12 reasons to use a business coach

                                                                             By: Dr Stephen Treloar (c) 2015
You might be asking, “why do I need a business coach” and “...anyway, what exactly is a business coach."

OK, let’s first consider what is a Business Coach?

A Business Coach is a person who is NOT an ‘expert’ in your business. You are! As the owner or manager, you know your customers’, you know your suppliers, your competition and the industry. If you like – you’re the ‘expert’ in ‘your business Pty Ltd’. So what help does a Business Coach provide?

Business Coaches are experts on the process of running businesses, including: strategic planning, finance & accounting, marketing (sales, product, price, promotion, distribution), leadership, human resources, and operations. While your focus is on your own business, an experienced Business Coach has seen scores (sometimes hundreds) of different businesses and can ‘see’ what works and what doesn’t. 

As the owner or manager, your skills are ‘technical skills of ‘your business Pty Ltd’ while your Business Coach arguably, by virtue of greater experience and training has stronger conceptual and strategic skills. It’s like, your technical ability providing the skill to ‘carefully examine, define and analyse an individual tree’ to that of a Business Coach who can ‘see’ and help re-configure ‘the entire shape of the forest’. 

Alternatively, if you like, the Business Coach can help take you on a ‘helicopter ride’ of your business. The old maxim of ‘working on your business, instead of working in your business’ still applies.

So what’s the difference between a Consultant and a Business Coach?

A Consultant will often scope the project, diagnose the problem, consider alternatives and (generally) implement the changes or recommendations. 

A Business Coach (as does a coach in a sporting sense) shows the business owner or manager HOW to do it themselves. 

Whereas Consultants solve certain problems or issues (or make recommendations), a Business Coach equips the owner or manager to resolve it themselves (and serves as a backup when needed). Many successful Business Coaches have their genesis as a former consultant but later transcend into business coaching. It is also fair to suggest that a Business Coach makes greater reliance on psychological skills, knowledge (and application) of motivational theories, and change management concepts to that of a Consultant.

The 12 Reasons - Why you should use a Business Coach...

1. You realise that you have not developed a clearly enunciated vision into the future of the business. Where will the business be in 3 and 5 years time, including: revenue projections, bottom-line, financing, cash flow, acquisition strategy, or possibly even an exit strategy (i.e. sale of business)?
2.  You are a business owner or manager and experiencing that lonely feeling at the top. Intuitively, you know it would be good to have someone to act as a ‘sounding board’ to test your ideas, provide new dimensions in thinking, or suggest different paradigms. Maybe even, to hold you accountable for developing plans and milestones – and keeping you ‘honest’ to achieve them.
3.  You have become a ‘captive’ of your business. Instead of the business working for you, you are ‘working’ for your business. This means you are taken away from the more pleasurable pursuits of being a business owner, including maintaining a better work-life balance. Maybe your family life is suffering, and you want more out of being a business owner?
4. You are “fighting fires” everyday and doing day-to-day tasks without looking ahead to the future and planning for the growth of your business.
5. Your business has either ‘hit a wall’; maybe you’re experiencing cash-flow problems, and it is “all getting a bit too much." Every business is different and requires an individual or customised approach. We call this a bespoke approach to coaching.
6.  You need assistance in achieving new and additional business revenue, maybe by increasing your use of the Internet driven e-marketing (e-com), social media, Google, Ad words, SEO, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It is tantamount to say that if your business is still doing things the same way as it did 10 or even 5 years ago, chances are you are being left behind by your competitors.
7. Maybe, you are at the start-up stage of business and need assistance in planning and preparing all those things that are necessary. It can be overwhelming, and you need guidance.
8. Maybe, you have a large project to complete such as: relocation, acquisition, or downsizing project and need assistance. There is much to be done and need some assistance and guidance in considering the options. 
9. You never seem to have sufficient time during the day to do all those things that need to be done. “Everything becomes urgent” and maybe you need some assistance in project management, time management and priority setting (or maybe it is a delegation issue).
10. There are ‘risk management’ issues of lingering concern, this might include changes to Workplace Health & Safety legislation (what’s my exposure?), general risk management and governance issues.
11. You have some staffing or human-resource issues? It could be in recruitment, staff performance, employment agreements, dispute matters, in short, any issue involving staffing. 
12. It could be; you are thinking about one day, selling the business, handing the business down to a family member, or maybe even considering a complete career change. There are many options and you need assistance working through them, in order to make the best choice.

