Hi, I'm kchoi. Welcome back to my channel.
Last month, I posted a video called "A Week in My Life as a Consultant,"
and it has the most views, by far, on my channel.
I basically took you along a week in my life
of my work week.
And although I showed a lot of what my lifestyle could be like
in my current job,
so there's a lot of traveling and all of that,
I wasn't able to show you much about the actual work I do,
mostly because I can't film during client meetings or anything like that.
The reason I am making this video today
is because I wanted to actually get into more of what consulting is
because I think lots of people don't really know.
I'm planning to make this a whole series about consulting
so if you are interested in that topic,
then please do subscribe, so you don't miss any of the future videos.
CONSULTING 101
WHAT IS CONSULTING, ANYWAY?
Usually, when someone says they are a consultant,
this is what comes to mind.
Bob is a consultant.
OFFICE SPACE - 20TH CENTURY FOX
Yeah, he is gonna be sort of helping us out a little here,
asking some questions,
maybe seeing if there are some ways
we can make things run a little more smoothly around here.
So, clearly, these people are not sure what a consultant does actually,
and there is some truth behind this, you know.
Consultants, they notoriously charge a lot of money.
They travel all the time to the client site,
maybe for months on end.
But what is that they actually do?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
a consultant is a person who provides expert advice professionally.
That's a very broad definition, and it doesn't tell us much
about what a consultant does in the context that we're looking at.
I mean, with that definition, it could apply to someone in law, in medicine,
marketing, politics, anything really.
If we're talking about business consultants,
then that generally refers to three different types of consulting.
First, you have strategy,
which generally has a focus on finance
and increasing a company's revenue.
Some of the things they might work with their clients on
are global expansion or mergers and acquisitions.
Then there are management consultants who look at operations and making things more efficient.
So, it could be streamlining a supply chain
or changing the organizational structure of a company.
And third, there is technology or IT consulting
and, of course, this has to do with technology,
so they might implement IT systems or design a specific app for a company.
Consultants don't necessarily have to fit into one of these three categories.
These are just the most common ones,
and there might also be overlap between two or more of these categories,
whether in an individual consultant role or at an organization overall.
So there's our initial overview at what consulting is.
Now, let's look at a little more specifically what consultants do.
Consultants will first be presented with some sort of problem,
so maybe the company they're working with is trying to figure out if they should expand into China,
or a different company is having communication issues between leadership and management.
The first thing they would do is conduct some research,
so that could be qualitative research, doing interviews with people at the organization
or it might be quantitative research, collecting data from the client or from third party market research reports,
things like that.
And using that research, they can either come up with a strategy
to present to the client or a solution that could help them with that problem.
Typically, the strategy or plan would come in the form of a PowerPoint deck.
That's the traditional consultant deliverable.
I don't really like using PowerPoints, and luckily for me,
the consultancy I work for doesn't really use PowerPoints.
We use some different types of deliverables.
But I will get into that in a different video.
And what happens after the strategy or plan is presented to the client might differ.
Some consultancies just help with the formulation of the strategy.
Others might help with the implementation of that strategy or plan or they might help with both.
I know that the explanations in this video are still quite general, not very specific,
but that's because consulting spans so many different kinds of industries
so the clients and the projects that you would work on
might be very different from each other.
But I hope this video is still helpful and gave you a little bit more insight
into what consulting is,
or at least help to come up with more questions about it
because sometimes, I feel like if I don't know anything about a topic,
I can't even come up with questions,
but if I have a little bit of a base knowledge
then you can come up with more.
On that note, please leave any questions you have for me in the comments,
and I will address them, probably in a future video
in this consulting series.
So again, please do subscribe and stay tuned for those.
As always, thank you so much for watching,
and I will see you in the next one. Bye.
You