Why Work with a Business Coach? By Phil Glosserman
Suppose you were an Olympic athlete. You invest years of your time and energy, training to perform at your absolute best. The stakes are high—winning could mean an incredible and lucrative career and could open all kinds of doors and opportunities. Anything you do to increase your performance, even a little, could make a huge difference in your outcome and your life. You wouldn’t think of embarking on such a serious venture without a coach. Practically every winning athlete has gotten to where he or she is with the aid of a coach.
Your business is also a high-stakes competitive game. The quality of your performance can make a major difference in your career, your income, and your life. And as with sports, working with a business, sales, or executive coach can give you a competitive edge that will significantly impact your results, and your income.
What Is a Business Coach?
A business coach is a trusted advisor whose sole purpose is to help you grow and better manage your business. A coach works with you to:
– Develop the strategies, actions, mindset, and discipline you need to attain your important business objectives
– Solve your most pressing business issues and challenges
– Become more effective in your business and attain a better work-life balance
Coaching helps you achieve the results you want, more efficiently and faster than you would on your own.
Business Coaching Case Study
One of my coaching clients, Ralph, owns an accounting firm. Ralph hired me to help him grow his business. His objective was to increase the firm’s revenue by 15 percent annually. He also wanted to spend more time with his wife and his two young children. When we started working together, Ralph was working 70-80 hours a week, and he didn’t see how he could possibly grow his business without sacrificing even more time with his family.
Ralph had built the business from the ground up. When he first started out, it was just he and an administrative assistant. Now he had 12 employees. As I dug into his situation, I discovered that Ralph was still running his business much the same way he did when he was the only accountant. Ralph had a habit of micromanaging. No matter how much the business grew, he just wouldn’t let go. Though he had hired four CPAs, he still insisted on reviewing all the work and handling all client meetings. In addition, he had two problem employees that sometimes missed deadlines, communicated poorly, and didn’t consistently follow procedures. Ralph held onto these employees, even though they created more work for himself and the rest of his staff.
Through our coaching, Ralph recognized the need to make changes in how he ran the business. We developed an action plan to make these changes. Ralph began to delegate more of the work and dealt once and for all with his problem employees. I helped keep him on-track and accountable for his action plan.
Now his firm is running much more efficiently and Ralph is spending much more time with his family. He has cut his working hours down about 35 percent, and has grown his annual revenue by an average of 22 percent for the past three years.
Ralph is a highly competent accountant and a bright guy, but on his own, he bumped up against his own limited thinking, perceptions, and old habits. Coaching helped shine a light on the issues that were constraining his business and helped him tackle them.
Coaching Results
What results can you expect from coaching? Here are some of the major benefits that can come from having the right coach in your corner:
– Increase your sales and income
– Measurably improve your performance and productivity
– Bring on more new clients or customers
– Improve your time-management and have a more balanced life
– Stay on-track and accountable for the actions you take in pursuit of your goals
– Get beyond the obstacles and emotional blockers that limit your success
– Better manage your staff and enhance team collaboration and performance
– Receive objective feedback, so you can make better decisions
– Recognize and get beyond your blind spots
– Become a more effective leader
– Improve customer retention and satisfaction
Hiring a coach can be one of the smartest, most powerful decisions you can make to jumpstart your business.
Before committing to work with a coach, make sure the coach is the right fit for you. Some coaches offer a complimentary consultation to help determine if it’s a “good match.”
The bottom line is: Coaching is a catalyst for making positive changes. Working with the right coach, you will expedite your personal performance and business growth.
Phil Glosserman is a business coach with over a decade of experience helping people and companies become more effective and profitable. He works with business owners, executives,salespeople, professionals, and companies in a variety of industries, including financial services, insurance, real estate, mortgage, high tech, healthcare, public relations, accounting, and business consulting, to name a few. He is the coauthor of two books, Sell the Feeling: The 6-Step System that Drives People to Do Business with You and The Referral Code: Unlock a Constant Stream of Business through the Power of Your Relationships. His Web site is http://www.CoachPhil.com
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