Best Cities for Business Consultants

Business consultants are paid by clients or employers to create, repair, improve, and expand their business operations. Thus, they need client businesses for their employment. The best cities for business consultants have a strong, growing economy with many active companies. A good customer base for consultants includes not only large, profitable corporations but also startups, small companies, and transitioning industries, the businesses that most need consulting services. More potential customers provide steadier, higher income for both freelance consultants and consulting firms. A business consultant specializing in a particular industry will also prefer a city where that industry thrives. 

Good cities for business consultants also provide:

• a large talent and education base of other consultants and skill trainers
• strong support for consulting and business operations, including professional organizations that aid networking and collaboration
• easier access to business resources like financing and office space, and
• infrastructure advantages like reliable communications and transportation. 

What is a Business Consultant?

Few business owners possess every skill required to operate and grow their business. The same is true even for many large companies. A business consultant is a knowledgeable professional who provides the missing expertise and services that client businesses need. Their guidance and assistance might be employed to solve problems, remove obstacles, support a company through a crisis or expansion, help their client find and add new customers, or improve the efficiency of a company’s internal operations. Most often, a business consultant is hired to start or expand a business or to facilitate a major transition.

Business consultants may specialize in particular kinds of services, such as information technology, human resources, or legal compliance. Consultants may also specialize in particular industries, such as healthcare, manufacturing, or transportation. Some ‘business’ consultants tailor their services to non-commercial operations like education or government. 

Business consultants can be independent contractors, employees of a consulting firm, or direct hires of the businesses they improve. In some cases, a business consultant acts as a temporary employee, filling a gap for an empty or not-yet-hired position. Depending on their tasks and terms of service, business consultants may be paid on a salaried or contract basis, hired at an hourly or per diem rate, or paid according to their Return On Investment (ROI), the increase in sales a business observes after the consultant improves their operations. 

Studying can improve a worker’s understanding of business consulting practices, make them a better advisor and assistant to client businesses, and teach them how to run a successful consulting practice. However, the best business consultants are more than scholars, teachers, or aides; they possess experience running or participating in a successful enterprise. Such work experience proves their knowledge and skills but also teaches a consultant practical lessons about effective and ineffective business practices. 

What Makes a City Good for Business Consultants?

An ideal city for consultants has a steady client base: a high concentration of active local companies that yields frequent employment opportunities and higher income. Particularly prosperous regions with multiple large corporations can support larger consulting firms that directly employ business consultants, providing these employees with more consistent work and greater stability. Such prosperous areas also tend to offer favorable conditions for businesses and supportive resources that help consultants find clients, manage their work, and produce growth for both their clients and themselves. Aside from these general considerations, consultants who focus their services on particular industries will prefer to work in regions that emphasize those industries. 

Job Opportunities

When evaluating a city as a good place for business consulting, the first consideration should be whether that city offers consistent consulting work. The simplest indicator is a strong business climate that supports a high number of companies, since more businesses mean more potential clients. However, it is just as important that these businesses span a diverse range of sizes, structures, and industries so that they provide opportunities for consultants varying in levels of experience, types of expertise, and kinds of services. For example, a new, freelance business consultant would not benefit as much in a region dominated by large corporations looking for experienced, established consultants.

Other considerations further affect the job prospects in a region, such as local business trends and the presence of other consulting services. If a city is experiencing little change, businesses might not consider consulting services worth their investment. A region experiencing widespread growth offers more roles for business consultants, who can help new businesses stabilize and existing businesses expand. However, a region encountering difficulties may also need business consultants to rescue and revive struggling businesses. A region that already has a large number of active consultants may offer fewer openings for a new freelancer. However, large cities may have more job openings in consulting firms, for those consultants willing to work within their structure.

High Salaries

Another attraction for any worker is higher regional income for their profession. A business consultant, whether novice or experienced, can expect higher income in areas that:

• have a higher median income overall,
• exhibit greater economic activity,
• have a greater demand for business consulting services, and
• provide frequent earning opportunities for business consultants.

Of course, a city’s average income for any profession should be considered relative to its local cost of living. A larger city can be considerably more expensive for residents, so a potential worker should see if salaries there are correspondingly higher, or more or less so. Still, within these considerations, some cities simply welcome business consultants and favor them with a higher average pay rate.

