Can business coaching help my business?

Written by bmlengel on July 31st, 2010

So is business coaching a rip off or is there genuine value in it? As a business coach I have to admit that I may be very biased in my answer to this question, but I also don’t believe that the answer is that easy .

Most of the time I hear business proprietors raving about their business coach, but from time to time you’ll hear a business owner lamenting the day they hired one. So how do you know if business coaching is going to work for you?

My summation is that you need to have both a brilliant business coach and a great ‘coachee’.

Business coaching doesn’t suit every business owner. That’s just the way it is, no apologies needed. For that reason, I don’t try to offer my coaching to every business owner that asks me to tell them about it. Not every person is coachable.

The worst people in the world to coach are the ones who use the words ‘I know’ a lot. They just know it all – there’s nothing you can teach them. Or rather, there’s heaps you can teach them, but nothing they can learn because their mind is blocked from the possibility. Pride is another word for it.

Other business owners are brilliant ‘coachees’. They have an unassuming approach , they’re keen to learn, and they’re like iron sharpening iron when they work with the right coach.

Not every business coach is well suited to your business. For a start, you would expect any good business coach to have actually owned and operated a business. If they haven’t done that then there’s a good chance they’re justregurgitating theory. How can they help your business to improve if they haven’t proven they can improve their own?

Second, every coach and consultant has aspects of business in which they are more adept than other areas. For example, as a coach, I’m not interested in working with stores that sell lots of low value retail items . That’s a specialist area. I’m quite at home working with manufacturers. That’s a specialist area also but it’s an area in which I have lots of experience . Having said that, I work with quite a range of businesses from printer repairs specialists to divorce lawyers. Most business enterprises have far more in common with each other than they have differences . They all have customers, suppliers, staff and owners .

Finally, It’s important that you and your business coach get along together well . Coaches can end up working closely together, and there’s nothing worse than working with someone you don’t like. Well, OK, there are worse things, but you know what I mean.

So is business coaching a rip off? Not if you’re the right person with the right coach.

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