Business coaching across Northern Ireland.

No. Most Northern Ireland clients work entirely by video, and the ones who come to the Fenaghy Road office do it because they want to rather than because the coaching requires it. In-person and online cost the same. If you are in Antrim, Derry, Belfast or Down and the drive would turn a ninety-minute session into half a day, take the video option — what kills coaching is not the medium, it is sessions being cancelled because they are inconvenient in a busy month. A common and sensible pattern is to start face to face for the two diagnostic sessions, when you are mapping the business and building the working relationship, then move online once the rhythm is established.

Northern Ireland is our largest base and the Ballymena office is a real one. That matters less than people assume for the coaching method and more than people assume for the assumptions underneath it. NI businesses price against two currencies, sell into two regulatory regimes, recruit from a smaller labour pool and run on relationships that a GB adviser tends to misread as inefficiency. Telling a Ballymena manufacturer to put prices up and simply lose the bottom ten per cent of customers is advice written for a market with more customers in it. Local knowledge is not a substitute for commercial rigour and we would not claim otherwise. What it does is stop you spending sessions explaining context.

It changes the arithmetic, not the method. Cross-border trade brings currency exposure sitting directly on your margin, longer payment cycles, VAT and customs treatment that differs depending on whether you move goods or services, and pricing decisions that have to survive a moving euro. Those are commercial variables and they belong in the coaching — particularly in pricing and cashflow work, where a five per cent currency swing can quietly remove a year of margin improvement. What you will not get here is the technical answer on VAT, customs procedure or the Windsor Framework. That is your accountant's territory. Coaching is about the decision you take; the compliance around it is a different profession.

No. The fee is the same wherever you are based and the same whether sessions run in person or by video — pricing geography differently would just be charging people for their postcode. You will get a specific figure on the 30-minute discovery call before committing to anything. Two things worth raising on that call rather than assuming: if you invoice in euro and would prefer to be billed that way, ask; and if you want in-person sessions somewhere other than the Ballymena office, ask what that involves. Neither is a problem, and both are far easier settled before you start than renegotiated in month three.

One coach, consistently — not a rotating panel and not an associate you meet after session three. Business, leadership and accountability work runs with Andy. Financial Coaching runs with Peter, our Finance Director, because learning to read your own numbers with confidence is a different piece of work from deciding what to do about them. Some engagements use both, and if that is the right answer you will be told rather than have one person stretched across it. You will know who you are working with before you pay anything. If the chemistry is wrong, say so in the first month: coaching depends on you being willing to be contradicted, and that does not survive a relationship you are being polite about.

Employment law, tax, and anything that carries legal exposure. NI employment law diverges from GB in ways that catch people out, and a coach improvising on redundancy consultation or a grievance process would be doing you real harm rather than saving you a fee. The same goes for tax and company law. What coaching does is help you decide what you want to happen, rehearse the conversation and hold you to the timetable — then you take the process itself to a qualified adviser. Buzz Legal and Buzz Accounting sit alongside if you want them and there is no obligation to use either. The rule of thumb: if getting it wrong creates a liability rather than a bad quarter, it is not a coaching question.