Workers should also consider whether this income is consistent, similar from month to month or year to year. Business consulting can require regular shifts between clients and assignments. Freelance consulting is frequently paid by means other than a fixed annual salary, like an as-needed contract, a per diem or hourly rate, or a percentage of return on investment (ROI). Workers should examine whether consistent long-term employment is available in a city or if they might have to manage periods of less or no income.

Strong Business Consultant Community

Another factor to consider is the professional community among business consultants in each city. A survey of a city’s business environment often reveals organizations that support its business consultants. Are there organizations established to support business consultants? Do they foster cooperation and networking between professionals, both within the consulting community and between consultants and other businesses? Do business consultants in that area tend to collaborate, or do they isolate and compete, struggling over scarce resources and limited clients? 

Support services for business consultants can include professional development opportunities like training courses, workshops, and seminars, which create newly qualified workers and also improve the skills of existing professionals. Support services may create a knowledge base that consultants can access when they lack information, such as about local laws, practices, and resources. They may also help consultants obtain licenses or other credentials required to work in that area. Networking resources can help consultants meet to share professional knowledge, job leads, and information about local businesses, and may also put consultants in contact with potential clients. 

Support Services for Businesses

Separate from the organizations and agencies that support business consultants, cities differ in the support they provide for business operations in general. These supports can include helpful professional organizations, government policies that strengthen businesses, a strong educational community that produces skilled employees, and institutions that provide services businesses need for growth, such as financial advice, lending, and legal services. 

A city with strong business support systems not only tends to have a more prosperous and diverse business community, it makes work easier for business consultants. Consulting work solves problems for businesses and improves their operations, tasks that are more successful when a consultant can direct clients to local resources like financing, legal counsel, staffing services, or collaboration partners. Consultants working in a city with many such business resources can solve more problems, faster, yielding stronger results for every client.

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Specific Industries

A generally strong business climate is not the only consideration that makes a city an ideal place for a business consultant. Many business consultants specialize in particular kinds of services or types of industries, and this expertise can influence their regional preferences. For example, a consultant might focus on financial services like investment funding, accounting, and loss management. This kind of service-focused consultant might prefer to work in a city with fewer institutions of the same type, where their services will be rarer and in higher demand. Business consultants specialized by industry, however, should favor places with a higher concentration of their preferred clients. For example, a consultant might specialize in financial institutions, offering services to banks, financial advisors, and accounting firms. Their ideal city would have significant financial activity and more of these finance-related businesses.

Top Cities for Business Consultants

New York City

New York City has multiple well-known advantages for businesses and business consultants, starting with its size, population, economic power, and international reach. Over one million different businesses are based in NYC, and new businesses start there every day, benefiting from the city’s enormous economic, structural, and human resources. While many of those businesses’ needs are already addressed by its hundreds of consulting firms, including several of the world’s oldest and largest, those firms do offer many job opportunities for new consultants. Most international consulting firms are either based in NYC or have branch offices there. Business consultants in NYC can also find work at the various nonprofit and government business incubators that provide free resources and guidance to small companies, startups, and entrepreneurs. Another asset is NYC’s diversity; its great variety of cultures, consumers, and business types means that adaptable consultants can always find a market for their services. 

San Francisco

San Francisco has a reputation for technological expertise and innovation, fostering many rising startups and boasting now-established providers of modern industries like digital media, online services, and medical technologies. The city’s business consultants and consulting firms are similarly creative and technically savvy, and an aspiring consultant in San Fransisco can learn new approaches to their craft and collaborate with emerging and unique industries. This environment continually attracts talented workers, aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, and support industries, all of which benefit local businesses and provide further clientele for business consultants. San Francisco is also a center of international trade, transportation, and finance, and many of its consulting firms have global reach, assisting clients from around the world and helping businesses operate effectively worldwide. While the city has a high cost of living, salaries there are correspondingly higher, and residents enjoy a good quality of life, including vibrant arts and culture and strong infrastructure.

Chicago

Coastal cities like New York and San Francisco boast connections outside of the US, but Chicago’s central location and long history as a hub for travel, freight, trade, and industry have made it an equally powerful economic force. Many of the world’s most significant and well-known corporations — including McDonald’s, United Airlines, Amoco, and Blue Cross Blue Shield — either started or are now centered in Chicago, and hundreds more have regional offices there. In fact, Chicago can lay a strong claim to being the birthplace of management consulting, pioneered there by James McKinsey and A. T. Kearney. The city’s enormous and diverse business activity now supports a strong and varied market for business consultants, with almost every type and size of industry present there and in need of consulting services. Additionally, as a frequent host to corporate meetings and events, Chicago attracts professionals from everywhere in the world, expanding consultants’ networking range. Despite its size and its excellent income for business consultants, Chicago’s cost of living is lower than for comparably sized cities. 

