India has more than 2.61 crores registered and unregistered Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises which are expected to contribute 22 % of the GDP by 2012 up from 17 % at present. The sector accounts for about 45 % of India’s industrial output, 40 % of its exports and employs 4.2 crores people with 0.1 crores jobs created every year and thus forms a vital component in propelling our country to the next level of growth and development. Proper guidance and access to the right support resources would be vital if the pace of growth is to be made sustainable. How can it be ensured?

Many a times, a business leader of a Small or Medium Enterprise has to play multiple roles – he has to wear the hat of a director, a salesman, a marketer,  an HR and office administrator and an accounts & compliance officer etc. all at the same time and also has to deal with decision-making activities crucial to the business operations. However, unlike managers in larger firms who are backed by staff members who study & analyze the environment and have access to extensive information, a business leader of a Small or Medium enterprise usually takes his decision in the face of incomplete or inaccurate information. Secondly, the business environment is more dynamic and complex for smaller enterprises.  Although this also applies to larger firms, the effects of dynamism and complexity have a stronger influence on smaller firms. Large firms get more opportunities to make similar types of decisions and hence often develop decision-making routines that simplify the decision-making process for managers. Decision-makers generally are not looking for the best or optimal solution to a decision problem but one that addresses all aspects of the problem in its totality.

Most Small and Medium enterprises do not have an experience of engaging professional business advisory services to support them in their operational or strategic business decisions making. However, these enterprises do engage consultants in the form of Chartered Accountants, Web Developers and System Administrators etc for specialized tasks in which they has little or no competencies. Business decisions are usually taken in consultation with “experts” from the social eco system of friends, relatives and acquaintances, and in most cases by the business leader himself who understands his business best. This arrangement works fairly well for enterprises which are not aggressively looking at growth. However, for enterprises pursuing growth aggressively, professional business and knowledge inputs could bring a paradigm shift in the way they take decisions. But still business leaders of small and medium enterprises are reluctant in employing professional business advisory and support services primarily due to the following reasons:
•    No clarity with respect to the utility and relevance of the service. Most enterprises perceive consulting services to be relevant for end to end project implementations only, and do not see them as a day to day operational & decision support tool. For an SME, a good percentage of their time is spent on handling operational issues for which they do not see the necessity of engaging with external consultants. At the same time, most conventional consulting firms do not offer day to day support services for operational issues but offer business process transformation which aims to streamline your operations. These are usually irrelevant from the context of a small organization, more long term in their implementation and are costlier.
•    Most business owners feel they have the business and domain expertise needed for running their business and do not see an external consultant adding much value.
•    Perception of these services to be extremely costly. This is not unfounded because conventional consulting firms providing offline consulting/ advisory services, unfortunately charge “sky-high” prices which make them unaffordable.

Thus there is clearly a need for good quality and affordable business advisory and support services. If India has to go to the next level of growth and development, business process efficiency of the smaller enterprises has to be improved. This can only be done through making knowledge and skill based business expertise available to these enterprises at affordable rates. Moreover, the perception around non engagement with external advisory services for day to day operational issues has to be changed. The advantages could be seen through a simple calculation - Research shows that a business leader of a Small or Medium business generally works for 10*6 = 60 hrs a week. Now by taking the help of an external business support service, he will free nearly 20% of his time, which would translate to 48 hours of work/week for the business leader. Of the remaining he can spend 3 hours with the consulting team, as process of continuous improvement and rest 4 hours on his business development. This would translate to ~ 7.5 %( 4*100/60%) more growth.  Now the balance 5 hours can be spent by him on improving the quality of life. Moreover, accessibility to well researched, relevant and important information would remove the uncertainty in which decisions are taken and thus improve the quality of his decisions.