What a day is like in the life of a business advisor primarily depends on the category of the business advisor.
There are different categories of business advisors out there depending on the type of business engagement (and their availability):
- Industry experts who offer advisory services as an added value proposition
- Business advisors employed full-time (or working as full-time contractors for 3/6/9 months)
- Full-time advisors who juggle with a portfolio of customers
The first group of advisors have a different day job (managers, executives, founders, investors) and work with a small group of advisory clients. Their day-to-day is mostly consumed with developing their skills through practice.
A portion of their time goes into R&D, advisory calls, research. Depending on their availability, this could be 1–2 hours a day or even an hour every three days.
Full-time advisors working with a single contractor do what an external consultant/auditor would do—analyze the areas of work they specialize at (and sell). This will depend on the type of business advisor.
Business advisors working with multiple clients full-time may be employing assistants for organizational and research tasks. It makes sense should you need to monitor metrics and dashboards or keep in touch with different people for various reasons.
Even if they don’t, they normally have a packed schedule with research, analysis, documentation, reporting, coordination tasks, some internal (around their own work), and some in collaboration with executives and departments they should collaborate with. The more enterprise-grade the organization, the higher the importance for strict documentation, slide decks, or following administrative protocol in a different fashion.
You can easily distinguish a reliable business advisor from the others by looking at what they focus much of their energy on—if they are constantly working on gaining experience, continuous learning, and gathering as many resources as needed, you would know they can be trusted.
