When looking at a company, it’s often easier to identify problems from the outside looking in. This is why new employees may have the most tremendous thoughts and ideas for business improvement. They’re looking at something with an excited, unbiased perspective. Excited because they’re about to join a new opportunity. Unbiased because the staff hasn’t pushed their corporate biases on the employee yet.
So how do we identify these problems if we’re not new employees?
My solution is to start with the website. A brand has quite the story to tell from the website alone. Can a fifth-grader understand what the business does? Is the About page unified and consistent around a vision? How about the pricing strategy, is it sensible? What do the social media and blog pages look like in terms of content and community engagement?
You can basically understand a good portion of a business by starting with a website analysis. Identify ten opportunities you see as a theoretically new visitor to the homepage. Opportunities for optimization. Opportunities for growth. Opportunities for unification.
Potential consultants or freelancers will find themselves contributing the most value if they can identify business problems to solve. After all, that is what their roles are all about. Start with the website.