What separates a good coach from an expensive conversation?
Three things. Whether they have carried the responsibility you are carrying, or have worked closely enough with owners who have. Whether they can describe a method you can follow, including what happens in the first month and how progress gets measured. And whether the first conversation examined your business rather than pitching at you.
Coaching is not regulated in the UK. Anybody may call themselves a business coach, with no training, no insurance and no obligation to anything. That puts the checking on you, and the first call is where most of it can be done.
Seven questions worth asking every coach.
Ask all seven of everyone you speak to and write the answers down. The differences will be obvious on the page in a way they are not in the moment.
“What happens in the first month?”
A coach with a method answers this specifically: what they will look at, what they need from you, what comes out of it. A vague answer here usually means the sessions will be shaped by whatever is on your mind that week.
“What do you need from me between sessions?”
You are buying obligation as much as advice. If nothing is expected of you between meetings, nothing much will change. Find out how many hours a month the work realistically takes and whether that survives your actual diary.
“What numbers will we work from?”
Coaching without figures becomes a conversation about how the week felt. A coach who wants management accounts, job costings and a picture of where your time goes is going to work on the business rather than around it.
“How will we know in ninety days whether this is working?”
Ask for the test before you start. Three to five numbers and a date is a proper answer. “You will feel clearer” is not, because feeling clearer is compatible with nothing at all having changed.
“When do you tell a client to stop?”
Everyone worth hiring has done it and can tell you when. Somebody who has never ended an engagement either has not been doing it long or keeps selling sessions past the point of usefulness.
“What do you not do?”
A clear boundary is a good sign: legal problems, clinical problems, work that needs delivering rather than deciding. A coach who claims to cover everything has not thought about where they add nothing.
“Who exactly will coach me?”
In larger organisations the person selling is not always the person you get. Ask for the name, and ask what happens if the two of you turn out not to work well together.
What the letters after the name actually mean.
Three voluntary bodies dominate UK coaching: the International Coaching Federation, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and the Association for Coaching. A credential from any of them means the coach has trained, logged supervised practice and signed an ethical code. It is a real signal about how they coach.
It says nothing about whether they can read a set of accounts, price a job or tell you that your best salesperson is the problem. For owner-managed businesses, put the credential next to two other things: what the coach has run themselves, and whether their references are owners like you. Ask for both. Any coach with a working practice can arrange a conversation with a current or former client.
Apply the same test to us. Buzz Coaching is run by Andy Jackson and Peter Allen, who built and still run the accountancy practice alongside it, so the people in the sessions carry the same kind of week you do. Personal, leadership and business coaching runs with Andy, who takes the discovery calls himself. Financial Coaching runs with Peter, who brings twenty years in finance and is licensed by the AAT. You know which of them you are working with before you pay anything, and you are not handed to an associate once the engagement starts. Ask us the seven questions above and see what the answers look like written down next to everybody else’s.
Five things that should make you pause.
A guaranteed return
“We will double your profit or you pay nothing.” The result depends on decisions you make and a market nobody controls. A guarantee is a sales device, and it is usually attached to terms that make it unclaimable.
Pressure to sign today
A discount that expires at the end of the call is about their pipeline. Any engagement worth twelve months of your money is worth a week of thinking about, and a coach confident in the work will say so.
No interest in your numbers
If nobody has asked what the business turns over, what the margin is or where your week goes before quoting you a fee, they are selling a package rather than diagnosing a business.
A tie-in with no exit
Long contracts are normal. No notice period is not. Ask what happens if the business hits a bad quarter and get the answer in writing before you sign anything.
Everything is an upsell
Where every session surfaces another paid workshop, retreat or accreditation, the sessions are being used to sell the next thing.
Getting the fit right.
You have to be able to talk to this person honestly about money, about the team and about the things you have been avoiding. That needs enough warmth to be candid. It also needs somebody who will push back, which is not always the person you liked most on the call.
A reasonable way to test it: describe the decision you have been putting off and watch what happens. Watch whether they agree straight away, or ask you three questions you had not asked yourself. That is the difference you will be living with for the next twelve months.
Practicalities matter too, because coaching fails on cancelled sessions more often than on bad advice. Choose a rhythm you will still be protecting in month seven, and be honest about whether that is in person or by video.
Two things to do before the first call.
Bring a rough set of figures and one sentence describing the problem. The figures do not need to be perfect: turnover, gross margin if you know it, what you draw, and how many hours a week you are putting in. The sentence should be the one you would use to a friend, not the tidy version.
If you want to arrive with more, the free tools on this site take your own numbers and give you something to argue with: the Wheel of Business scores nine areas of the business out of ten, and the Profit Improvement Calculator shows what small movements in five numbers would be worth. Neither asks for payment, and either one makes a first coaching conversation considerably more useful.
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Common questions
What qualifications should a business coach have?
Coaching is not a regulated profession in the UK, so anybody may use the title and no qualification is required by law. The recognised voluntary bodies are the International Coaching Federation, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and the Association for Coaching, and a credential from one of them tells you the coach has trained, logged practice hours and signed up to an ethical code. It tells you nothing about whether they understand a profit and loss account. For owner-managed businesses, weigh the credential alongside what they have actually run, and treat someone who has done neither with caution.
Does a business coach need to know my industry?
Less than most owners expect. The problems that stall owner-managed businesses look similar across trades: underpricing, work that comes back to the owner, decisions deferred for a year, a team nobody has been honest with. A coach who has never seen your industry will ask better questions about things you have stopped noticing. Where sector knowledge does matter is in the numbers, because a healthy margin in construction and in software are different animals. The workable test is whether the coach can read your accounts and ask sensible questions about them within the first two sessions.
Should I choose a local business coach?
Only if it makes the sessions more likely to happen. Some owners think better across a table and will protect an in-person appointment they have travelled to. Others find that a two-hour round trip is the first thing dropped in a bad month, and a ninety-minute video session at eight in the morning survives everything. The honest test is which version you will still be doing in month seven. A common pattern is to meet in person for the first two diagnostic sessions and move online once the rhythm is established.
How many coaches should I speak to before deciding?
Two or three is usually enough, and discovery calls are normally free, so the cost is your time. Ask each of them the same questions so you are comparing like with like, and write down what each one said they would do in the first month. The difference between coaches shows up in that answer more than anywhere else. Then pick on the evidence as well as the rapport. The coach you warm to fastest may not be the one who says the uncomfortable thing to you in month four.