increase your site’s rank in search engines, making it more likely that someone searching for a term will find your page instead of your competitor’s.
Getting more eyes on you is great, but not if those eyes don’t have any interest in what they’re seeing. Let’s assume you own a bike shop. If someone is looking for airline tickets, you don’t want them stumbling on your bike shop website during their search. Nobody is going to bike to Bermuda! They’re more likely to pass your page by without a second thought and keep looking for airline tickets. Instead, SEO focuses on getting people already interested in biking and related topics to your page. Someone looking for biking trails, or maybe seat covers, or any number of things related to bikes are who you want to guide you.
SEO is simple in concept and complex in execution. Like this site, Chicago SEO Scholar, proper utilization of SEO can provide a massive boost in your company’s sales. For this, a consultant is recommended. They’re less expensive than keeping in-house staff dedicated to it, they keep their finger on the pulse of online trends, and they have more understanding of the system’s intricacies and quirks. By hiring a consultant to handle SEO for you, you reap all the benefits of optimizing your online presence without having to dedicate precious internal resources to it. Your consultant will take care of all the messy details, and you can focus on running your business.
Remote Streamlining
Let’s face it, the world of business is different now. Employees got a taste of that sweet, sweet work from home life during the pandemic, and they can’t be blamed for wanting more of it. As the world returns to regular office work, employees are brushing up their resumes and setting the ‘remote’ keyword to alert them on their job search website of choice. You’re going to be faced with a cruel choice: lose your employees to remote positions that let them return to the home offices that they love, or restructure your office expectations and requirements.
The good news is that a consultant can help you out with this and that switching to a partially remote structure is actually better for you in the long run. Not only are remote workers happier and more productive when working from home, but they’re also more willing to stay loyal to the company – as you can see from this link. I can attest to this from personal experience. Before moving to my current position as a writer, I worked for a state government managing benefits programs. The work was hard and occasionally heartbreaking, and burnout was a real danger in that field. During the pandemic, we switched to working from home, and it was a total game-changer. Morale was higher, we could weather burnout easier, and things were overall great! When it was time to return to the office a year and a half later, I had another job lined up that very next week.
My story is far from unique. That’s why you should consider switching your structure up to allow for remote work on positions that frankly don’t need to be done in the office. To determine what jobs can be moved to a remote position, either partially or completely, and to determine which of the many remote structures will work best for your company’s needs, you need to reach out to an external expert. A consultant will be able to get a full bird’s eye view of your company and measure its needs against what’s possible. Because remote employees are happier employees, and less on-site staff means fewer overhead costs to worry about, getting a good remote structure working is a win-win for both you and your workers.
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