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