Monday Consulting 101: How to Find & Hire the Right Fit

by Deb Cinkus, PMP

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Est. reading time:  min.

Friday, 19 November 2021

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Managing a business can sometimes feel quite daunting. If you're in charge of teams and multiple projects, you need to get all the moving parts to work together in harmony at once. How can this be achieved, when you're already stretched to the max?

Enter the monday.com Work OS, a visual platform designed to manage your team's operations. From planning to organizing to tracking progress, everything on monday.com is intuitive and easy to understand. You can tell at a glance how projects are proceeding, who’s struggling, and what needs to be done next.

Monday.com is an incredibly flexible platform you can tailor to the finest detail to fit your business needs. Full of customization options, the platform allows you to build, plan, run, and scale custom workflows with ease.

However, flexibility can also be one of its biggest hurdles. You could easily get lost in all the features and waste substantial time trying to set it up just right.

Because every organization needs different services to perfect their workflows, monday consulting agencies exist to support all users. By working with a consultant, you can take advantage of their expertise and optimize your monday.com Work OS from the very beginning. Instead of wandering around the platform hoping to figure out what to do, you can jump straight to the business at hand.

Hiring a consultant has many other benefits, including ease of operation and long-lasting support. In this article, we break down how consulting can make your management process a breeze and provide tips for hiring the right agency for the job.

Three Key Benefits of Working with Consultants

How exactly can monday.com experts support your business? They can do so much more than just setting up the platform for you. Specifically, monday consulting can help you:

1. Avoid Feeling Overwhelmed

While the monday.com Work OS is relatively easy to use and navigate, it’s still possible to get lost during the set-up process. You could find yourself overwhelmed with all the features and quickly lose track of your priorities.

Monday specialists are there to make the user experience seamless and support you when you're faced with multiple ways to do things in the system. They'll help you choose just the perfect options for your organization and resolve doubts and questions along the way. Moreover, a monday.com consultant will give you invaluable tips and techniques for making most of the platform's capabilities in a shorter period.

With a monday.com expert on your side, you can focus on the things that matter most - your business, your team and your customers.

2. Access Industry Expertise

A consultant is not only there to show you how to set up monday.com initially, but also to provide optimization guidance as well. Once you set up your Work OS system correctly, you'll need someone at your side to take it to the next level.

The right agency will have years of experience with adapting monday.com to unique business processes and a deep understanding of its power features. You'll be able to lean on this expertise as you adopt the platform and leverage monday.com to its fullest.

3. Get Tailored Training

Even if you start off your monday usage with templates and prebuilt solutions, customized training will greatly improve your understanding and experience with the platform.

Customized training will also help you future proof your setup and reduce mistakes in the future, allowing you to manage and expand your Work OS with confidence on your own.

Essentially, monday consulting can support you through every stage of your interaction with the Work OS.

How to Spot a Reliable monday.com Consulting Firm?

Working with a good consultant can make all the difference in the world when first interacting with monday.com. The question is, how do you choose the right consulting partner for your needs? Here are key traits every high-quality monday.com consulting firm should offer:

• Industry expertise: First and foremost, monday.com consultants should be experts in their field and be able to share relevant examples and client references to prove it. Seek established consulting firms with a solid track record, who have built their success around providing monday.com consulting services. Monday.com is continuously evolving, so it's best to choose a partner who doesn't just do monday.com along with a lot of other project management or CRM platforms. You want someone who is fully dedicated to evolving their monday.com knowledge and expertise, every single month.
• Excellent communication: A good relationship between users and consultants relies on seamless communication. If you want to see outstanding results, you should be able to communicate your needs with the consultant. Likewise, your assigned expert must be responsive, an excellent listener, and willing to work with you to fully understand your goals.
• Collaborative style: Your monday.com expert should give you just the right amount of independence and support. The two of you should collaborate tightly throughout the engagement to ensure outstanding results that meet your expectations. That's why you should make sure a particular expert is ready to collaborate with you before starting the journey. Much like you wouldn't want to go to a doctor who prescribes a treatment without a full examination and understanding of your symptoms, don't choose a monday.com consultant who claims to have all the answers before you've even started working together.
• Focus on training: Last but not least, consultants should be committed to helping you achieve long-lasting results. They can do so only through the monday consulting training that ensures everyone is on the same page. Therefore, look for the companies that offer training and guidance even after the consultancy ends. Those are most likely to provide the full service you need, plus they'll be there when your needs change down the road and you need a bit more help.

