The job, in plain words.
A business coach works with the owner of a business on a fixed rhythm of sessions. They find the constraint that is actually 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.
That last part is most of the value. Owners rarely lack ideas; what goes missing is the time to think properly and anybody to hold them to what they decided. A coach supplies both, on a schedule, whether or not the week has been kind.
What a coach does not do is run the business. Nobody will rewrite your price list, chase your debtors or sit in your sales meetings. The work stays yours. Where an owner wanted the work delivered instead of the decisions made, coaching disappoints them.
What ninety minutes actually looks like.
The first fifteen minutes: what happened.
The actions from last time, one by one. What got done, what did not, and what the honest reason was. Nothing sharpens follow-through like knowing this conversation happens every fortnight.
The middle hour: one issue, worked properly.
One thing examined to the bottom 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.
Two or three things, 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.
Three to five numbers you update before each session, so both of you are looking at the same reality. Where a decision cannot wait a fortnight, you get a call.
Diagnosis before advice.
Most owners arrive with a view about the problem, and it is often the wrong one. “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 a coach who is any good spends the first sessions finding out rather than prescribing.
The questions are ordinary and the answers usually are not: 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 methodWhat the work covers as the constraint moves.
The thing in the way changes once the first problem is fixed, which is why coaching here covers four areas rather than one. Most owners start in one and end up in another.
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.
Business
Strategy, pricing, margins, systems and scaling. The work that decides whether growth adds profit or just adds hours.
Financial
Reading and running your own numbers with confidence, delivered with Buzz Accounting so the figures in the session are the real, current ones.
What a coach should hand to somebody else.
Ask any coach where their work stops. Four things belong elsewhere, and a good coach says so in the session rather than improvising.
Legal questions
Contracts, disputes, employment law. A live problem that turns out to be legal needs qualified help, not a coaching conversation about it.
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
Coaching is not therapy. Where something needs a doctor or a therapist, the right answer is to say it plainly and point you at the right help.
The fourth is delivery. Building the cashflow model, writing the processes, running the recruitment campaign. Those are consultant or contractor jobs, and paying coaching rates for them is poor value. The difference between the three purchases is set out on the coach, mentor or consultant page.
What a coach needs from you.
Three things, and none of them is enthusiasm. Ninety minutes a fortnight that you will protect in a bad month. Figures, even rough ones, on the table from the start. And a willingness to hear something you did not want to hear without reaching for the reason it does not apply.
The work between sessions is mostly not additional. It is work you are already doing badly 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 actually goes. Most owners cannot answer two or three of those quickly, and 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 just 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 watched forty owners walk into the same pricing mistake, staying silent serves the method rather than the client. What you want is experience offered as evidence rather than instruction: here is what usually 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?
You should, and the work is thin without it. Coaching that never looks at figures becomes a conversation about how the week felt. 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 genuinely 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 works best for 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.