If you’re a business owner considering hiring a business coach to help you get to the next level, then it’s really important that you do your research to find the right match.
There are many different styles of coaching, and many people promote themselves as business coaches.
Everybody has a different idea of what a coach does and what you can get out of the coaching relationship, but here are a few things that, from my point of view, you should expect from working with a good business coach.
It’s Important to Find the Right Fit
Firstly, you want to find a business coach who has proven time and time again that their methods, their framework, and their approach works.
You need to read testimonials, ask questions, and do your research.
Most importantly, you need to understand their approach.
To help you understand this point, let me first explain our underlying approach to business coaching at Summit SCALE®.
Coaching Philosophy
“Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
This is one of our favourite quotes because it shows the differences between us and other coaches or consultants.
We believe in teaching our clients what they need to know and how to execute so they understand what to do next time. (Here’s how to fish).
What most other coaches or consultants do is provide solutions and leave their clients reliant on them (here’s a fish).
These coaches want their clients to feel reliant on them, so they keep getting paid, and the coaches themselves want to be the hero of the story.
Our issue with this is that it feels “wrong” for coaches to do this.
Coaches are supposed to help lead you in the right direction and teach you the correct ways to do things so that, eventually, you can do it on your own without their help.
They should take on the role of the sherpa while letting the client be the hero of their own story.
Over the years, we’ve refined our coaching strategies, but one method we’ve never let go of is the Socratic method of coaching.
It involves the coach asking questions and letting you come up with the right answers instead of giving you generic advice that will not help you further on your journey.
The idea behind this method is that people learn through critical thinking, reasoning, and logic, finding holes in their own theories and then patching them up.
And when we’re no longer working with them, they’ve upgraded their personal operating system and can make real-time decisions on their own.
We’ll never tell you what you should do. It’s your business, and you make the decisions.
Our goal is always to help equip you with the insights that empower you to discover the answers that make sense for YOUR business… even after we’ve long gone.
If our client isn’t 100% independent after our time together, then we haven’t done our job as coaches.
That’s why we always teach our clients how to fish instead of constantly feeding them fish.
Elements of Business Coaching
Next, let me explain the core elements of Summit SCALE® business coaching.
Think of a Venn diagram, you know, those three overlapping circles.
1. Business Development
The first circle of our business coaching is focused on business development, which involves the systems, tools, strategies, and tactics to be implemented in the business.
That’s the part that most people think of when they think of business coaching.
There isn’t a shortage of information out there. Business owners are bombarded with business building and business growth information every day, including what they should be doing, the latest technology, and the latest strategy.
Most business owners are overwhelmed with information, which leads to confusion and inaction.
Our job as business coaches is to help you determine your business’s stage of development and the priorities for moving it to the next stage.
In other words, we help you cut through all the noise and effortlessly get results by focusing on the right things for where you’re currently at and where you want to go next.
2. Personal Development
The second circle of our business coaching is focused on your personal development as a business owner.
This is helping the owner adopt and move towards a mindset of success. We call this the science of success. However, that’s only half of the equation. The other half is what we call the art of fulfilment.
Let me describe it this way.
‘The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle’. This means that the capacity of the business to grow and develop is always limited by the owner’s capacity to grow and develop.
The success mindset involves developing the skills of leadership, communication, goal achievement, mastering emotions, your relationship with time, and building the muscle of focus and concentration,, to name a few areas.
The other aspect of this is balancing success-driven ambitions with personal fulfilment. Often, business owners are so focused on chasing success for their business that they neglect other parts of their lives—their health, their relationships, etc.—without really seeing it until it is too late.
As someone much wiser than me once said, success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure.
A good business coach is someone who has experienced their fair share of life’s challenges, undergone self-improvement, and understands the personal development journey.
3. Performance Accountability
The third circle has to do with performance and accountability.
No matter how much willpower and discipline you think you have, none of us have enough to overcome the resistance to change. Willpower will only get you so far.
Someone outside of ourselves will always help us do more, achieve more, and reach more than we would on our own.
That’s why so many of us have personal trainers, right?
We go to the gym, but a personal trainer helps us do more push-ups and better-quality push-ups.
And as a result, we get fitter faster.
The same thing applies to business.
Someone outside of yourself will help you achieve more.
Many business owners don’t really have anyone to hold them accountable.
A CEO of a bigger company will have a chairman and a board who will hold you accountable for the delivery of the plan on behalf of the shareholders.
As a business owner of a small to medium-sized company, you often don’t have someone holding your feet to the fire.
Yes, there are the external realities of customers and banks and that kind of thing.
But at the end of the day, no one holds you accountable day-to-day for working on your business.
Having someone hold you accountable will help you achieve more.
So those are the three core elements of Summit SCALE® business coaching. At the intersection of those three circles, magical results happen!
If you’d like to explore how business coaching with me could help you, get in touch. You can book an initial complimentary 15-minute call with me at TimeWithShane.com.
