Which Business Growth Stage Do You Aim Your Coaching At?

It is sometimes insightful to think about what stage of growth your clients' businesses are in.  This will not only help you identify the challenges they face but also help you think about your marketing; that is, which growth stage are you targeting?

You could start by reading this HBR 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.

You might see this model as somewhat inaccessible to your clients, the owners of small businesses; maybe they would see it as theoretical or corporate.  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.

You could talk to them about a simpler, three-stage model:

• Stage 1: The business owner does everything
• Stage 2: The business owner controls everything
• Stage 3: Employees control and do everything

In terms of employees, Stage 1 has of course only one; Stage 2 could have anything up to fifty (although five to twenty is more typical) and Stage 3 is unlimited - it is a scalable business.

Research from the DBEIS in 2019 (link) suggests that 76% of businesses in the UK are in Stage 1; and fewer than 1% are in Stage 3.

To put it another way, fewer than 1% of businesses are scalable and almost all businesss that employ people have their growth limited, actually or potentially, to what the owner can directly control.

Now of course the stats show many business owners will be comfortable with their business as it is and distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of giving up control. But many are not; instead they are frustrated at their apparent inability to grow their business past a certain point.  This gives you, as a business coach, a great source of opportunities.  These business owners have real income and can afford your services (unlike the mass of one-person businesses).

The model won't help you solve the problem for these business owners but it does, I hope, make the solution pretty clear:  In scalable businesses , employees do and decide everything. To make a business scalable, achieving this must be the primary objective of the owner.

Several coaching systems available from BusinessCoachKit, such as Scalable Business Roadmap© and Productivity Improvement Roadmap© are aimed exactly at this market.  Applying these models to your marketing and coaching will help you tap into this lucrative market.

(Based on an original post on www.nickbettes.co.uk)