Imagine that you’re researching a new market or investment opportunity for your firm. You need to conduct extensive research and analysis to determine if it’s a good move. 

Or maybe you need to re-evaluate your current business plan or corporate strategy, and you want to make sure you’re making sound decisions and choosing the right growth opportunities for the future.

If you already have researchers or analysts on staff or an executive team and managers who can work at the strategic level, you might look to assign these tasks internally. After all, if you have internal resources, why not use them?

Yet many companies turn to independent consultants to take on these special projects or provide strategic insights and skills. In fact, you yourself may be looking into independent consultants to solve a pressing need but may not be sure if you should do so. 

In our experience, companies usually onboard independent consultants for one of four core reasons. We know this because we help countless Fortune 1000 companies connect with some of the world's best independent consultants on demand. 

But before we dig into the four reasons companies hire independent consultants, let's first define an independent consultant. 

What is an independent consultant? 

An independent consultant is a self-employed individual with extensive functional skills or industry-specific experience. They are self-employed and work on a contract basis with end clients with a set time frame to complete mission-critical projects. 

To accomplish that, they work with clients to understand the main business objectives, conducting research and analysis to identify areas of improvement. Based on the IRS categorization of employment status, an independent consultant is considered an independent contractor. 

As independent contractors, independent consultants set their own hours, pace of work, supply their own work equipment, and work at an hourly rate. They also tend to have prior MBB and Big Four consulting experience and have about 12-15 years of work experience in the field. If you're interested in learning more about the difference between independent contractors and full-time employees, then take a look at this blog: To Hire a Full-Time Employee or Independent Contractor? How to Pick the Right One for Your Business‍.

4 Reasons Companies Onboard Independent Consultants 

‍1. An Outside Perspective

Company strategy, projects, and initiatives often involve tough decisions. It can be challenging to trust your instincts or feel confident that you've analyzed a decision thoroughly and arrived at the best possible choice.  

A company might have plenty of in-house expertise in the matter at hand and may have an idea of how to solve a problem. However, turning to an outside, objective perspective can help lend some much-needed confidence and sanity checking.

Just as we might turn to friends, family, or a wise mentor to help us grapple with a personal issue in our lives, companies can turn to independent consultants for an external view and objective advice.

Independent consultants also offer the advantage of experience. They often work with many different companies and may have helped other clients work through the same problem in the past. As a result, they know what works or what doesn’t, and they can bring new and innovative ideas to your company that you may have been unable to envision on your own.

More importantly, an outside perspective can enable companies to drive innovation. According to MIT Sloan, it's easier for outsiders to connect seemingly disparate thoughts because they have fewer preconceptions than those working internally at a company. 

‍2. Closing a Skill Gap‍

Some business needs require specialized skills that might be lacking in-house. This is especially common when: 

• Entering into new markets or investment opportunities
• Modernizing and evolving a business to improve competitiveness
• Rethinking and retooling existing processes and practices

This is probably the most common reason why companies onboard independent consultants, so they can bring in qualified, proven experts with the skills to tackle a specific business problem or opportunity.

A great example is a fast-growing FinTech startup that’s looking to attain Series D funding but needs to revamp its accounting systems and practices to match that growth and more. Alternatively, a women-led private equity or venture capital firm might want to double down on potential investment opportunities and needs a financial modeling expert to provide guidance and establish best practices to drive growth.

In all of these cases, hiring independent consultants offers a timely and seamless way to bring in a skill set on demand, part-time, or a longer time frame. 

‍3. Keeping Employees Focused

‍In other cases, companies might have internal experts and specialists who are normally well-equipped to take on a specific project or need. Still, they may already be preoccupied with day-to-day operations or other strategic initiatives. 

A new project might require you to reprioritize an employee's core job responsibilities or overload your employee with extra work at a critical time when they should remain focused elsewhere.

Also, while hiring additional employees might be an option, it often doesn’t make sense for individual one-off projects or when there’s a shortage of qualified candidates with the ideal skills. If you can temporarily tap into the same expertise on flexible and cost-effective terms, it's often a better fit for specific projects and keeping your overhead costs lower.

In these cases, independent consultants deliver timely skills and help companies add resources without making a long-term, permanent commitment. 

Given that they frequently work for different organizations, they’re also easier to onboard, with a rapid learning curve, and they bring a diversity of proven experience and insights that you won’t find in most traditional job candidates.

‍4. Safer Decision-Making

‍As we discussed earlier, companies often confront challenging problems when seeking an outside perspective, making it hard to make confident and definitive decisions. Sometimes there is a lot of emotion wrapped up in a decision, or internal perspectives and politics can blur our vision.

In contrast, independent consultants are objective and offer a way to set aside organizational emotions or politics in favor of an unbiased point of view. They’re particularly effective when confronting a controversial or difficult move such as restructuring or revamping the way a company does business.

Independent consultants can also offer insights from the experiences and successes of other organizations to reinforce the right decision-making and confirm the right moves to make under similar circumstances.

Ultimately, independent consultants offer a way to make safer and sounder decisions, whether it's a one-off problem-solving project or a company-wide strategic decision. 

You can enjoy the peace of mind of knowing you put your organizational instincts or decision-making to the test and validate your path forward with the knowledge and objective perspective of a qualified outside resource.

‍Exploring Independent Consultants for Your Business Needs

‍If you need an outside perspective and want to solve problems and make better decisions without having to re-assign or overload your current team or hire a new employee, it might be time to put one of these four reasons to work for you. 

Exploring an on-demand talent acquisition platform like Graphite can help you gain access to pre-vetted and highly qualified independent consultants on demand. Outside of helping business leaders like you find and onboard talent within 24-58 hours, you can also manage all interactions and payments in one place. 

Interested in learning more about the on-demand talent acquisition model? Then take a look at this blog to learn how it differs from traditional talent acquisition approaches.