Hiring a consultant is expensive, and not all small business owners have the privilege to hire one due to budgetary constraint. Before you decide on hiring one, you need to ask yourself this question: Do you really need to hire a consultant?

Please be clear early on: I personally think that small business owners need to find as much help as possible in order to improve their businesses. However, help often doesn’t come cheap.

Consulting fees usually come in the hundreds of dollar an hour. A typical 6-week engagement with McKinsey will easily cost over $500K. This is not ideal for many – even most – small businesses.

Fortunately, there is an alternative – or a substitute, if you will – in the form of business frameworks, oftentimes also referred to as business methodologies or management models. Typically in PowerPoint presentation format, these frameworks act as guides in addressing various common business problems or scenarios. High level examples include industry analysis, pricing strategy, product launch, growth strategy, business case development, change management, etc. They can guide you DIY things. The big question is, where to find a quality provider of such documents?

I have discovered that a company called Flevy might have the answer for you.

Introducing Flevy

Flevy is the marketplace for premium business documents. You can literally find hundreds of business frameworks and methodologies for you to purchase. They also carry other similar documents, such as presentation templates, pre-built financial models, market research reports, etc.

“But do they work?” you might ask, and I understand your concern. Here’s my answer to you: Yes, they work well if you implement them correctly.

Flevy’s premium documents are exactly the same documents used and produced by top consulting firms. In other words, when you hire a consultant, he/she will use the similar frameworks and methodologies. In fact, all top firms use such documents internally when training consultants and for actual delivery use on client engagements.

This raises a conclusion: Why should you hire a consultant for $150+/hr when you can purchase a business framework for the same $150, even less, pay only once, and it’s your business asset to keep for a lifetime? The framework documents on Flevy start as low as $29.

That is exactly the proposition Flevy is offering to their clients – an astounding list of clients, I must say: AT&T, Cisco, GE, Intel, IBM, Coca-Cola, and many other companies, ranging from small businesses to large corporations.

Perhaps some examples can explain the point I make above.

Here is an example of business strategy design guide:

…and here is an example of a framework for marketing plan development:

As you can see, those documents are professionally prepared by consultants and are actually being used as a guide and framework for working with their clients. Here is one last example that is a compilation of over 50 frameworks commonly used by management consultants.

Another benefit of acquiring premium business documents is the time saving for not creating your own business documents. Sure, you have the know-how about your own business, but you can always save time, money and effort by purchasing relevant documents and customize it to reflect the needs of your business.

If you are looking for some recommendations, please go to http://flevy.com/blog/recommended-documents-by-business-topic/

Takeaway

As a small business owner, I know I have to use templates and ready-made business documents. Not because I’m lazy per se, but it’s because of the limited resources I have.

I can use ready-made business documents as they are, and I can use templates to create my own documents in the most resource-efficient way possible.

I recommend you to do what I do, so that you can allocate your budget for the business functions that require more of your attention.

Head over to Flevy and start browsing.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post. However, the opinion expressed in the article is exclusively mine.