Dallas

While less populous than the largest US cities and home to fewer high-profile corporations and consulting firms, Dallas has a favorable business climate that attracts many companies, investors, and skilled workers. The city’s low cost of living and low taxes are also incentives to live and work there, coupled with income for business consultants that is regularly ranked among the highest in the country. Business and management consulting are highly valued in Dallas. The area’s consultants boast a strong reputation for measurably boosting businesses’ productivity, raising their clients’ revenues by an average of 20% or more. Along with neighboring cities Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, Dallas is part of a wider technological and economic powerhouse; consultants based anywhere in this region benefit from its broad, thriving customer base. The strong digital and transportation infrastructure in this region also simplifies communications and travel for consultants in any of its cities. 

Denver

Denver may not immediately come to mind as a “business city,” but it boasts consistent economic strength driven by a diverse range of industries, a similarly diverse and well-educated workforce, and a supportive business culture that fosters creativity and risk-taking. This vibrant environment provides business consultants with both steady opportunities and unique challenges, quickly generating broad experience and an impressive portfolio. Denver has a good mixture of independent consultants, small consulting groups, and larger consulting firms. The city also ranks high on affordability, quality of life, and business consultant salaries. 

Why Become a Business Consultant?

Many who aspire to a career in business consulting do so because it offers a good income and long-term employment security. Though many business consultants, especially freelancers, must regularly seek new clients, often transition between clients, and may have occasional lapses in employment, consulting services are always in demand, required wherever businesses operate. A well-qualified and -established business consultant may find themselves with more offers than they can accept, and this demand plus proven skills can command even higher income. Particularly skilled and sought consultants often work for consulting firms or establish their own firms, where they can ascend to senior positions serving high-profile clients and overseeing multiple other consultants. 

For some business consultants, this job’s frequent transitions are part of its attraction. Rather than being bound to a single company or industry, consultants can contribute to multiple businesses, solve a wide variety of problems, and gain experience in many areas. For such enterprising consultants, their client list is not only evidence of their skill, it is a traveler’s journal, a series of adventures where they became a rescuing hero. 

Some business consultants specifically seek and enjoy this career for its potential to create beneficial change. They love seeing their clients grow and thrive, knowing that their help created greater profits, new services, and more and better jobs. Or, in cases where a business is struggling with a crisis, a business consultant might rescue it from disaster or at least reduce the damage.

For all of these reasons, a business owner or a corporate worker might choose to transition to a career in business consulting. Some prospective consultants are interested in self-employment, seeking the freedom of freelancing or the opportunity to create their own business. Others are simply tired of their previous work but want to continue using the skills they’ve gained. In either case, experienced workers who become consultants can share the expertise and confidence gained in their former employment, boosting clients’ knowledge and improving their operations.

How to Find a Business Consultant Job

To qualify for work as a business consultant, a candidate must first know how a successful business starts and operates. They must also have strong communication, analysis, and problem-solving skills to provide clients with appropriate advice and interventions. Prepared with these skills, a potential business consultant should create a promotional plan listing their credentials, describing the services they can offer, and explaining the value of those services. Ideally, they should create a portfolio including examples of past work. Here, research into the field can help to tailor a candidate’s job pitch, identify what services are in high demand, and locate emerging opportunities for consulting. Depending on a consultant’s background and employment goal, their self-promotion might take the form of a resume or a business plan. Establishing one’s credentials as a business expert through training, certification, service, and references also helps to build interest and potential clientele. Finally, the candidate must contact potential employers and present their pitch, convincing the employer to hire them, whether on a specific contracted basis or as a direct employee.

Business Expertise

A consultant’s business knowledge need not be total or universal. This is especially true for consultants who focus their practice on certain aspects of business operations or specific industries. Still, consultants should understand fundamental principles like business planning, financing, staffing, workflow, growth, and troubleshooting. This knowledge can come from study, work experience, mentored training, or a combination of all three. A consultant can and should expand their knowledge further while working, but they need some basic competence to start. Academic degrees are valuable, but professional certificates and certifications — consulting-specific credentials as well as specialties like management, security, or finance — can also verify a candidate’s competence to potential employers.