Written by

Dr Stephen TreloarDirector of Postgraduate Studies. Senior Lecturer; Executive Coach; Keynote Speaker.

Business Builders Group – BBG Chapters Launched in Sydney

Andrew GotleyBusiness Enhancement Professional

This week the four BBG Chapters formed in Sydney kicked off their first group meetings. Braving the early morning weather to get to the meetings, the members convened at the BSI Group offices in Martin Place, Sydney to participate and experience what BBG is all about.

 With a unique structure and process, BBG connects members with other members and their networks. The process builds on the Know, Like and Trust principles of networking to allow the group members to make better quality, easier and more referrals. Better Quality and More Referrals come from the process where Chapter members get to Know, Like and Trust the other members of the Chapter. Easier Referrals are facilitated by the Referron App and the relationships formed between the members. The whole process is facilitated by a Mentor who has attended and passed the BBG Mentor Accreditation Course.

Having attended three Chapter meetings this week (out of four) and mentoring one of these groups, there were a number of exciting and powerful results witnessed. The Chapter members commenced building business relations before, during and after the meeting. They got to know some of the member’s businesses from member presentations followed by question and answer sessions. After the meetings, there have been numerous conversations, emails and phone calls between members where they have been exploring ways of helping each other’s businesses via referrals.

Within the group I facilitated, I have seen over 50 emails from the group members. I can only imagine the number of emails and phone calls took place outside the BBG meeting between the chapter members. This has been repeated over the other three Chapters that have met this week.

BBG is a very powerful process for generating High Quality Referrals for Business. It is not limited by the industry, profession, business model, organisation size, etc. and can be applied to anyone looking to grow their business or address issues in their business.

For more information or to join a BBG Chapter, please message Andrew via LinkedIn or visit the websites www.bbg.business or www.asgstrategies.com.au

Andrew is a Business Enhancement Professional backed by solid academic record, wide ranging industry experience and a successful 35-year career in General Management, Sales & Marketing and Engineering.

Written by

Andrew GotleyBusiness Enhancement Professional

My Name is Jennifer and I am a Niche Switcher

Jennifer T. Grainger★ I Help Women Leaving the Corporate World Build a Thriving Business & Replace the Paycheck They Left Behind 

It was embarrassing going to networking meetings and changing my niche every few months. Like I was some kind of a flake!

Some call it “building the plane while flying it” which is exactly what it feels like.

I went way too long with my first niche. 5 years to be exact (which is how long it took to burn through all my resources I’d been throwing at it.)

Niche #1

As a freshly minted coach, full of enthusiasm and idealism, I was certain my niche was people on a spiritual path who had no one to talk to, because that was the “big problem” I’d experienced and wanted to help others so they wouldn’t be as lonely as I was in my journey.

I loved working with spiritual seekers, and I always made enough money to cover my business expenses, so making a living as a spiritual coach was not really important.

That all changed when my former husband, Dave and I decided to reshape our relationship from husband and wife to good friends, and I had to earn my own living (more on that later).

My first business coach tried to discourage me because he said that unless you’re a big name, like Deepak Chopra or Wayne Dyer, you won’t make a living as a spiritual coach.

I trusted my guidance more than my coach, and proceeded to spend the next five years bouncing from coach to coach who offered success if I just followed their formula.

It didn't happen!

I burned through my life savings and all the credit I could muster until I had no more resources to throw at it. (And making all the business mistakes along the way so my clients wouldn’t have to.)

 This was pretty clear feedback that my first coach was right!

Through a series of seemingly unrelated circumstances I stumbled upon a mentor who filled in the missing puzzle pieces . . . those things I didn’t know I didn’t know, without which I would have kept spinning my wheels “doing what I loved and expecting the money to follow!”

