What Is Business Coaching? And Is It Right For Your Business?
Do you have big plans for your business but don't know where to start? Are you feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with the progress of your company?
If so, you may need the help of a Business Coach. Working with a Business Coach can be one of the most impactful decisions you make for your business.
A business coach can help you overcome obstacles and achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible. Without a coach, it can be difficult to take your business to the next level.
This article discusses what Business Coaches are and what they do. We also explore the benefits of working with a Business Coach and how they can help grow your business more strategically.
You can also listen to “What Does A Business Coach Do?” a conversation we hosted recently in The Scaling Up Coaches Club on Clubhouse.
Listen to Scaling Up Coaches Phil Rose, Maxim Mulyadi and Steve Ferman answer questions and share how they work with clients.What is a business coach?
There are now dozens of niches for coaching. Just as in sports, some coaches work with individuals, and others work with teams.
For instance, a career coach works with a professional to help them chart a course to match their skills and abilities to roles that help them meet their career goals.
An executive coach typically works with upper-level managers or individuals to gain self-awareness, improve their effectiveness or performance in leadership roles, and develop new skills.
A business coach provides professional guidance and support to business owners to simultaneously achieve both the entrepreneur's personal and business goals.
A business coach helps you:
Improve your leadership skills
Sharpen your communication skills
Scale your company faster and more strategically
Regain control of your work-life integration
Create a place where other people love to work
They work with an entrepreneur or CEO and their team to push them out of their comfort zone, set the most ambitious goals for the company, develop a plan, and identify challenges and opportunities over time to achieve the goals in that plan.
At the same time, a business coach serves as an accountability partner and provides feedback on improving business practices so that the business owner can spend less time managing the business day-to-day. This increased capacity gives entrepreneurs time to focus on meeting their personal goals that the coach helps them with as well.
What types of companies work with a business coach?
Unless you've worked on the leadership team of a company that uses a business coach, you likely haven't had a chance to see how they work or the impact that they can have or drive for a business.
But professional coaching shouldn't be exclusive to business owners who have worked in companies that have already scaled.
Successful small business owners who haven't had the opportunity to work in larger organizations are often the ones who benefit most from working with a coach. That knowledge gap around managing more complex organizations with more moving parts often creates blind spots for business growth.
The best business leaders in successful businesses are constantly improving. But that doesn't always come easily. When you are your own boss, you have to create a lifestyle with self-accountability and lifelong learning. Building those habits on your own while also running a business is challenging.
Business Coaches come from a variety of backgrounds, but all have one common goal - to help businesses grow and reach their goals. They can help with anything from developing a business plan to improving communication within a company.
Their years of experience running a business and their subject matter expertise provide a solid foundation for their advice. But one of the key advantages a business coach offers is the insights they gain from coaching a variety of businesses.
They have seen the growing pains of both large and small businesses. They have guided companies through the chaos when a business scales and outgrows the systems and processes that contributed to their growth. And they have developed plans for successful and profitable exits when a business owner is ready to capitalize on the gains they have built. They can share those best practices in their toolkit to help clients in any industry or maturity stage.
“As an entrepreneur, a business owner, it is easy to get stuck in your own little world doing your own things and not see what’s around you. A coach provides an outside view that truly does help a lot.””
Scaling Up Coach Steve Ferman shares that the best coaches in the world also use coaches for their own businesses to keep up the lifestyle of continual learning. Joining a business entrepreneur coaching program was very helpful for him as a business owner and a coach.
What does a business coach do?
Improving profitability and your business culture are often the top benefits of business coaching.
A great business coach doesn't just cheer you on. They have gameplans, playbooks, diagnostic tools, and more to help you chart your course to success. And working with a business coach means you won't be charting unnavigated territories alone. Since a business coach works holistically to help you and the business, your coach will also help you lead your team on a much easier journey.
Your coach becomes a trusted confidante — providing you with a peer-to-peer sounding board and your co-architect to create a scalable action plan designed to accelerate your success quickly.
““As an engineer, I used to get paid for my answers. As an engineer in the aerospace industry, if I got the answers wrong, planes fell out of the sky, engines stopped turning, and that was a nasty place to be. So quite frankly, I was paid to get answers right. When I switched over to coaching in 2008, I realized that actually, the key to helping people change was asking good questions rather than answering good questions. So the flip in my mission was moving from an engineer where I was paid for the answer I gave to becoming a coach and being paid for the questions I asked. Because I knew that’s how you make the biggest transformation in people.””
