A business coach can help you identify gaps in your knowledge, skills, and approaches to issues, from setting actionable goals and inspiring you to becoming more self-aware with the goal of being a better leader.Business leaders, no matter how confident in their abilities, recognise they don’t know everything and often enjoy the greatest success from being coached. The benefits from adopting a coaching culture are significant and very personal to the specific individual’s precise needs.
What is a Business Coach?
A business coach is most often an experienced business leader who has developed a portfolio of their own and has the desire and skills to pass their knowledge on to others. The most important element of any coaching support is that you value them. A coach to have a successful coaching relationship with you needs to be someone you get on with and trust.
A good business coach is someone with a wide range of experience across business, who you can share your concerns with openly and discuss your concerns with, and who will support you in dealing with those.
Coaching Culture
A coaching culture works best when you can share your challenges openly and honestly. As a business owner, being able to openly discuss key challenges as well as personal limitations is highly valuable. Like having a Non-Executive Director (NED) onboard, but with a wider remit to support you talk through personal challenges, a business coach provides extra experienced insight.
Being able to share concerns, not just about where your business is going but in dealing with challenging customers, making improvements to your business, and effectively managing your work life balance are just some key areas small business owners often benefit from a business coach in achieving.
Business Coaching Supports Business Owners
A business coach is typically employed to drive confidence and performance. A small business owner often has few people to discuss their personal challenges with. This is where a business coach adds real value to business owners. There is the big stuff, strategies, growth, and change, but also the small details, which impact business owners far more often. From how to change a specific client relationship to dealing with a specifically challenging one, working with a business coach can make a real difference in how you approach these types of issues.
Even the very best business owners call in the services of a business coach to help them progress to the next level. Apart from strategic planning development to business reviews, using external professionals to support business owners has become very common.
Coaching Through Challenges
A business coach works with a business owner, supporting them as a person. Supporting them in decision-making, acting as a sounding board, and supporting their growth into the role they wish to achieve.
A coach can help you develop your strengths and how to deal with and mitigate areas of weakness. A small business is often a reflection of the owner, so a good coach will work with you to create areas of improvement that make running your business easier and more efficient.
Working with you as an owner is the key role of a business coach. It's often about listening, understanding, and then bringing their experience and knowledge as well as a fresh perspective to a challenge where a business coach adds value.
Supporting you grow as a leader
A good business coach will be there to support you as you actively manage changes to your business. Creating positive changes from growth, business model development, through to process improvements and improving your skills.
So growth for you as a business owner is all about shifting your mindset to a positive, growth-orientated one. Creating focus and direction that shape your thoughts and behaviours as a business owner.
Being Held Accountable
Small business owners are often very busy juggling many existing clients, operations, and finding new ones. Being busy is easy in business, but being effective requires someone looking at and working with you to keep you focused, motivated, and with a positive mindset. When you’re busy, it is easy to bury your head in the sand about the challenges you face.
Working with a business coach should help you be focused on your key priorities and key actions and hold you to account through regular meetings to keep you focused on those priorities. Knowing what to focus on rather than becoming buried under a mountain of stuff to do and reminding you about celebrating your wins.
Setting goals and then breaking them down into actionable points that you then present back makes you as an owner accountable, so someone who has only your best interests at heart and can support you when you run into a blockage. One major element a good coach will do is support you in identifying key focus points of improvement or change. These are usually a few items that limit or hold back an owner's ability to achieve their goals, either in growth or in balancing their work within their life.
A good coach should help you build yourself the business you want to own and run and support you in making the changes you want to see happen.
Written by Richard Gourlay
Tel: 07786068488
richard@cowdenconsulting.com
About Richard Gourlay
Richard Gourlay has for over twenty years worked with senior businesspeople, supporting them grow and develop. He has worked with owners of a wide range of companies and supports numerous leaders through a range of bespoke coaching solutions.
Richard Gourlay
Cowden ltd