Hiring a Consultant for Your Business

Now that you are familiar with the characteristics of a good consultant, you can start the selection process. Hiring a consultant is a two-way street, and you should get informed and well prepared. If you are not quite sure how to run the process, here are a few things to consider:

• What problem are you trying to solve? Your perfect choice of a consultant will differ depending on the issue you have. Therefore, ask yourself for what purpose you need a consultant. Take note of the challenges your business faces and share them with potential candidates. This simple action will help you pinpoint your needs and share them with prospective experts.
• Do you have a defined outcome in mind? For consulting relationship to be successful, you should have a clear idea of your goals. Ask yourself what you aspire to achieve with monday.com. The answer will tell you what you need from your next consultant, whether that may be guidance on increasing employee engagement or reducing project completion time with the monday.com Work OS.
• Are you ready for collaboration? When you hire someone for consulting, ideally you start a collaborative business relationship. This means both sides should be prepared to roll up their sleeves and work together towards achieving the same objective. If you don't have time to spend on the project and want the consultant to do (almost) all the work, be sure to communicate that up front so it's clear.
• Hire for quality and expertise. Finally, monday.com consulting should allow you access to true experts in the field. If you’re looking for professional help, you should prioritize experience and quality over price. These values can make all the difference between a successful consulting relationship and potentially a frustrating failure.

Tips for Finding the Right Fit

Of course, not every consultant will mesh with every company. You could end up with quite a few different options on your hands, not knowing which one to choose. If in doubt, here is another set of questions to help you narrow down your choices and choose the right fit:

• Does the consultant mesh or clash with my company culture? Depending on the field and area of expertise, you could spend some time finding just the perfect candidate for your business. While a long-established business may look for boutique services when using monday.com, a startup may wish to just focus on quickly setting up the basics in the platform.
• Is the consultant experienced in the specific issues I’m facing? When you’re looking for a monday.com consultant, you want to find someone who has experience with similar business challenges. Keep in mind that many businesses in different industries can all face the same problems, so it's not about finding a consultant who has worked with X number of clients in your one specific industry. Rather, listen to see if the consultants you talk with have dealt with similar business problems before and can describe how they solved them in monday.com, regardless of which industry was actually involved.
• Does the consultant have the time and availability to achieve my goals? Some consultants have so many clients that they can’t give each one the attention they need. When looking for a good fit, consider how candidates respond to messages and schedule meetings. If they are always slow to answer or can’t fit you in for an appointment for weeks, they may be too busy to help you.
• Is the consultant available for future support if necessary? A great monday.com consultant will be able to offer (paid) support in the future, even after your initial consulting period ends. Keep in mind that consulting firms are more likely to provide long-term support options than freelance consultants.

Hire a Monday Consulting Expert with Confidence

We know hiring a consultant can be a challenging process and often is confusing. There are so many things to weigh before making a decision that you could easily find yourself lost and worried about whether you've made the right choice.

The guidance above can help ease some of that pressure. By understanding what makes a consultant a good fit and setting clear expectations from the relationship, you can confidently hire a monday.com expert that fits your company culture and meets your needs.

When you’re ready to hire a monday.com consultant, Polished Geek just might be your right choice. We're a highly collaborative monday.com consulting firm with a long track record of helping clients improve their business processes using the monday.com Work OS platform. Polished Geek provides every client with a unique blend of consulting and training tailored to your company for outstanding results.

Are you interested in hearing more? Schedule your free consultation today and learn how our team of Polished Geek consultants can help you streamline and optimize your use of monday.com.