Other Skills: Communication, Analysis, and Problem-Solving

A prospective consultant should be able to communicate well in multiple settings, gather and analyze information, and identify and solve client problems. These abilities are necessary to examine a client’s business in detail, determine its needs, and apply one’s knowledge to create improvements. Again, a consultant can improve these skills on the job, but training and practice with public speaking, interviewing, investigation, data analysis, and creative problem-solving will make a candidate more qualified to start work as a business consultant. Consulting-specific classes particularly emphasize these abilities.

Career Planning

A business consultant’s preferred type of employment is often guided by their studies, their experience, the services they can provide, and the industries they plan to work for. Many consultants are self-employed, contracting with client businesses to provide one or more services. Others work for consulting firms, companies that employ multiple consultants and act as an interface between those consultants and their clients. A few consultants work directly for corporations, either hired for a limited term to complete a specific task or employed flexibly over a longer period, identifying problems as they arise and improving processes wherever possible. However, these internal positions are rarely entry-level, except for analysts and trainers in the largest corporations, and usually require an established reputation as a skilled consultant.

Each option has benefits and limitations, but a new consultant may not have as many options for their first job. Some start as freelancers simply to gain enough experience and references to secure a more consistent and well-paying position. Some accept entry-level positions with a consulting firm but are initially limited to routine work like interviewing, data analysis, or reporting. This labor can teach useful skills and might be preferable to the complexities and stresses of self-employment but does not grant as much diverse experience or increase one’s professional reputation. Some potential consultants must initially work in other areas, such as human resources or administration, to acquire more experience before launching their consulting career.

Self-Employment

If planning to work as a freelancer, a business consultant will need:

• a comprehensive business plan, detailing the clients they are seeking, the services they can offer, their preferred employment model, and their pricing structure;
• a record of their previous work, either a portfolio describing the specific improvements they generated for clients or, at a minimum, samples of their creations such as live presentations, articles, or taught classes;
• a marketing plan, including statements explaining the nature and value of their work, methods to find and approach potential clients, and an advertising budget; and
• a support network, including professional organizations that provide training, guidance, and client contacts, plus associations of fellow business consultants and business owners.

Consulting Firms

Business consultants seeking a position with a consulting firm should:

• create a portfolio of their previous work, including improvements created for clients, positive references, and/or samples of their creations like presentations or articles;
• prepare a resume listing their education, work experience, and other credentials;
• research potential employers, their needs, and their expectations for candidates;
• prepare for interviews by researching likely questions and preparing answers;
• anticipate starting in subordinate roles, handling routine tasks like interviews, data collection, analysis, and report preparation for more senior consultants. 

Learn the Skills to Become a Business Consultant at Noble Desktop

Business courses at Noble Desktop can teach you most of the skills needed to start working as a business consultant, including general business skills, soft skills used in consulting, and specialized skills often sought by clients. These courses span short classes of one or two sessions, bootcamps of varying lengths, and comprehensive professional training programs. Noble Desktop’s classes are available both online and in person in New York City. All classes include live instruction, supplemental reference materials, a digital certificate of completion, and the option to retake the class for free for up to one year. Students can also view recordings after each class session and for up to one month later. 

Business Skills

Noble Desktop’s “MBA” Business Certificate course covers a full range of professional business skills, including useful tools and information on project management, leadership, finance, marketing, data analysis, generative AI, hiring, and legal concerns. While not a full MBA degree program, this certificate course was developed by experienced professionals to cover the core elements of a business education. In addition, this class’ certificate is licensed by the New York State Department of Education. The primary course runs for about five weeks, including both live class sessions and study projects. In addition to reinforcing class lessons, these projects will generate work samples for a starting portfolio. In addition to the primary course, students can select up to 60 hours of elective classes including programming languages, business software, financial tools, and digital marketing. The course also includes eight 1-on-1 mentoring sessions allowing students to work directly with a mentor to address individual goals, review difficult lessons, improve their portfolios and resumes, and refine their career plans.

