What is a Business Coach?
A business coach is a person who helps a business reach its goals. There are many advantages of having a business coach. They take a business from where they are now and get them to where they want to be. Business coaching is a thought-provoking, introspective, and creative process. Ultimately, the process of successful coaching empowers clients to maximize their personal and business potential.
A Business Coach meets with business owners on a regular basis, either in person or over the telephone. In sessions, they discuss the current and future business and life issues the business is facing. The goal of the coach is to establish a sense of clarity of what success means to the business owner. Once this is established an action plan is needed to achieve this success.
Business coaches don’t teach practical business skills. Instead, they are partners in achieving radical personal understanding. Most of the time a coach wants to be facilitating the generation of their client’s ideas, not suggest their own ideas.
There are many areas in which a business coach offers insight and help, and some of these areas are the following:
What can a business coach help you with?
Finding issues within the business
One of the advantages of a business coach is that they provide an outside perspective to the business. Often when you are running a business you are so involved and too closely associated with your company. This often makes it difficult to see where you are going wrong. Being personally connected to something makes it difficult to think about it in a rational or logical way. A business coach will then shine a light on what the business is doing, and why it’s not working.
The coaching process looks at your business, in the context of your whole life. A good coach helps clients recognise where their business, and their own role within it, are out of alignment. As an outside observer, a coach can also pinpoint ways in which you are getting in your own way, or holding back your team.
A business coach helps the client find their own strengths and weaknesses. The advantage of a business coach is that they have no personal or emotional attachment towards you or your business. This enables them to tell you the hard but important truths. They then see how these aspects are affecting the business. A good coach will then have the systems in place to help clients on their own self-development journey so that they can become better people and have a more successful business. At the end of the day, the goal for both the coach and the client should be to achieve business success.
Implementing strategies for lasting change
Personal development
A business coach is not there to be a “quick fix” or a short-lived success story. The client will still be putting in hard work, and the changes might be slow and gradual. The changes that the client implements should, however, result in the lasting transformation that will help the business keep on improving time and time again.
If a business coach wants to create long-lasting, sustainable change, that leads to substantial business growth, they have to change their client and how they see themselves. To create positive results a business coach needs to get their client to reach their full potential. The business coach needs to establish what the core values of their client are. They can then provide personalised advice to help them live up to these values.
Coaching is not just about getting the client to do some actions for a short time. Otherwise, they’ll just go back to where they were once the coach leaves. It’s crucial for a coach to create long term goals that will bring lasting improvement to the client’s life. Instead of arbitrary numbers or empty symbols of success, a coach helps align goals with the values of the client. The client needs to recognise the impact of his or her thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.
Coaching relationship
Establishing a coaching relationship is a critical component of the coaching process. Without a good coaching relationship where the client feels supported and understood, the client will be reluctant to follow the advice and recommendations of the business coach. The coaching experience should be an encouraging and positive experience for all parties involved.
No matter what change needs to be implemented in the business, whether it’s a strategy system in the business, it’s the client that has to implement it all. A coach needs to recognize the client’s strengths and areas for learning and growth to be able to really encourage them on where they need to improve and build that self-identity.
A coach needs to guide the client to think bigger, broader, and deeper about what they want, in business and in life. The more passionate a coach is about helping others, the better the coach will be.
Providing Accountability and Support
Another advantage of having a business coach is that they are the ultimate accountability partner. They provide weekly or monthly check-ins with their clients to see if they are on track with the business plan. This will help guide them to achieve their short and long term goals. A coach needs to spend time in sessions checking their client’s progress. A coach needs to make sure that what was agreed upon is actually being done. If they don’t do this it becomes very difficult to calibrate whether something’s off track.
You want to acknowledge what the client has and has not done, learned, and become aware of since the previous coaching session. A coach also needs to positively confront the client when he or she does not take agreed-upon actions. You have to challenge your clients. Coaches are there to keep the client focused on the end result and remind them why it is important. They will motivate their clients to keep their commitments. They will act as a sounding board for new ideas. And when needed, hold a mirror in front of the business owner, highlighting their business and personal blind spots.
A coach is also there to encourage and support the client to apply new knowledge or skills immediately. They should want to build the clients’ passion for what they are doing. A coach also needs to encourage the client to constantly be more engaged in the process of change. Your coaching services should push clients out of their comfort zones. This will make them a better leader, and ultimately change their view of themselves so that they can lead a better life.
The coaching industry is an exciting one to join. It can provide so much meaning to both the coaches and the businesses they help. If you feel like your business could do with a fresh perspective, and needs a professional coach we have a board of coaches ready to help you reach your business goals. Or on the other hand, if you would like to embark on your own coaching journey, you can read our previous post on how to become a business coach.
