Preliminary assessment methodology of consulting companies for small businesses

<p>Increasing role of small business in the modern economy is determined by the following points: creates the conditions for increasing competition and new jobs; stabilizes prices; focuses on scientific and technological developments; easily and quickly adapts to the changing political, economic and social conditions.</p><p>At the same time small business is the most vulnerable type of work on the Russian market, and his development at this stage requires help of the state. One of its main problems small businesses find low availability of qualified personnel. This problem may be solved by attracting consulting companies either for training business owner and his staff, or to address them specific business challenges.</p><p>Nevertheless the consulting companies show poor interest in cooperation with small business due to its diversity and, consequently, the inability to use standardized consulting procedures. As a result, small business is mainly dealing with insufficient quality of proposals from consulting companies, without having a sufficient qualification to assess such proposals. Additionally this is compounded by the fact that for consulting services is characterized by the so-called &quot;trust consumption&quot;, wherein the quality of service received is determined only after receiving it, and sometimes long time after its use.</p><p>Thus, the <strong>problem</strong> of this study is the difficulty in the selection of consulting services for their consumption by small business, and the <strong>purpose</strong> of this study is to develop a methodology that will help small business pre-assess the quality of the proposed consulting services, using public domain information, mainly from the Internet.</p><p>The <strong>object</strong> of the study is consulting companies, offering their services (in whole or in part) for small business. The <strong>subject</strong> of the research is information about the activities of consulting companies, contained in open sources, on the basis of which small business can pre-assess the quality of its consulting services.</p><p>During the research some firms providing consulting services for small business were selected. Structured information about them was assessed by a point system using the following criteria: activities of the consulting company, availability requisites and contact information, the existing reviews of its activities and usability of the site. Obtained for each of the company the scores were summed, then they were carried out in the ranking, and on the basis of these the preliminary conclusions about the consulting services quality of these firms were hold.</p><p>Obtained by applying this methodology results allow to exclude from further consideration of potentially inefficient companies, and to take a final decision on the choice of a partner for obtaining consulting services based on study of remaining companies in the deeper analysis of the reviews, checking these details for correctness, and after comparing the commercial offers from such firms.</p>