Small Business Coaching for Entrepreneurs
What is Business Coaching?
Business Coaching is a 1-1 focused discussion targeted to helping you improve your performance and grow your business. Business Coaching is also often referred to as Executive Coaching. The “work” and approach is primarily the same in both, but business coaching is geared to the business owner; whereas, executive coaching is geared to the executive level manager inside an organization.
In my practice, I coach entrepreneurs including franchisors, franchisees as well as independent business owners, but for simplicity sake, I refer to both scenarios as “business coaching.”
Difference between Business Coaching and Business Consulting
Business Consulting accelerates your business growth by focusing primarily on creating customized strategies, methods, plans, structures, systems, and tactical planning for your specific business or organization.
Common business consulting services I offer include:
▶ Business development / marketing strategies
▶ Franchisee performance development
▶ Increasing employee engagement
▶ Increasing staff retention
▶ Recruiting top talent
▶ Sales force recruiting, development & management
Business Coaching, on the other hand, works on developing your soft skills which is also often referred to as the “psychology of success”. Business coaching explores shifting your mindset and perspective on your business which then allows for powerful breakthroughs in strategic direction of your company.
“Soft skills” does not mean weaker skills, remedial skills or less important skills. It truly is the necessary ingredient that propels and fast tracks your progress.
Business coaching meets many important unmet needs of the Entrepreneur and small business owner:
- Accountability
- Action planning
- Brainstorming
- Clarity
- Executive skills
- Focus
- Greater confidence
- Motivation
- Productivity
- Push back
- Sounding board
- Support
If you have never hired a business coach,
understand that a good business coach is not someone who simply tells you what you should do.
An effective business coach should serve as your partner, so together you are co-creating greater levels of success for you (the client).
There are tremendous benefits in hiring a business coach. It’s a great return on investment for entrepreneurs with faster speed to market. Reviewing case studies is a good way to find the right business coach for you.
The right business coach is often a seasoned entrepreneur who does not have the same exact background, expertise, and skills. When you take on a partner you want someone who brings different strengths and insights to the table. If you partnered with someone with the same background and skills you would likely struggle with the same insulated and stale “group-think” syndrome.
If you are the business owner and President of your company, the right business coach should have a track record of starting and successfully growing their own businesses. Someone with a corporate background has a completely different understanding of what it’s truly like to be the President of a company that started the business from the ground up and needs to systematically scale and grow your organization. You have to juggle wearing multiple hats while steering all the moving parts to work in tandem.