Scaling Up Coach Phil Rose also explains how good business coaches have two toolkits to help clients. "What I call the business consultant toolkit on one side, which is all the tools that have helped coaches do what they do in the past, and on the other side, they carry this coaching toolkit, and that's asking the right questions, helping people get to their own answers. The questions you ask, combined with the toolkit, and that's where the value comes from."
He explains how knowing when to use each toolkit separates the good from the great. "The key to being a great business coach is to know how to sit in a space of just seeing what the client in front of you can come up with before you bring out all your tools to help them do things."
Steve agrees. He says, "Asking the right questions is important. And listening. Listen to what clients say. People basically will tell you what they need to tell you. What is really important to them? But you've got to listen - and ask the right questions to get them to see it. Like the adage that it's kind of hard to see the forest from within the trees."
Steve also points out that a coach is different from a mentor. He shares that "A mentor guides you, teaches you, and makes sure you're on the right path, but a business coach works with all three components: the executive team, the business, and the CEO."
Scaling Up Coach Maxim Mulyadi sums it up nicely. "Think of having a coach as having access to the Justice League for Entrepreneurship."
How does a business coach work with me?
We don't believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to business coaching services at Scaling Up Coaches because every company is unique. In a rapid high-growth phase, a new entrepreneur has different needs than a small business owner who has a successful company but has hit a plateau.
However, our coaching process uses fundamentals that are transferrable for everyone no matter where they are on the journey to scale. Scaling Up Coaches work from the same basic toolset built over two decades of helping over 70,000 companies scale. Our coaches also continually share knowledge and resources with each other to stay well informed of emerging best practices.
Scaling Up Coach Steve Ferman, who has built, bought, and sold seven companies in the last 40 years, explains that "every business owner has to deal with four pillars in their business: people, strategy, execution, and cash. It doesn't matter what business you're in. We all run into the same issues."
Steve explains something he often hears within Entrepreneur's Organization, of which he is a member, is "Nobody else could ever have to deal with what I'm dealing with." He says the reality is that everyone deals with the same fundamental problems, and they go back to those basic four pillars, or Four Decisions in Scaling Up.
Our certified Scaling Up Coaches use a proven, complete, high-growth solution that serves the business needs for where it stands today. Our coaches help you create a roadmap, prioritize, and scale your business to the next level.
Some of those changes are easier to identify, like making a concerted effort to improve communication across teams. Others require developing a strategic plan to reach your most ambitious goals.
Scaling Up's globally recognized coaches leverage the most effective tools and evidence-based best practices to help you achieve results.
Some of the solutions our coaches offer in their toolset help with:
Cash-Flow
Our One-Page Strategic Plan for Strategic Planning
Competitive Analysis Tools
Diagnostic tools to assess what areas would benefit most from improving
Software to manage goal planning & tracking throughout your organization
Improving communication rhythms or cadences throughout your organization
Continuing executive education through online courses, workshops, masterclasses, and award-winning summits
Each coaching engagement is customized. While the Scaling Up Coaches work from a proprietary suite of tools, there is no prescriptive or one-size-fits-all solution. Every company is unique, and each coach brings a different set of skills to the table.
Phil says, "We are tool agnostic. We're not tied to using one specific set of tools. The beauty of Scaling Up is that we have a whole host of things at our fingertips." He points out that he sometimes sees coaches go all in one specific way to coach and forget what they already know and the experience they bring to the table. "I think too many coaches join a business coaching program, come into coaching in a business that is gearing up, and believe they need to do at the same way as everyone else. That's wrong."
How do I know if working with a business coach is right for me and my business?
Scaling Up Coach Maxim Mulyadi explains how he moved into coaching and why. "I am still an entrepreneur. I still have a business. I now have people running the business day-to-day. So I'm working on my business but not in the business anymore. I became a coach because of my passion for learning and sharing what I'm learning."
Maxim's background originated in mineral water manufacturing and distribution in a family business. He then expanded, founding a holding investment company and a technology company.
