Demystifying the Business Coaching Process
It’s lonely at the top. When you are leading a team, often the chance for bettering yourself as a leader slips through your fingers. It’s not your intention to forget the importance of leadership development, but sometimes, it’s hard to fit it into a schedule that is crammed with urgent management responsibilities. Increased revenue, productivity, and employee well-being are all achievable goals for your business. But it requires a shift in perspective and in what specifically is a priority to you.
Demystifying the Business Coaching Process
It’s easy to get confused about what hiring a business growth coach means. There is a lot of noise out there and promises made, but what really matters is finding the right advocate and accountability partner for your business mission. Finding this partner means they will display a commitment to understanding not just your industry, but what motivates you and your team. They will display knowledge of the many intricacies of running a business and understand how that has an impact on you as a leader and person. A good business growth coach will display competence in navigating productivity snags and challenges that come your way, be intent on listening to your problems, and help mirror potential solutions to the roadblocks you face.
What is Business Coaching?
What is business coaching? And how is it different from hiring a consultant? A consultant is usually hired only for a specific need in a business’s life cycle. A sales negotiation, a rebranding of the company, or maybe as a temporary conflict mediator. However, a business coach is there for the long-term, steading the hand of leaders as they reach higher levels of productivity and growth.
Relationships are the cornerstone of the business coaching process. Development and growth only happen in an environment of trust. A business coach is responsible for creating this trusting relationship and helping you nurture it with your team. One of the supreme ways a business coach achieves this is through accountability.
Leaders who invest their heart and hard-earned money into a business venture want more than a consultant. They need someone who is invested in their future. Someone who cares for the well-being of their team and who isn’t afraid to offer a dissenting opinion if it leads to clarity or progress on the path to success.
The Different Business Coaching Models
There are a number of ways a business coach might work with a business leader. One of the best ways to facilitate this process is with a collaborative model of coaching. Instead of using a predetermined agenda for how to reach success, this type of business coach is collaborative in building the goals and metrics to assist you down the road. Active listening plays a big role in the collaborative coach’s mindset. They design accountability markers with you in mind rather than treating each client with the same inflexible processes.
Regular check-ins and phone calls with a coach are a part of that process. Different methods work for different people, so the ideal business coach will be adaptable to the specific motivators of the leaders they coach. Getting people to communicate what is important to them and which goals are essential to a thriving business helps a coach build a plan retrofitted for the client.
Another model for exploring business coaching is to use an industry-based approach. Things like scaling and managing growth have important nuances for the industries you serve. Seeking a coach with a portfolio of similar clients might help in providing context for problems you face. The larger portfolio of past clients a business coach has for your industry, the more successful he or she might be in assisting you with real solutions. While there is some overlap between industries, knowing patterns and insider norms of your world will allow your business coach to spot problems, understand pain points, and come alongside what you are already doing more effectively.
The last type of business coaching and consulting model we think is the most powerful is the coach who specializes in helping leaders take a high degree of accountability and ownership. This coach gets results, not because they have some magic formula that unlocks the best behavior of people, but because they understand how to empower and inspire others to act in their own best interest. This includes achieving the transformation that people want for their teams. The accountable coach is also effective at conveying the end result to clients.
This business coach is excellent at providing clarity and giving honest and sometimes tough feedback to improve a leader’s effectiveness. Want more time back with your family? Take charge of your schedule instead of allowing it to run you into the ground. Financials out of control? Take a hard but necessary look at what is threatening your longevity by understanding the dynamics of cash flow. They understand their role not only as a cheerleader but as a strategic advisor. Many, if not all of the business leaders we encounter say this type of coaching is what they need the most.
Putting Together a Business Coaching Plan
A business coaching plan is formed directly from the relationship between the business coach and the owner. Each plan is customized to the particular needs of the client. It all begins with the client and what needs and expectations are most urgent in their world. This gives the coach a sense of direction. The client’s priorities, not the coach’s, come first. Identifying habits, motivators, patterns, and priorities are part of the initial steps of making a coaching plan.
Coaching, while a bit of an art and a science, isn’t about flying blind. There are key metrics available to measure whether a client is trending toward growth. An accountable business coach looks at a few things: staff retention, cash flow positioning, productivity, company culture and morale, and the owner’s productivity levels while at work. However, the most common underlying tool used to diagnose the overall performance and health of a company is a business valuation.
Business Valuations and the Coaching Process
A business valuation covers all areas of a business’s competency and helps a business coach to see the health of an operation for its owners and stakeholders. A business valuation is a way to clear the decks and gather information on what is working well for a business, and what is not. This exercise provides an objective metric and diagnostic tool for coaches and their clients to “see what’s going on under the hood” with their clients. The tool also is effective in allowing a coach to determine areas of opportunity to help the business expand.
A business valuation benefits a business of any size, regardless of whether or not they are ready to sell. It shows the likelihood your business will grow in the future and at what rate, helps you to understand cash flow swings and seasonality of sales, and how differentiated your business is from competitors. The point of a business valuation is to provide a set point for where the business is in its pursuit of future growth. It shows what factors are within your control as a business owner and whether you can improve the valuation of your company.
The Importance of Business Growth Coaching
Business growth coaching is all about results. If systems and processes change within teams, culture, and leadership, there will be signs of improvement almost everywhere you look. The important thing to understand is that business coaching doesn’t work to “fix problems” any more than it does “fix people.” It engages relationally with leaders, their teams, and the business, and seeks to inspire, invigorate, and promote change in every way possible. But the desire and motivation to change must already be within. A business coach simply provides guidance.
Business Coaching and Consulting with Coachwell!
If business growth coaching and consulting sounds like an avenue you’d like to explore for your business, we recommend setting up a discovery call to speak with a coach about your strategic business growth goals. Do you want to know how much your business would be worth to a buyer today? Would you like to introduce better communication patterns within your team? Or learn how to create leaders from within your business? We can answer all of these questions and more.
