Nearly all startups are doomed to fail.
This does not mean that the ideas that bring them there are bad. If you have a great idea and want to be the next Jeff Bezos, it is completely possible.
You may be a developer with an amazing new software solution. Maybe you are one of the best roofers in the area. In any industry, you can bring expertise and special talents to getting the most out of your brand.
The problem is the people who start small businesses are often experts in anything except for business. Startups fail primarily because business owners fail to read the market or they just run out of money. Not knowing efficient operations and strategies to bring products to market is often the issue, not the product itself.
If business is not your forte, how can you overcome the long odds for the survival of your company?
Hiring a business coach is one of the most effective ways to fix and sustain your business’s trajectory. Bringing in a coach when your business starts to lose momentum or even regress can save the dream.
Of course, hiring a small business coach is an investment, and you want to ensure a high ROI. In this article, we will discuss the key indicators that it is time to bring a coach into the fold.
What Is a Business Coach?
What Is a Business Coach?When you have a growth mindset, you understand that your education is never-ending. There is always room for business improvement, and a business coach can help you improve the right way. From business fundamentals to specialized skills, entrepreneurial coaching gives you the tools to succeed.
Business coaches work closely with their clients to understand how they can help them reach their goals. They look at where a business is and where the owner wants to take it. With this, they formulate strategies to achieve those goals.
After they set the direction, business coaches assess progress and regularly provide guidance to keep business owners on track. When they see you struggling, they intervene with expert advice, teaching you how to manage challenges as they arise. When they see you slow down, they act as motivational coaches to keep you progressing forward with confidence.
What Is the Difference Between a Business Coach and a Business Consultant?
While the terms are commonly used interchangeably, there are several distinctions between a business coach and a business consultant. As a business owner, you can see a ton of utility from both coaches and consultants. However, one will be more appropriate than the other depending on the context and your goals.
Business coaches focus their efforts on empowerment, setting their clients up for long-term success. Their role is not to take over any particular task. Instead, they show business owners how to prioritize, perform and own their various tasks.
A business coach makes you a better leader. Hiring a coach will help you form your perspectives, insight, and business knowledge to optimize your operations. You dig into your aspirations, allowing your coach to assist in clarifying goals and staying strict with your vision.
A business consultant, by contrast, is instrumental in achieving more immediate results around a specific business goal. These experts can find inefficiencies and issues in your business and work to correct them.
Instead of making a better business owner, consultants focus on making a better business. They take over problems, working to achieve more short-term objectives.
Hiring a business consultant is valuable, though in a much different way than hiring a business coach. A business coach will still require you to work and engage to learn and grow. A business consultant will save owners time to focus on other aspects of the business.
If you need great results quickly, a consultant is the way to go. If you want to become the expert and develop a sustainable business, hire a coach early on.
Coaches, like consultants, are also specialists, so do not think it is just a general education. You can hire a marketing coach, executive coach, and other experts to improve knowledge in specific fields.
Famous Executives and Entrepreneurs Who Have Benefited From Business Coaching
It may sound difficult to assess the true impact of a business coach. They are a long-term investment in time, money, and effort, so they need to deliver some pretty life-altering results.
If you want to know if business coaches are worth it, you can ask some of the world’s most prominent figures. Several high-profile business leaders, politicians, and celebrities owe their success to their coaches, including:
- Barack Obama
- Oprah Winfrey
- Bill Gates
- Steve Jobs
Following their lead, hiring a business coach can be the key to raising your profile. Understanding what you know and what gaps you need to fill in will make you an effective leader.
Why You Should Consider Hiring a Business Coach
Why You Should Consider Hiring a Business CoachAlthough just about everybody can benefit from a business coach, there is a time and place to hire one. Here are seven reasons why you should consider hiring a business coach.
Grow your small business or startup when you are feeling stuck.
It takes a confident person, and a smart business owner, to admit when they need help. When growth sputters and you feel like you are stuck, it is easy to get bogged down in indecisiveness. You do not want to make the wrong decision but you need to do something.
At some point, you will be stuck with a seemingly insurmountable problem caused by a lack of knowledge. You may not know what to do or you may lack experience and struggle with leaving your comfort zone.
Entrepreneur coaches lend their expertise to help you plan and execute worthwhile strategies. With their help, you will gain the beneficial outlooks and confidence to make a change. They are a support mechanism to help you weather challenges.
Find a clear path forward.
As a business owner, it is up to you and you alone to write the book on how your company is run. This can be overwhelming and particularly confusing for a burgeoning entrepreneur.