Maxim starts his coaching practice by first understanding the person in charge and the people on the team. "I believe that the essence of coaching is expanding the soul. I'm also a Gallup strengths coach, so I always start with the entrepreneur - with the individual. That's why I say coaching is about expanding the soul. Companies may not fully absorb, so when you expand the soul of individuals at a company, you expand the company's soul."
After running a strengths assessment, he starts by asking, "Imagine a ladder from one to ten, and one is your worst possible life, and ten is your best possible life. Where are you right now? Where do you see yourself five years from now?"
That answer tells him how you are now and where you want to be. He also asks what is most important for your well-being: financial health, wealth, or relationship. Once he has those answers, he helps you translate that to the business and ensure your business is aligned with your personal goals. He says that there's usually an aha moment or discovery moment throughout that journey.
Steve was in the military before becoming an entrepreneur. That experience influenced his approach. "One of the most incredible things is when you get 80 Marines all marching in the same direction, and it's one-foot boom, boom, boom, boom, after the other. It's a powerful feeling. And the same thing can happen for a company if they work together."
He works to get everyone to work together as one cohesive unit, all going after the same goal, all having the same vision, the same core values as a top priority. He starts with the Scaling Up Assessment for the whole executive team to understand where they all feel they are related to the four pillars of Scaling Up: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.
The next steps depend on what he finds in the diagnosis. He says, "That gives me an idea of their perceptions, and then, it's about understanding their challenges."
I work to figure out the best way to help them realize what to do to fix it. And it's always based around building good core values, a brand promise, a core purpose figuring out who their core customers are."
The process usually involves starting with a two-day kickoff meeting. He initiates regularly recurring one-on-one coaching sessions with the CEO. Once he and the CEO thinks they are ready, he begins quarterly strategic planning sessions with the management team.
The Scaling Up Coaches business coaching program also improves how your business operates.
“One of the challenges in my business that Scaling Up helped solve was implementing the rhythm. In addition to the communication rhythms, breaking the goals into quarterly cadences with no more than 3-5 priorities helped. Since it was such a game-changer in my own company, it is one of my favorite tools to use with clients.”
Maxim says that one of the challenges in his business that Scaling Up helped solve was implementing the rhythm. In addition to the communication rhythms, he says that breaking the goals into quarterly cadences with no more than 3-5 priorities helped. Since it was such a game-changer in his company, it is one of his favorite tools to use with clients. He also likes to implement technology to help his clients measure their performance on their goals.
So there is the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual, so there's an alignment of energy and goals. Everything moves in that cadence towards the same direction. So if there's any single one that moved out of sync, that person can catch up, or maybe others will help them catch up."
The methodology used by our coaches helps you build processes and systems to run more efficiently and improve communication. "Process is why some of the best, most productive companies in the world do so well. You do this every single time, and you will the same exact end result.
For me personally, the tools in Scaling Up helped my business implement process." He says now, as a coach, once he discovers the real issues a client is experiencing, he put processes and procedures in place. "It just becomes a well-oiled machine. It becomes much more simple and easy to run and manage."
Phil says that a good business coach will help you systemize your business. "One of the tools we use in Scaling Up is putting the systems in place. We have the phrase “Routine will set you free.”
It may seem strange to entrepreneurs to think about having a routine, but that's what it's all about at the end of the day. Because if you're doing things regularly and have a routine where you do the same thing repeatedly, you get consistent results. And that's what business is about. If you want consistent results, follow the same process."
In addition to adding processes, it is much easier to run a business where everyone is working on the same rhythm. The Scaling Up methodology our coaches use helps companies shift from having multiple rhythms in different departments to one.
If you feel your decision-making is getting harder. Or if you feel like your business has hit a wall. Or maybe you personally are the one who has hit the wall from running the business. It might be time to consider a business coach.
Steve says, "I think the hardest thing for many of us entrepreneurs is learning how to let go, but you really need to let go and let other people help you. I was always very fortunate and lucky to be able to surround myself with really smart people. And they always helped me to succeed."
The moment you don't see a clear path forward for your business is when you need to start thinking about bringing in professional coaching. Scaling a company is hard, but you don't have to go it alone. Improving your bottom line, regaining control of your business success, and finding your own work-life balance don't need to feel impossible.
