Consulting Cents is a social enterprise that focuses on utilizing technology, unique methodologies and international partnerships to bring down the costs of doing business while retaining quality standards through rigorous operational procedures and strict monitoring of work progress. Our ultimate goal is to provide a one-stop location for micro and small business owners to attend to all their business functions in an economical and time efficient way.
The origin of Consulting Cents was formed from real-life experiences leading to entrepreneurship, where start-up costs were found to be huge. As an entrepreneur, I believe in starting with a minimal cost base (if you can help it, I know for some capital-intensive industry, that is going to be difficult). But of course there are some costs that have to be incurred like logo design, business card design, business cards, website design, hosting, legal document draftings, name reservation, corporate incorporation fees and etc. All these necessary expenses were met with high quotes that seem to be putting a stretch on the budget. Thus, I have decided to find ways to reduce excesses or increase the value I receive for every dollar that I invest into my business and it is through these lessons that I can share how to help our clients reduce their start-up costs or at least make their dollars work really hard for them. At Consulting Cents, we help our clients achieve results, not just giving them empty promises.
At this point, you must be thinking what is our catch and why are we not trying to maximize our profits like what a corporation would do? First, we are not a normal corporation but a social enterprise. Our main concern is to help SMEs thrive in this challenging environment by offering affordable services that they need as we believe they are the unsung heroes of most economies due to their “last to fire” nature in-relation to human resources. Second, we not only value accounting profits, we also value highly consumer surpluses that a consumer get when they buy our services. For example, if you are willing to pay CAD$5,000 for a website and someone charges you that, you have none (basic Economics) and that’s where the Consulting Cents challenge comes in. We provide a 20-25% discount to any quote received by our clients from other developers given (a) we authenticate the quote and specifications for the website from the developer (we have ways to find this out) and (b) we accept the project. Of course, as this is also a business, we could not give it for free. Third, we would like to challenge the traditional business model of servicing this particular segment using custom-packaged solutions. We might succeed or fail but at least we tried to innovate and make a difference, who knows. We believe it is during these times that the opportunity cost of failure is the lowest.
At our current juncture, we are offering two services, which are web development and web maintenance. It is through our conversations with small business owners that we found owners to be highly responsive too. Consulting was the initial service offered but it came on deaf ears, thus we decided to bundle it with web development where we formulate the small business owners’ virtual extension around his or her business objectives. Why spend money on a website if it does not bring in additional sales? No offense, but non-tangibles are secondary to us and results are what we stand for, not excuses. If we are not able to deliver, we will not promise it.
Time permitting, future posts regarding our journey will be posted here with some tips and information we found on SMEs. We will also be posting useful discoveries of cost saving tools.
Conclusively, this is the humble beginnings of Consulting Cents, a story about a small business established during one of the worst Depressions since 1929.
Consulting Cents is a social enterprise that focuses on utilizing technology, unique methodologies and international partnerships to bring down the costs of doing business while retaining quality standards through rigorous operational procedures and strict monitoring of work progress. Our ultimate goal is to provide a one-stop location for micro and small business owners to attend to all their business functions in an economical and time efficient way.