First-time leaders have a habit of being drawn into minutia, unwilling to cede responsibility. As the head of your company, you cannot afford to stretch yourself too thin.
Leadership coaching provides clarity, detailing exactly what your responsibility is as the captain of the company. Business coaches lay out what you can reasonably manage yourself and what tasks are better off being delegated. They empower you to empower others.
Executive coaching involves defining your responsibilities and aligning your organization to match your goals. You will have a clear vision of the roles you need around you and a much stricter plan moving forward.
Inspire more personal accountability.
It can be hard to get objectivity from those close to you and especially from your subordinates. You need accountability to stay true to goals, but others may be resistant to criticizing if they fear consequences.
At the same time, holding yourself accountable is often a half-hearted effort. You may make it easy to explain away failures or blame others for your problems.
A business coach can be the firm guide to hold you accountable for achieving your goals. After all, a business coach will help you set specific, measurable, reasonable, and worthwhile business objectives. There will be little room to excuse lack of effort, and your coach will consistently remind you of that.
Develop new skills.
The difference between a business coach and a business consultant is kind of like owning and renting. In terms of skills, if you hire a consultant, you are borrowing their skills for a while. When they are gone, you are back to square one.
A business coach teaches you. It takes more investment, but you own your skills at the end of the day. With the right coach, you can improve in lasting and meaningful ways.
When using coaches for skills development, it is important to seek specialists. Seek executive coaching services, for example, if you want to improve as a trusted leader. You can also find convenient improvement workshops through online coaching or a group coaching session.
Skills development is critical to stay relevant and successful in changing business environments. New technologies, trends, and practices need to be integrated to stay ahead of the competition. A business coach can be the driver to continually evolve your skillset.
Make better decisions and stay focused.
By clarifying your goals and responsibilities, business coaches can show you the essential focus areas and KPIs to prioritize. They will help you develop the muscle memory to connect your decisions with desired results.
When the destination is clearer, so is the road to reaching it. You will stop continually changing direction and confusing your strategies. Decisions will be easier to make as they are all unified toward a set of common goals.
Make actions more frequent and more well-informed.
Clarity, focus, and skill all drive toward better decisions and subsequently better actions. When there are too many options and too many considerations, business owners retreat into inactivity. With clear goals, prioritization, and delegation, plans are whittled down into more actionable schemes.
As you learn and grow as a competent leader, your speed to action will greatly improve. Optimized decision-making processes combined with ever-growing confidence equals more goals being accomplished. Plus, you have the watchful eye of your business coach to hold you accountable to tighter deadlines.
Have a work-life balance.
Business coaching is critical for new leaders who feel overwhelmed by running a business. It is easy to work day in and day out trying to handle every aspect of the business. At a certain point, your productivity will start to suffer severely.
A business coach will make it all worth it again, helping you strike a satisfying work-life balance. They will review all of your tasks to identify what you should prioritize and what you can delegate.
Make more money.
You are worth more than you are making right now. This is true for any individual with room for improvement.
Successful entrepreneurs need to be resourceful. That often means the difficult task of swallowing your pride and acknowledging someone else’s prowess. A fresh perspective and advanced knowledge can open you up to possibilities you never considered.
When you get accustomed to the status quo and innovation stagnates, you end up leaving money on the table. This can cause you to become blind to your weaknesses and be less appreciative of your strengths; closing yourself off to the potential of maximizing your growth.
A business coach will strip back your built-up complacency to reveal the opportunity underneath. They will provide brand new ideas and approaches to leveraging your competitive advantages to win more business.
Business coaches are also experts with their professional networks. This is a distinct benefit that falls outside of what coaches actually do as their job. While they can help you build your network as part of their role, you can also leverage their connections.
A business coach can also be a partner— one to help you build powerful relationships with key industry figures. They can help you find individuals and businesses that expand your resources and marketing opportunities.
Find the Right Business Coaching Services
Leadership coaching can be defined differently depending on the type of business and the owner. When you start your business, you need to be introspective, assessing your shortcomings, strengths, and long-term objectives.
Purposefully hiring an appropriate coach when your business is young will help you build momentum quickly. Do not be surprised if you seek additional coaching as you grow as well. Commitment to improvement is the hallmark of great leaders, and there will always be a coach ready to help.
Getting started can be made easier with the right consulting and coaching business. At the Selling Revolution, we manage both. We equip our clients with the tools and knowledge to build long-term success while managing immediate short-term needs. For information on how we help transform sales and marketing strategies to maximize revenue, contact our experts today.