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Use risk to sell and coach

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Working with growing SMEs will make you aware of how fragile some businesses are.  Of course, businesses of any size can be caught out by unpredictable events but small businesses are often hit by things that were entirely predictable - and the consequences can be fatal. In the corporate world they have formal risk management processes and reviews.  Smaller businesses don’t run to those but a simple checklist approach can be applied on a regular basis.  This won’t in itself remove risks but it will bring them to the attention of your client who can decide what action to take, if any, to remove or mitigate the risk. This approach is also a great way to demonstrate value both before and after you have signed a client up. Explain to your proospect or client that risk in a small business can be considered in six areas:  Revenue, profit, cash, people, reputation and regulation. Revenue risks include over-reliance on a single customer and limited track record in bringing in new business. Pro
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Business coach start-up lessons

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Just starting as a business coach?  Here are three things I have learned from my own journey and from mentoring other business coaches who are starting theirs: 1.  Target a niche. Telling prospects that you are a business coach and that you are "pasionate about helping them" or you have "been there and done it" is not compelling.  Deep experience in solving the exact problems they are facing is far more likely to get their attention. Your niche could be vertical (dentists or IT service companies, say) or functional (sales or leadership, say).  Note that you still need the complete range of business knowledge at your fingertips; what manifests as a sales problem may actaully be rooted in strategy or structure, and the ability to apply cross-industry experience to solve problems is valuable to your clients. 2. Create a tangible solution. Coaching and its outcomes are difficult for your prospect to envision.  Presenting the coaching process in terms of some framework o
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Starting out as a business coach - the easy way

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I coach people to become business coaches, which is fun.  It's also a much less expensive way for my clients to get started than buying a franchise - by a factor of 20 or more, even before considering ongoing franchise license fees. What things do new business coaches need to succeed?  Here's a list: A start-up plan.  Why try to figure it out for yourself when you can just follow a proven and quick way to get started? A coaching model.  Something that guides your coaching interactions and gives you and your clients confidence. Coaching tools.  ready-made templates, guides and tools that link to the model, help your client and make you look great. A marketing system.  Don't re-invent the wheel, just copy something that works. A sales system.  If you can't sell then you won't have a coaching business.  This system makes it easy for prospects to say yes. Support and advice.  Sometimes things doen't go according to plan.  Sometimes you might want some encouragement
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Will AI wreck your business coaching practice?

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Try spending some time interacting with an AI platform like ChatGPT whilst pretending to be a business owner with the kind of problems you help them address (scalability, systemisation, delegation, structure and so on).  I anticipate that you will be impressed with the answers you get. If you are stuck for questions then try: "Why do I feel overworked as a business owner?" "Give me a method for systemising my business" "How do I improve my sales process?" How do the answers compare to the ones you would give?  I anticipate that you would be pretty happy to give these answers yourself. Does that mean business coaches and consultants like you are out of a job?  I don't think so - not yet. The information provided by AI systems is already available to business owners, on Google, in books and in blogs.  AI reduces the effort required to locate and correlate it (and, I understand, will extrapolate to provide original answers), but if access to information w
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A coaching formula

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Quite a lot of your time will be spent helping business owners develop their management team. In a small business, your client may have had limited management training and the potential managers even less – so they are coming from a long way back in terms of becoming capable and accountable managers. The effort is worthwhile. Not only are the people concerned loyal and passionate about the product but it avoids the huge risk of hiring senior people from outside the company. Managers from larger businesses in particular can be fish out of water when they move to a more senior position in a smaller business, with disappointment on both sides the result. Like any coaching, this approach requires some simple and repeatable method - in this case, to develop management skills that can be applied quickly to free up the business owner’s time (usually, the biggest constraint on growth). One approach is to think of business processes as “units of delegation”. Each process to be delegated has a c
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AI - there, I've got it into a post title

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 You'll have seen the trickle of AI-related business coaching articles turning into a flood. You'll have skimmed through a few lists of professions that are going to be wiped-out by AI to see how business coaches are going to fare. You have probably tested a few business-related questions on ChatGPT and been surprised (and perhaps worried) by the speed and usability of the answers. Does that mean we should fold our coaching businesses and do something else? I don't think so.  If access to information was all that business owners needed then we would all have been out of business years ago. AI is an opportunity for us.  Firstly, a productivity opportunity.  Use it to write the emails inviting people to your next event.  Use it to write a blog (just be aware that  it makes mistakes, and that people want orignal thought in a blog, not just recycled words). The second opportunity is really the obverse of the first.  Examine the things that you do that help business owners and t
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Helping your clients manage in difficult times

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Running a business in difficult economic times is tough.  Your clients are going to want answers - here are some things you might talk to them about... Suggest that they develop a budget and cash flow forecast that shows how they get through the next 12 months – in particular, making some conservative assumptions, do they have enough cash at the start to execute the plan, pay themselves, pay the bills and grow without ever running out? Next is a clear marketing plan. Your client knows that people buy what they sell but you need to make sure they invest enough and take an organised and active approach to marketing in order to achieve the plan. Finally, their sales process. Many small businesses can be lackadaisical when it comes to manning the phone, turning proposals around quickly, following them up and so on. Getting your clients to follow a consistent, managed and speedy sales process will ensure that nothing escapes. By the way, effective marketing and sales require a CRM. There is
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