Business coaching for South Africa.

The method is identical. The inputs are not. Performance on Purpose, the Wheel of Business and the three freedoms work the same way in Gauteng as in Antrim, but the variables they run on are different: load shedding as a permanent line in the cost base rather than an emergency, rand volatility on anything imported, labour legislation that makes a wrong hire materially more expensive to unwind, and a cash cycle that has to survive customers paying late as standard. A coach who has not put diesel for generators into an operations conversation will give you advice that does not survive Tuesday. The questions we ask are the same everywhere. The arithmetic underneath them is yours.

Yes. Sessions run by video, so Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg are no harder than Pretoria, and clients in Gauteng who want to meet in person can do so by appointment. The practical constraint is not distance, it is power. Book sessions around your load-shedding schedule rather than hoping, keep a phone as the fallback, and agree at the outset what happens if a session drops mid-conversation. The UK and South Africa are only one to two hours apart depending on the season, so a session can sit anywhere in a normal working day for both sides. There is no early-morning or late-night compromise built into this.

Raise it on the discovery call — it is genuinely a conversation rather than a fixed policy, and settling it before you start avoids an awkward month three. The reason it is not published is that currency is not a detail for an SA business: being invoiced in pounds means your coaching fee moves with the rand, which is exactly the sort of unhedged exposure we would tell you to remove elsewhere in the business. You will have a specific figure and a specific currency in writing before you commit to anything. Ask two further questions while you are at it: how and when the fee can change, and what notice applies if you need to stop.

Because the constraint in an owner-managed business is the owner, and that does not change at a border. There is a Pretoria base and in-person sessions happen there by appointment. Where UK experience transfers directly — pricing discipline, delegation, building a management layer, reading a set of accounts — it transfers without modification, because none of that is jurisdictional. Where it does not, you will be told: we are not the right people for B-BBEE scorecard strategy, SARS technical questions or CCMA process, and you should hire a South African specialist for those. What coaching does is help you decide what you want to happen and then hold you to it, which is nationality-neutral.

Fortnightly, ninety minutes. The first fifteen minutes go on what you committed to last time — done, not done, what got in the way — and then one or two live issues get worked through properly rather than skimmed: the actual person, the actual conversation, the actual numbers. You leave with two or three specific actions and dates against them. The first two sessions are diagnostic, mapping where decisions currently land, what the figures actually say and what is genuinely in the way, which is usually not what you arrived thinking. Progress is reviewed at ninety days against measures you choose in month one. If they have not moved, that gets said plainly rather than managed around.

Say it early and it stops. The ninety-day review exists precisely so neither side has to raise it awkwardly: if the measures you set have not moved and you have done the work, the approach was wrong and it either changes or the engagement ends. Get the notice terms in writing before the first paid session rather than assuming them, and ask specifically what happens if you need to pause for a quarter — South African owners raise that more often than UK ones, usually because of trading seasonality or a cash squeeze. Any coach who is vague about how you leave is telling you something useful about how they run engagements.