The marketplace for businesses to find and connect with highly qualified professionals, easily access their expertise, gather proportionate advice, and achieve their goals faster.

As a COO for over a decade, I've seen countless challenges in buying and selling of products and services. I've noticed two big issues: 1. Businesses are too fixated on external opinions, which can vary in value. 2. Teams struggle to find the right external input sources to help their organisation grow. The first issue can become overwhelming and hinder quality control. While external input is valuable, it's a challenge if not executed well. The second issue shows that people often just need guidance and a chance to test their ideas, instead of a drawn-out consulting service. When the cost-value ratio for advice is off, it causes businesses to lose faith in professional support; or overspend for value. We're not saying there's no place for long engagements, but they should be chosen based on need, not as a default. Team members need access to diverse advice to grow and help the organisation achieve its goals. Many lack the connections to do this, and even those who do often only have contacts in their own industry. Research shows that UK small and medium sized enterprises face a significant issue, with a £60bn and growing market suffering up to 20% (or £12bn) in loss due to mistimed, disproportionate, or poor advice. Counsl aims to tackle this issue in the UK and the US (where annual spend is £250bn) by creating a single platform for advice and services. We want to make them available and proportionate so businesses can get what they need, when they need it, from start to success.

@james_loft Hi James! Great product. How do you verify experts who join the platform as advisors/consultants?

@ilyagalushin Hi Ilya, Great question. We ensure all Providers firstly can pass our standard KYB checks to ensure they are a real entity with no obvious negative history. Then we review them across their services, past clients, Standing in the Market. We look at and get to know every provider. In the longer term we will introduce a suite of automated checks including things such as University qualification checks and good practice tests.

Congrats on the launch! I've needed a service like this myself when working on a previous startup. As this is a SaaS business could you share a bit about your development experiences? Was there any particular feature that proved challenging to develop?

@chris_robinson10 Thanks Chris, and great to hear you would have seen that value. I think with an MVP you are always looking to do the least for the greatest value so that in itself was a challenge but the biggest bit for me (Which I guess is also one of the most important parts) was the search functionality. We needed an approach that both helped people refine their ask whilst dealing with the potential of low detail levels in provider listings. What we have created is awesome but it was very fresh territory for us to do it in the right way.

Counsl - The Advice Platform

Get actionable advice from professionals in 30minute blocks.

Get actionable advice from professionals in 30minute blocks.

Counsl - The Advice Platform

Get actionable advice from professionals in 30minute blocks.

Get actionable advice from professionals in 30minute blocks.

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