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

 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

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

What do your business coaching clients want?  Is it the same as what they need?  If not, which of these things should you give them? The pure coaching answer is, I suppose, that the client must control the coaching process and so you try to help them achieve what they want, without imposing your own opinion.  By definition, the coach requires great coaching skills and zero knowledge of business to provide this. Some coaches will ask questions that provide the client with insight into their wants and helps them towards more productive thinking - less pure but perhaps more useful to the client.  This still requires great coachig technique but also the business experience to tell the difference between sensible business practice and wishful thinking. Other coaches, and I include myself among them, focus on providing practical business advice and tools, so we market to and sign up only clients that have this need and will embrace this solution.  Of course, effective coaching is still requi

Your client business owners will often decry “the politics” they see as being inherent in bigger businesses. The implication is clear: smaller businesses are free of that kind of skullduggery and self-seeking. The fact is that many business owners get stuck because they don’t understand that, past a certain size, they need to include political thinking in their growth plans. Most owner-managed businesses get stuck once they have grown to between 5 and 25 employees. They reach the limit of what the owner can manage on his or her own. There are only so many employees, customers, sales and transactions that one person can deal with. You could explain it to your clients as "reaching your plate-spinning capacity". The unfortunate fact is that most businesses (over 99.5% according to the ONS) get stuck like this – even when the market opportunity for more growth is there. They reach this revenue ceiling and there they stay. It doesn’t matter what the owner does, how many hours they

HBR once published a paper on the stages of business growth (The Five Stages of Small Business Growth by Neil C. Churchill and Virginia L. Lewis  link ). It’s rather old but remains, like all good management models, relevant today. It provides a useful tool for gaining insight into an individual business, its stage of development, strategy and challenges. The problem is, your clients might find it somewhat inaccessible. They might see it as theoretical or even corporate. Their small businesses are not big enough to afford the shamens required to think about and apply these frameworks. From the practical, over-worked perspective of a business owner, the theories don’t look like their business. They must be talking about someone else. That led me to wondering about what a model that they would find useful might look like. I came up with a three-stage model: Stage 1: The business owner does everything Stage 2: The business owner controls everything Stage 3: Employees control and do everyt