Scenario planning for consultants

Consultants navigate significant uncertainty. A consulting business can be feast-or-famine, especially when faced with external volatility from the economy, a pandemic, or other unexpected disruptions.

It makes sense for consultants to mitigate risk and maximize upside. With our handy scenario-planning capabilities, you will be able to chart a course through an unpredictable landscape and plot a path to maximum profitability.

What does scenario planning mean?

Scenario planning is a financial planning discipline that is based on evaluating a range of hypothetical future developments. Because of that, it is used by some of the world’s most successful organizations.

In scenario planning sessions, executives will ask “what if” questions and explore all the possible outcomes. When done with the right framework (hint, hint: Profit Frog), scenario planning can result in powerful modeling capabilities using a company’s actual data extrapolated into hypothetical futures.

Finally, scenario planning is available to small businesses, such as consultants, at an affordable price, giving everybody a fair chance. Profit Frog helps consultants tackle profitability modeling under hypothetical futures and chart a course to maximum profits.

Which, of course, is the reason you’re in the industry.

Benefits of scenario planning for consultants

Scenario planning is extremely beneficial to consultants’ profitability. Here are the most important scenario planning benefits:

Be decisive and move quickly. Consultants can react quickly to external events because they’ve already modeled their response and have a plan.
Minimize risk by not being caught off guard. When consultants are prepared for specific scenarios, they are less at risk because they can act quickly to keep the impact to a minimum.
Maximize upside. Your consulting business can gain strength by being prepared to take advantage of opportunities introduced by change; meanwhile, unprepared competitors cannot mobilize quickly enough to capitalize on the opportunity.
Have a competitive advantage over competitors. Customers and employees will be inspired by decisiveness and dexterity.

Consultants on the rise will flourish with Profit Frog

A couple of years back, scenario planning was only available to commercial enterprises with unlimited budgets and financial pros on staff. But, over the last couple of years, a new crop of scenario planning tools has emerged. Most of these cater to enterprise organizations and have a pretty steep learning curve and too much complexity.

Profit Frog is the only one that offers scenario modeling tools solely targeted to aid small businesses and startups. With a fool-proof interface and the capability for dynamic planning, we give you everything you need…and nothing you don’t.

With Profit Frog, you don’t need an army of MBAs or Microsoft Excel wizards. Simply follow our prompts and you’ll be modeling scenarios like a genius.

Our scenario planning software lets you model a range of possible outcomes and impacts. Then you can steer your restaurant toward best-case scenarios while being prepared for worst-case ones.

Learn where to allocate resources
Be strategically and financially prepared for a worst-case scenario
Recognize and seize amazing opportunities
Have a proactive rather than reactive orientation to the future
Gain confidence in your decision-making skills by preparing for things you can’t control
Be ready for disruptive change and take advantage of it
Identify potential risks and turn them into gain

Strategic Planning versus Scenario Planning

Many consultants confuse strategic planning for scenario planning, when the two methods are actually quite different in orientation and result.

Scenario planning assumes a dynamic, chaotic future and helps you plot the course to maximum profitability through all the unknowns
Strategic planning assumes a known future outcome and strategizes how to get there

While scenario planning is designed to navigate variability, strategic planning is a more static process and is disrupted by variability.

Our scenario analysis is designed to be dynamically updated as conditions change. This sort of dynamic planning is much more effective and actionable than many static planning models.

Consulting businesses that decide to adopt scenario planning are better positioned for variability than those that undertake strategic planning by themselves.

Scenario planning FAQ

How do you create a scenario planning project with Profit Frog?

Profit Frog is an effective scenario planning tool that allows you to model as many scenarios as you please, quickly and easily.

Identify scenarios you want to model
Input actuals (data about your business) into Profit Frog
Adjust variables dynamically to see how they influence scenarios
Create an action plan and update it dynamically as conditions change

With a Profit Frog scenario plan, you can look at local or global scenarios with the lens of how they will impact your restaurant. You can then look at the various alternative futures posed by those scenarios and develop a plan to navigate them.

Do consultants have cost of goods sold?

Cost of goods sold, also called COGS, is a financial metric developed for companies that make and sell physical products or deliver a service.

Since consultant firms are service businesses that don’t have inventory, a lot of owners struggle with calculating COGS. That is why you should see our guide to calculating COGS for service businesses for more detail on this.

How does Profit Frog’s scenario planning software differ from other options on the market?

Other scenario-planning software on the market is expensive and extremely complex. Ours is easy and affordable.

How does Profit Frog’s scenario planning software help my business make better, more informed decisions?

When you create scenarios in Profit Frog, you’ll be using your actual company data and then strategically altering certain variables. This gives you valuable insight into how specific factors will affect net profit—without having to actually experience the situations. You’ll use the insights gleaned from these exercises to craft a dynamic business plan that is antifragile and tailored to specific possibilities.

How much does Profit Frog’s scenario planning software cost?

Our software is priced on a sliding scale based on your company’s total revenue. For custom pricing, make sure to contact us.

How to use scenario planning in situations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic?

In a world remade by the pandemic, every organization needs to invest in financial, strategic, and operational scenario planning. We help you model organizational viability across all types of scenarios, including disruptions caused by pandemics, supply chain issues, recessions, or other events.

Does Profit Frog offer free trials?

Yes, we offer a 14-day free trial of our software. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a custom estimate.