6 Reasons You Should Consider Hiring a Business Coach
The top performers in many fields, from the arts to sports to finance, use coaches. They don’t just have coaches in order to be the best: they want to stay the best. It’s no different for business owners. If you want to be playing at the top of your game, you should consider hiring a coach to get you there (and keep you there). Let’s talk about some of the reasons why.
1. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
While it would be nice to imagine the business building journey as mostly an upward trajectory from zero, there are many bumps along the way. At some point you may find that your sales have stalled or your margins have eroded. You’ve gone as far as you can go on your own and all the signs point to needing help. A business owner has to have the humility to ask for help and the willingness to grow beyond his/her current capacity. A coach can help you take a hard look at what is missing and offer solutions to fill that gap.
2. Accountability
We’ve discussed how an advisory board can help you stay accountable and grow your business. But they can’t meet with you every month. A business coach can. He/she can help keep you accountable to goals and tasks you set together. We know it can be easy to break promises to yourself. A coach doesn’t let you do that.
3. Objective 3rd Party
While your spouse, business partner, or even a key employee may be able to help you with some of these issues, they aren’t objective parties, and adding this dimension to your relationships with them can cause unnecessary strain. A coach isn’t emotionally or financially tied to your business, hence he/she can offer more objective advice. They aren’t within your organization, so they aren’t influenced by forces and emotions that can sometimes make it difficult to see and diagnose issues. Outside perspectives matter.
4. You Have Specific Issues
There are many tasks that a business coach can help you with:
- Exploring different directions for the company
- Calibrating marketing and pricing
- Hiring a new key employee
- Examining company culture and retention
- Giving a second set of eyes to your financial statements
- Advising on exit strategies
As each month and quarter ends, you’ll be able to deal with issues as they come up instead of resigning them to that mental pile of “I’ll deal with that later” (“later” here can often mean “never”). A coach can help you work step-by-step through what seems to be large and complex issues: breaking down the elephant, one bite at a time.
5. You Feel Stuck
Things could be going well for your business, but you just feel that you need to grow in areas that you aren’t world-class in. This could be negotiation, management, or leadership, just to name a few areas. Of course there are plenty of great books and courses out there these days to help, but a coach can give the sort of personalized and focused attention that they can’t.
6. Steam Valve
Let’s be honest. Sometimes as entrepreneurs we just want to blow off some steam. Perhaps it’s a vendor who hasn’t been paying on time lately, or a business partner who hasn’t been communicating well, or a troublesome employee. Whatever the challenge may be, we sometimes just need a way to let off some steam. Coaches can help you do that. But even better, once that steam has been vented, they can help you navigate to the root of the problem and try to solve it.
Need a business coach but don’t know any? We happen to know a few, and some that we’ve used for our own businesses. Give us a call and we can connect you.
