Why business coaching is important for growth

Business coaching is like any other business service; it must pay for itself somehow, whether that’s financially, or indirectly through increased happiness and reduced stress.

So what’s the justification that I’d suggest for business coaching? Why do I think it’s important? I’m going to talk personally about my business coaching here, rather than the services offered by other business coaches.

Is business coaching important for all businesses?

Let’s handle this question first. Should every business have a coach? Well, I think at the point where a business is very large, the senior executives and certainly the owner should have a coach who aims to help them, individually, handle the stresses of their role.

I also believe that all startups and entrepreneurs will benefit significantly from an experienced business coach, particularly one who has grown their own business. Not only with the coach be able to help them ask the right questions, but they will have significant experience that. In the end “you don’t know what you don’t know”.

Businesses in the middle phase, such as a a small business or a medium-sized business, and especially those that are plateauing or experiencing internal difficulties with processes, communication, or business structures, will find that a coach provides them with more value than they cost.

However, if your business is growing well, and you aren’t resisting any effective paths, then there may be no benefit to coaching. A good coach should be able to listen to where you are and tell you if they can help.

About one in every five coaching discovery calls leads me to believe that the business owner doesn’t need my services.

My own business journey

I’ve had my own business for over two decades and I’ve had amazing times, and not so amazing times. I really wish I’d have the support of someone more experienced who could have helped me handle several aspects of this.

What did I struggle with then? Here’s a few challenges I faced.

Catastrophic thoughts

Handling my catastrophic thoughts during difficult external situations which I had no control over is the number one benefit I would have received, personally.

I remember when Google decided to take pretty much all of our traffic away from. As a business that was formed on SEO (yes, I know .. diversify to reduce risk), it’s hard not to see everything crashing down when something like this happens. I handled it, but there were days where I struggled.

Handling burnout

There were times when I was just overwhelmed with everything that was going on around me. It’s tough being a business owner and sometimes the amount of money coming in doesn’t seem like it’s going to be enough.

It’s very easy to get to the point where you’re struggling and become burned out from too much work and emotional toil, and a professional coach would have given me an outside perspective.

Assessing business health & risk

A great business coach is not only interested in what’s going well, and how to improve it, but they’re also interested in the risks that you’re have but are not handling or even consciously aware of.

During coaching sessions, a coach would have spotted something which I hadn’t so far.

How business coaches drive growth

Let’s get to the crux of the matter. How can the right business coach help you to build your company in a more effective and efficient way?

You already have a large amount of the skills that you need to be effective within your business, but along the way new challenges come along, or you spot repeating patterns where you are unhappy with the outcomes.

Business coaching aims primarily to help you through these kinds of situations which are causing you to be less effective than you could be, personally and professionally.

• Maybe you’re becoming angry with your staff. This will create a poor working environment, and push them away from you.
• Maybe you’re not happy in your work any more. This will cause you to struggling with motivation and you may start to procrastinate.
• Maybe you’re in a sticky situation and can’t see a way out. This could take all of your mental processes, and you could become stressed and unclear about the way forward.
• Maybe you’re getting the wrong customers all of the time. This will lead to you being inefficient since you’re dealing with unhappy people continually, which can also impact your mental health.

Any of these situations is enough to pause growth in your business, or cause it to reduce, and these are all situations that a business coach can help you with.

Inefficiency in working

I have a different view of accountability coaching compared to many coaches. I am never going to push you to complete something, but I am interested in why you did or did not complete a tasks, because it can lead to some significant and important new information, which might lead us in a new direction.

This new direction might have been what you had been searching for all of this time. Together, we’ll discover what is missing from your life and business, and reinject what you need.

Replacing unsuccessful strategies with successful strategies

Most people don’t realise that they’re working using unsuccessful or less effective strategies. Most people believe that, if they’re struggling, they must lack some knowledge.

However, when they try some of the popular growth and productivity strategies, they sabotage themselves by choosing to do other work, or to work in their usual methods. If these are effective, why aren’t they working?

And because they can’t fix these problems, they start to lose confidence and begin to doubt their abilities.

In business coaching, we’ll wipe the slate clean and start again, with the goal of designing a system which allows you to be successful.

We’ll learn together, and experiment, and at the end of the coaching relationship, you’ll be working in a way that builds trust within your team, and which you feel comfortable and confident will lead you to success.

That will likely involve some element of personal development which you had been avoiding, but we’ll work through this slowly and at a pace which you can comfortably handle.

Once we’ve removed the blockages, you can carry on and grow to the next phase of your company as the business leader who is comfortable, happy, supportive and dependable. This will lead to improved employee engagement, which will in turn lead to increased growth. Both you and your staff will be working optimally.

Why do you have a business?

I always offer an element of life coaching in my sessions because it’s important to understand why you have built a business, and it’s easy to forget in the day to day of running it.

Are your life goals still the same as they were when you started the business? And why are they how they are right now? Why have they changed, if they have?

These are some of the questions that we will aim to answer, because if your life goals have changed, your business goals may be out of date.

Let’s update them by being clear about what it is that you really want now, and how you see your future playing out.

Business coaching is an investment

I’m writing this article as an investment, in the belief it will provide me value later.

Sales people generate direct revenue, whereas building a website and traffic to it are seen as investments. It’s common for business owners to want to reduce investment when times are tough, or they’re struggling.

These are the times when certain types of investment are most important, and business coaching can help to unlock success and growth when you’re struggling to achieve that on your own.

So why is business coaching important to growth?

Because, if you’re finding it difficult, you will be much more likely to achieve it with a business coach at your side helping you discover the paths that have remained untrodden, which could lead you to the gem that you really desire.