My “business plan,” which had consisted mostly of visualization, affirmations, energy work, meditation, and a really spiffy vision board, while important, was only half the equation.

I wasn’t paying attention to basic good business practices, like tracking the return on my investment of time and money into my various offerings. And the bigger problem was that I had no clue about marketing, which I had confused with “selling.”

And the biggest problem was I didn’t do the market research to see if people would pay me for what I was offering before sinking my life savings into bringing it to market. (Fools rush in where angels fear to tread was the bugaboo of my optimism.)

A huge mistake with Niche #1 was offering what I believed people needed. I hadn’t yet learned people buy what they want, which is not necessarily what we think they need.

Important Business Principle:

• Offer a product or service that people want to buy, and throw in what they need along the way. (A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down!)
• Get confirmation that there is a market for what you are offering by getting a few paying clients before going too far down that road.

Niche #2

Given the buying public was not attracted to my offering to teach them how to “be their authentic self and experience more joy, less struggle in their daily life,” I needed to switch my niche, or face life as a bag lady.

When Dave and I had decided to go our separate ways we made quite a splash by sending out 125 announcements to our family and friends celebrating “the successful completion of our soul contract after 25 years of marriage.”

People were blown away by the love and care with which we made that transition. So it seemed a no brainer to switch my niche to women trapped in an unhappy marriage where I would help them either reshape the marriage so it worked for them, or show them how to have a heart-centered and compassionate dissolution that didn’t cost a fortune (ours was $325) or make an enemy of their spouse, while keeping the love intact, like Dave and I did.

Everywhere I networked people oohed and ahhed at what a great niche that was. Everyone knew someone who fit the description. But after months of networking like crazy I didn’t get even one woman to make an appointment for a free coaching session!

My daughter clued me in: “Mom, women go for years in unhappy marriages. It is too painful to actually face head on the marriage might be over.”

Time for another niche switch!

Niche #3

My coach from the marketing program I was in suggested I interview married women to find out what they wanted.

Yep, good old market research to the rescue. What I found out was their biggest concern was how to make more money in their business.

Well, their problem was the same one I was getting help with in the program I was in: how to create a marketing message that easily attracted their ideal clients coming to them already wanting to buy, and how to ask respectfully curious questions that had their ideal clients talking themselves into buying (so they didn’t have to) .

Just a step or two ahead of my clients, I taught them what I was learning and built a full practice in just 90 days.

Yay! I found my niche and continued to refine it until I arrived where I am today: helping women first-time entrepreneurs build a thriving business and replace the corporate paycheck they left behind.

How do you know when it is time to switch your niche? One suggestion is to “date your niche” for 90 days. If it is not getting traction, it might be time to switch.

Or it might be time to tighten your marketing message.

Can you answer the question “so what do you do” in 2 sentences (or less) that describes the urgent problem you solve, who you solve it for and the results your clients get from working with you?

If not, you may have the right niche, but an unclear marketing message.

Try running your marketing message through my What Do You Do statement template below to see if it needs a little tightening up :

I help/teach/show (fill in the blank with your target market, which in my case is women first-time entrepreneurs)

how to (fill in the blank with the problem you solve, which in my case is to build a thriving business) so they (fill in the blank with the result they get, which in my case is replace the corporate paycheck they left behind).

If you decide a niche switch is in order, don’t be afraid or embarrassed to do it.No one ever accused me of being a flake (to my face, anyway).

And the people who have the problem you solve don’t care as long as they get the solution to their problem.

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Live events are big business

A report from Eventbrite projects 80% of millennials will attend a live ticketed event this year, leveraging an estimated $1.3 trillion in spending power and point to a surge of millennial entertainment spending in 2016, primarily through non-traditional channels.

 

The Eventbrite report centers on the larger Economy Of Experience. 

Millennials value experiences over “stuff,” are more afflicted by FOMO, and thus more inclined to spend money on live events, concerts, plays, festivals, races, and parties. 

Also, a majority (78%) plan not only to spend more on events in 2016, but to do so instead of on material goods.