What can a business coach help with?
Definition of business coaching
Coaching is a combination of a range of skills that incorporate elements of training, mentoring and consultancy. So what can a business coach can help with? They provide external accountability for performance and action.
A business coach focuses on the core principles and concepts of business without specialising in any area to the exclusion of others.
To answer what can a business coach help with is all the things you’ve probably never been trained on to actually run your business!
Coaches educate and support business owners to make more effective decisions and plans and help to enable them to apply that learning directly into their business.
Once the business owners have applied these elements into their business once and mastered the associated skills, they can then apply and adapt their learning to different scenarios.
Why is business coaching important, and how & what can a business coach help with?
A business coach means different things to different people, depending on their individual goals and challenges. What can a business coach help with, in your context, is a highly bespoke relationship that happens within a consistent framework.
Coaching in a business environment delivers a range of benefits, some of which are listed below:
- Stronger, more robust and pragmatic business planning
- Clarity over the business direction, so everyone is heading towards the same goal
- Greater business profitability
- Increased efficiency and effectiveness through things such as systemisation
- A stronger cashflow position and consistency in profitability
- Greater return from your marketing strategy
- Higher conversion rates, higher-order values and more repeat business
- Reduced reliance and pressure on the business owner
- Greater confidence, knowledge and reassurance.
What a business coach can help with is pretty much most aspects of running, operating, growing, scaling, and exiting a business.
What can a business coach help with?
At UK Growth Coach it's all around our unique 10-point Coaching Star
Having worked with over 250 SMEs during the past decade and training with some of the world’s top business coaches, we’ve developed a unique model of the 10 top areas of business that affect SMEs.
- Business Direction
- Company Culture
- Profit Levers
- Financial Controls
- Marketing Strategy
- Sales Strategy
- Driving KPIs & Gauges
- Systemisation for Efficiency
- Team Performance
- Business Owner Performance.
We chose a star because there are two sides to each point, which show the interconnection between two of the areas.
These are the 10 areas which affect performance for SMEs, are within their control and ultimately affect the lives and satisfaction levels of business owners themselves.
So ‘what can a business coach help with?’ A lot of different aspects of your business but ultimately delivering tangible business results and positively impacting the lives of business owners.
What business coaching isn't going to help you with
There are a few misconceptions about what business coaching is, so it is worth mentioning what our business coaching does not do So rather than asking what can a business coach help with, let’s now ask what we can’t help with!
Firstly, we don’t work with failing businesses.
Businesses that are struggling or in trouble require a different and often specialist skillset in the area that is causing failure.
Instead, we work with successful businesses, but ones that could be achieving even more.
We enable SME companies to realise their potential in the real world.
The other thing which we don’t do is to actually do the work for you.
Unlike a consultant who may take on the task or activity on your behalf, a business coach empowers, educates, supports, and enables you, the business owner, to undertake the action.
All decisions and actions sit with the business owner.
We provide guidance, a sounding board, and advice to enable those decisions to be taken with confidence and knowledge.
Finally, and very importantly, we don’t just have a chat over a coffee and provide some advice. Drinks of course are available!
But we move from advice, guidance, and education to agreeing on actions and timescales.
Then when the time is right we look at the results from them.
Hopefully this provides a clear picture of what a business can help with, and where other service providers may be more useful to you.
