Business Coaching – Look at Your Business from a Different Perspective

Without any dispute, this is understood by us humans, through all those thousands of years of living together as social animals, that the one single thing keeping this world going is business. From the small grocery shop around the corner to the global giants like Amazon and Alibaba, every business has its own importance in making the world prosper, evolve and move ahead as a whole.

Businesses are run by people from the owner of a small flower shop to the Fortune 500 executives and running a business effectively is a complex art and science. If you want your business to grow, you need to grow as a person first and that is what Business coaching is all about.

What is Business Coaching

Business Coaching is a process where a seasoned coach works in close collaboration with a business owner (or the executive tasked with running the business), guiding and helping them to formulate a concrete business mission statement. The next step of this process is to train the person to have the qualities necessary and assist them in attaining the business and personal goals they have set. A good business coach can help people improve as a person in their professional and personal life. A business coach is one of the top factors that can help you get your business to the point you want it to be at in the future.

One thing to be clarified, before we move forward is the difference between coaching and mentoring. The two are closely related yet distinctly different. It is true that both a mentor and a business coach bring years of experience for business owners to take advantage of but a mentor is more of an advisor, advising you to do better what you are already doing while a coach helps you make bigger goals and trains you in a way to effectively attain those goals.

Who is a business coach?

Although there are many individuals who claim to be a business coach providing only their personal experience in big organizations or companies a business coach is much more than that. A business coach is a trained professional certified in business coaching by one of the globally accepted institutions or Universities and has a strong background in psychology or NLP or other related modality and therefore can help the individual break through their own limitations or fears and move forward to establish new behaviors and patters so that they can achieve their goals easier and faster. A business coach has a toolset of methods and processes that can upgrade any business and help it grow and reach the next level of success.

How Business Coaching Works

Let’s now see how business coaching works and what business coaches do to improve the work and personal lives of those benefitting from their services and experience.

Building Feasible Business Plans

Most of the business owners know that it is important to set and pursue business growth targets in order to take their business to higher levels. However, it is one thing to set specific business goals and another to make them a reality. The speed at which business moves towards the goal the owner has set depends on a number of factors and priorities set by the business owner. If the business growth goal has a little or no direct impact on the personal life of the owner, it is hard to reach it, naturally. Business coaching is a process that makes business owners able to achieve their goals.

The first step of business coaching is setting goals and targets. Once a business owner has a concrete concept of what level they want to attain with their business, coaching moves on to formulating workable strategies to move towards the set targets.

In a typical business coaching process, a coach has regular meetings with the business owners where they set short term goals to move towards the ultimate target. In these sessions, the coach holds the business owner accountable for the progress they make towards the goal they had set in the last session.

Providing Motivation

Motivation is the key to achieve the goals we set for ourselves and our businesses. With the right motivation, one can achieve absolutely anything. Business coaching is not just about teaching the skills needed to run a business in an efficient way, it makes it easy to get to the goals by providing motivation to the owners and if needed the team.

Holding the Owner Accountable

One of the major aspects of business coaching is accountability. Your business coach won’t work merely as a consultant on your payroll to just tell you what is wrong and what is right. The role of a business coach is to make sure that you keep your focus on what is important and constantly remind you of why it is important to keep pursuing your goals.

Business coaching is a process to keep you motivated and working towards your ultimate goal by attaining the short term goals you’ve broken your target into. In this process, your coach will act as a sounding board and will make you face the mirror and highlight the blind spots that are not in line with the course of your success.

The president of Vital Signs, a company from New Jersey says: “My monthly business coaching sessions help me maintain accountability and focus on setting goals and meeting them.”

Business coaches create unique key performance indicators (KPIs) for every business owner in order to make the path to the ultimate goal transparent and accountable. The coach keeps track of performance using these KPIs. It is important because, being humans, more often than not, we tend to derail ourselves and start moving on a deviated path that makes reaching the goal difficult. A professional coach is, in a sense, boss of the owner who can keep them accountable while no other in the team might dare to challenge the boss’s authority. It highly reduces the chances of a business owner deviating from their path of success.

Does Business Coaching Make Any Difference?

A number of small to medium business owners acknowledge that having a business coach guide them worked as an important aid in attaining their business targets. Business coaching helps you on a lot of fronts, from setting a goal to achieving it and it is surely worth a try if you are looking for something to improve your business.