Included within the “MBA” Business Certificate but also available as a separate course, Noble Desktop’s Project Management Bootcamp is an accelerated program teaching project management methods, tools, and strategies. The program is primarily designed to prepare students for a career in project management but is equally valuable for business consultants. This course is taught in two class sessions, Project Management Level I and Project Management Level II. The first session addresses the theory, practice, subskills, and commonly used tools of project management. The second class further details the individual phases of a project; covers financial, resource, and risk management; and introduces students to the Agile Project Management methodology and several of its implementations, or “frameworks”. 

Leadership, Management, and Public Speaking

Although often described as ‘soft skills,’ leadership, communication, and management can be improved through study and provide concrete benefits. Business consultants use leadership and management techniques not only when directing clients’ employees but also whenever they advise, teach, and motivate clients or when devising organizational structures. Noble Desktop’s Applied Leadership & Management Skills is a two-session class that first teaches the fundamental elements of leadership, communication, and management, then applies these lessons to specific challenges like setting and meeting goals, managing workplace conflict, setting and meeting a schedule, and creative problem-solving. Another class, Intro to Public Speaking, is a shorter, one-session class that focuses more specifically on group communication skills and improves students’ confidence, clarity, and persuasiveness. These abilities are particularly valuable to consultants when teaching skills, delivering advice, or presenting research to clients. The class also includes a section on skillful, effective use of Microsoft PowerPoint for presentations.

Data Analytics

Data analytics is the ability to gather information, organize it, process it to obtain accurate and informative conclusions, and present these findings in clear, persuasive forms. Consultants regularly use data analysis to investigate and describe their clients’ operations, as a prelude to specific recommendations and interventions and as a way to track the effects of their changes. Most entry-level positions with consulting firms involve data analysis, and a consultant with significant data analytic ability is a stronger candidate for employment. 

Noble Desktop offers multiple types of data analytics training. Their Data Analytics Certificate is their most general and comprehensive program. This certificate program can be completed in under two months on a full-time schedule but offers several alternate scheduling options if needed. The course covers eight units of instruction, starting with a short course on Microsoft Excel to give students a commonly used tool for data collection, organization, analysis, and visualization. The course then covers data analytics in more depth, addressing its foundational concepts, utility for decision-making, and applications in business. Subsequent units teach specific coding and visualization tools, including Python (a general-purpose programming language), SQL (a programming language specialized for data collection and management), and Tableau (a popular data visualization program). The course also addresses machine learning algorithms and their interactions with data analysis. This certificate course includes eight 1-on-1 mentoring sessions and a New York State licensed certificate of completion.

For a shorter and more focused course, Noble Desktop’s Business Analyst Certificate covers several data analysis tools used in business operations. This certificate program takes students from introductory lessons to advanced skills with Microsoft Excel, SQL, Tableau, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Each application’s section is the equivalent of an individual bootcamp, including fundamental skills training, specific methods used for data analysis and/or reporting, and advanced techniques to add more utility and improve efficiency. This course lasts about six weeks on a full-time schedule, with part-time scheduling also available. Completing this course awards students with a New York State licensed certificate.

Financial analysis is one of the most common types of data analysis for businesses and an asset for any business consultant. Noble Desktop’s Financial Modeling Bootcamp is an intensive, three-session course that uses Excel to demonstrate representations, analyses, and concepts useful to understand any company’s finances. Participants are expected to already have good fluency and working experience with Excel. Alternatively, the Financial Analyst Training Program adds two preliminary classes on Excel and its use in data analysis and then presents the same material as the Financial Modeling Bootcamp. 

Marketing

Marketing is another necessity for businesses and a valuable skill for a business consultant. Finding interested customers, developing an appealing product, managing pricing and sales, creating interest and need, and confirming and retaining buyers all require trained strategy. Noble Desktop’s Marketing Strategy class teaches the fundamental concepts of marketing and addresses specific techniques to create, implement, and manage a marketing strategy. The class’ two sessions also include time to practice these methods in guided projects. 

Two additional classes address modern, online marketing methods in more depth. The Digital Marketing Certificate program is a New York State-licensed certificate course that covers a complete range of digital marketing methods and considerations, from website creation and web advertising to email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media sites and campaigns. Students learn not only how to establish an appealing online presence but also how to manage online activity to excite customers, hold their interest, and avoid mistakes. This course can be completed in about one month on a full-time schedule. A shorter course, but also a State-licensed certificate, the Social Media Marketing Certificate program is a subset of the Digital Marketing Certificate program that focuses more specifically on social media use and marketing strategies.