What a business coach does
A business coach works with the owner of a business on a fixed rhythm of sessions. They find the constraint that is holding the business back, using its own numbers as evidence. They turn that into a small number of decisions and actions with dates. Then they come back a fortnight later and ask what happened.
The coach gives you time to think properly and holds you to what you decided, on a fixed schedule.
You keep running the business: the coach helps you decide, and you or your team do the work.
What ninety minutes looks like.
The first fifteen minutes: what happened.
The actions from last time, one by one. What got done, what did not, and why.
The middle hour: one issue, worked properly.
One issue gets examined fully rather than five skimmed. The pricing decision, the person who is not performing, the product line that never got killed. The numbers come out on the table, and the questions are the ones you have been avoiding asking yourself.
The last ten minutes: actions with dates.
You leave with two or three actions, each with a date and an owner. Anything without a date does not count, and anything that rolls over three times gets discussed as a pattern rather than rescheduled again.
Between sessions: a one-page scorecard.
You update three to five numbers before each session, so both of you are looking at the same figures. Where a decision cannot wait a fortnight, you get a call.
The first month: diagnosis
Owners often arrive with a view about the problem that turns out to be wrong. “We need more leads” regularly turns out to be a conversion problem, a pricing problem, or a delivery problem that more leads would make worse. So the first sessions are spent finding out rather than prescribing.
The questions include: what is the gross margin by job rather than in total, what will cash look like in eight weeks, which clients would you not take on again at the price they pay, and where do your own hours go. Where an owner cannot answer those quickly, the first piece of work is often getting the information rather than acting on it.
By the end of the first month you should have the constraint named, a scorecard agreed, and the first two or three actions done. Coaching here also scores the three freedoms out of ten and places you on the Performance on Purpose quadrant, so there is a starting position to measure against at ninety days.
See the methodThe four coaching areas
The constraint changes once the first problem is fixed, so coaching covers four areas.
Personal
How you think, decide and lead yourself. Useful when the constraint is a decision you have known about for a year and keep not making, or when the business has taken over your head.
Leadership
How you get results through other people. Delegation that sticks, accountability that does not need you in the room, and the conversations that have been put off for months.
Financial
Reading and running your own numbers with confidence, delivered with Buzz Accounting so the figures in the session are the real, current ones.
Work that goes to other professionals
Four kinds of work go to other professionals.
Legal questions
Contracts, disputes, employment law. A live legal problem needs a qualified solicitor.
Regulated financial advice
Coaching covers understanding and running your business numbers. Advice on investments, pensions or debt products is regulated work and sits with authorised firms.
Clinical support
Where something needs a doctor or a therapist, we say so and point you to the right help.
The fourth is delivery work, such as building the cashflow model, writing the processes or running the recruitment campaign, which belongs with a consultant or contractor. The difference between the three purchases is set out on the coach, mentor or consultant page.
What a coach needs from you.
A coach needs three things from you: ninety minutes a fortnight that you protect in a bad month, figures on the table from the start, even rough ones, and a willingness to hear something you did not want to hear.
The work between sessions is mostly work you are already doing or avoiding: pricing the next job properly instead of quickly, costing your cheapest category of work, having the conversation with the person everybody knows is not delivering. The first six weeks are the heaviest, because the diagnosis lands on top of a full diary.
If you want a sense of the work before speaking to anyone, the Wheel of Business scores nine areas of your business out of ten in about five minutes, and shows you where a coach would start.
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Common questions
What happens in the first session with a business coach?
The first session is a diagnosis rather than advice. Expect to be asked what the business turned over last year, what the gross margin is by type of work rather than in total, what cash looks like eight weeks out, and where your week goes. If you cannot answer some of those quickly, that is part of the finding. You should leave with the constraint named, an agreed set of three to five numbers to track, and two or three actions with dates on them. If you leave with a general feeling of motivation and nothing written down, the engagement has started badly.
Do business coaches give advice or ask questions?
Both, and the balance matters. Pure questioning has its place when an owner already holds the answer and keeps talking themselves out of it. When a coach has seen the same pricing mistake many times, saying so helps the client. What you want is experience offered as evidence rather than instruction: here is what often happens, here is why your case might differ, what do your figures say. The decision stays yours, because you are the one who has to live with it and defend it to your team.
Do I have to show a business coach my accounts?
Yes. What is needed is management accounts, some sense of what each type of work bills against what it costs, and a picture of cash over the next couple of months. It does not have to be tidy. If your records cannot produce those numbers, that is a real finding in itself and it gets named as a data problem rather than coached around.
How often should you meet a business coach?
Fortnightly suits most owner-managed businesses, in sessions of about ninety minutes. Monthly tends to lose the thread, so half of each session goes on remembering where you were. Weekly leaves no room to do the work you agreed, and the actions start rolling over. On top of the rhythm, expect a longer review every ninety days where the numbers are compared against what was supposed to move, and the next quarter is set. That is roughly three hours a month of sessions plus the work in between.