Establishing your business is no easy feat. You can easily get caught up in the whirlwind of handling day-to-day tasks, making it challenging to focus on your company operations’ vital aspects that drive growth and success. All this can also take a toll on you mentally, emotionally, and physically, which adds to the list of things that could hinder you from succeeding. The good news is, business coaches can help you help yourself. They can assist you with devising strategic action plans to turn your dreams of achieving business success into reality. In fact, in a survey by the International Coach Federation (ICF), entrepreneurs and executives stated that working with a business coach can increase their net income by 46%. This guide covers the critical role business coaches play to establish your business and develop your company. But first...
What is a Business Coach?
Many business coaches are business owners and entrepreneurs themselves who have years of experience in company management and operations under their belt. Business coaches use their talents and skills to help other entrepreneurs and business leaders meet their goals. Coaches also refine their coaching services through programs such as Clients on Demand, which provides a step-by-step game plan for expanding businesses and client attraction strategies. According to founder Russ Ruffino, Clients on Demand gives coaches and consultants, “More freedom to focus on the other aspects of their business, where they can concentrate on delivering better results to their customers...”
Essentially, business coaches help you identify your business goals, refine your company’s vision, and establish strategies to help you meet those objectives and vision, among other things. They can give you advice and solutions tailored to your business’ needs.
What Business Coaches do
A business coach can serve as both a mentor and trainer, teaching you with the necessary skills to help your company succeed. Business coaches can also provide a bank of information to guide you take the steps you need to establish your business. A case study on the Return on Investment (ROI) of business coaching showed that executive coaching led to a 529% ROI and considerable intangible advantages to the business, highlighting the impact of what coaches can do for a company. Finding the best-fitting business coach for you and your company depends on many factors. Start by identifying your company’s needs and the professional characteristics of a business coach that can help address those needs, including: ● Skill level, experience, and training ● Certifications ● Curriculum, methodology, or the type of program they use ● Philosophy and approach While these characteristics are essential when finding a business coach, focusing on personal fit will help you choose the best consultant to work with. If you’re already working with business coaches but want to assess whether they’re the best fit for you, consider asking yourself the following: ● Does your business coach know where your business is headed? Does he/she have a blueprint that shows they understand your company’s direction and use it to ask relevant questions about your business in its current stage? ● Can they help you iron out your long-term vision while aiding you in addressing existing issues within your business? Your business coach should see trends and patterns, so you don’t end up firefighting little problems as they come up. After all, you’d want sustainable solutions and not just quick fixes. ● Do they hold you accountable? You want someone who can push you and call you out when you don’t do the work and show up, or you won’t make any real changes and improvements. ● Does your business coach meet you where you are? Can he/she be there when something goes wrong? An excellent consultant should be able to assist you when you need them and celebrate your wins with you when you’ve made progress and succeed. A business coach can help refine your goals, hone your talents, guide you in making the best decisions, and assist you in everything else that will help you make your company a success.
How Business Coaches Help Develop Your Business
A business coach helps you enhance your company, refining your business goals and implementing the right strategies for growth. Below are some of the critical roles that business coaches play in helping you establish your company.
1. Offer feedback and establish accountability
Some of the biggest setbacks in growing your business don’t always lie in operations alone but sloppy practices. This could come from anywhere, including extreme leniency with your employees that affect efficiency and productivity, neglected campaigns, and accounts you’re not giving the attention they require to produce excellent outcomes.
A business coach can help you set up and maintain an accountability system that allows you to stay on track and prioritize your projects and tasks. He/she will also give you regular feedback to monitor your progress toward meeting your goals.
2. Identify potential issues in your business
Being buried in your daily operations or pressing tasks on hand can make it challenging for you to see what you’re doing wrong. Business coaches can give you an objective rundown of your company. This makes it easier for them to uncover systematic issues that you might have overlooked or didn’t have the time to look deeper into and help you find the best solutions to address them. A business coach acts as a second pair of eyes that provide you with valuable insights about your company and identify key aspects that you need improvement. This includes time management strategies for better productivity and using the right tools to organization restructuring.3. Provide new perspectives and challenge existing mindsets
While the saying “Two heads are better than one” sounds cliché, it’s still a good principle to live by, especially when working with a business coach. Whether you’re trying to build your leadership skills, implement reforms to improve your operations or come up with new sales strategies and campaigns, running them by an experienced professional will only help them turn out better. Most business coaching programs help extract opinions, allowing you and your teams to exchange ideas while your coach supervises. This lets you gain new perspectives about your business. A business coach will ask you the right questions to challenge potentially archaic ideas and ineffective processes that impact your company’s success. Besides recommending solutions, business coaches will also help refine the systems you have in place.4. Share the expertise your business needs
Experience in business management and operations is one of the biggest factors that increase expertise, and business coaches have boatloads of it. This equips your business coach with the skills they need to understand your business and give you relevant and actionable insights. For instance, the company creation process requires a lot of support and assistance to help you take the right steps in the proper order. Mess this up, and you could end up with immediate and future issues, which is why a business coach’s expertise comes in handy. Most business coaches have gone through the company creation process with many various clients in multiple industries. This gives them the experience and skills to help you create a good plan and devise the right implementation strategies. Additionally, business coaches can help you fine-tune your goals and create contingency plans, allowing you naturally to address potential issues.5. Recommend strategies for expansion and growth
Some of the biggest challenges you may face can be gaining a high-quality and significant customer base and increasing brand awareness. A business coach can provide recommendations and tailored solutions to help you overcome these kinds of roadblocks, improving your business’ performance. According to the Institute of Coaching, 70% of surveyed individuals who received coaching experienced improved work relationships and performance and better communication skills.
For instance, your business coach can help you develop a strategic and cohesive digital marketing plan that allows you to generate relevant web traffic and boost your brand’s reputation. That being said, a business coach can assist you in identifying the direction you want your business and operations to take and building plans that drive performance and success.
6. Empower you and your business
“Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” This is one of the major end goals of business coaching. Business coaches don’t do the work for you. Instead, they equip you with the right tools to put into practice all your planning and your coach’s recommended solutions, from refining your goals to establishing low-cost, high-ROI marketing tactics to grow your business. A business coach also helps you develop the skills you need to assess and determine your business needs, even after finishing the coaching program. In a nutshell, the more your business coach helps you, the less you will need him/her. Great coaches know this and will tell you when there’s nothing else they can help you with. They won’t stretch out the relationship just to maintain a source of steady income.The Importance of Business Coaches for Your Business
The personal, intensive journey of working with a business coach can be long and painful. However, it will help you overcome obstacles that keep you from succeeding, unlock many potentials for business growth, and continue to level up your company even after your relationship with your business coach ends. Whether you’re just starting to build your company or trying to establish higher growth for your business, bringing in a professional business coach is an excellent way to make the process more effective. It can take some time and commitment to find a business coach that best fits your needs, but knowing your needs and how a coach with the right characteristics and skills can help you will narrow your search. At Growth Hackers, we are recognized as one of the top growth hacking agencies worldwide. Indeed, we help startups, small to medium businesses and founders to propel their business through content marketing, SEO, email marketing and more. So, if you need help to increase your brand awareness, get more leads and increase your sales, get in touch with Growth Hackers today. We won’t be your business coach, but we can take care of your entire digital marketing strategy and get your business to new heights.
Marc Sullivan
I live and breathe writing. I write about marketing, business, sports, cybersecurity, or just about anything and everything under the sun.
