I bet your clients' businesses' suffer from low productivity.  I also bet that they don't know that, and will be surprised when you suggest it. The individual wealth of your clients, and the overall wealth of the country, is being damaged to the tune of billions of pounds each year because many small businesses suffer from low productivity. This article might help you explain to your clients that the main reason for this low productivity is poor leadership.  The owners of small businesses do not generally set out with the ambition of employing lots of people, often have no formal management training and are unaware of the principles and advantages of good leadership.  Many are also oblivious to the problem;  80%of business owners rate themselves as average or above average managers , You could suggest that they adopt some leadership behaviours that might help to make their business more productive. Small Business Productivity is Poor We have seen a flurry of reports ...

Do your clients have capable project managers in their business? I don’t necessarily mean people with the title “Project Manager” but people who know how to run a project. Project Management is one of those things like marketing, or skiing, or hanging wallpaper, that look pretty simple to people who have never tried to do it. Only when they end up with a broken leg or covered in wallpaper paste (and marketing can result in both of these things) does it start to dawn on them that there might be a bit more to it. This might explain why so many small businesses are so poor at running projects – even some of those who do have people called Project Manager and run projects for a living. Poorly-run projects can result in everything from a few wasted days of effort to a completely failed software implementation that materially damages a small business. If the project is customer-facing then delays and cock-ups can impact your client's reputation and customer retention. Take the recent exa...

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 i...

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 framewo...

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...

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...

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...

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. Ther...

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...

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 ev...

Your clients will often be sceptical about the quality of their managers. As they become the bottleneck in their business they get more and more desperate to get out from under all the things that, apparently, only they can do and the decisions that, apparently, only they can make.  They won't see their managers as part of the solution but as part of the problem. They may ask you how to find some “big hitters” from larger businesses who will help them achieve their growth aspirations. Try asking them how they know that managers aren’t up to the task.  Usually the answer will be a series of anecdotes about failures to do x or inability to understand the importance of y.  Then try probing how well your client has explained to their employees where the business is going, what their role in this is and what success in the role looks like. Try asking yoru client what they do when an employee comes to them with a problem – whether that is an angry customer or a blocked sink....

I worked once with a copywriter to develop some new marketing collateral and he asked “What have your clients tried that hasn’t worked before they come to you?”. A thoughtful question that you might usefully ask yourself - the answers might help you target new prospects better and ask better questions of them once they are in front of you. What have your clients tried that hasn’t worked before they come to you? Many business owners believe that the stress, frustration and limited growth they experience is just the way it is – it comes with the territory. They don’t know what they don’t know and so don’t think about changing things. Others, perhaps more enlightened or more unhappy with their working life and business performance, try to change things when they come across something that looks like a solution. Here are the most common: Vision-building sessions with staff. Often these result in a mission statement or pictures on the wall of people rock-climbing and so forth. These efforts...

When you are talking to your clients about delegation they may say that “I don’t trust my employees”.  Usually that doesn't mean they think their staff are stealing each others’ sandwiches from the kitchen fridge, or selling company secrets online – it’s just that they don’t think they care enough or understand enough to be trusted with more responsibility. This is a great opportunity to talk to them about the right culture for delegation.  If employees are overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, feeling unloved and underpaid, resentful towards management (that is, towards your client)…don’t try to delegate stuff to them. If that is the situation in their business then chances are that your client is also feeling overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, unloved and underpaid…and resentful towards their staff. This is a recipe for a downward spiral. How then to break out of this situation?  And break out of it your client must, or...

Sooner or later your clients will ask for help making a decision; moving premises, buying a machine, hiring someone expensive. Some business owners won't manage finances at all, some will use their monthly bank statement, a few will manage cash flow using spreadsheets.  Most will struggle to produce information in a form that helps make decisions. Often you'll hear "I don't understand accounting” and that their only experience of financial reports is the annual return produced by the accountant. I’ll leave you to guess how thoroughly most of them go into that document. When this opportunity arises, talk through the reasoning process.  For example the plan might need to support additional rent (and so costs) of x (this requires a brief discussion on fixed costs). Perhaps employee costs up by y (this requires a brief discussion on fixed vs variable costs). Revenue up by z – this requires a brief discussion about productivity, gross margin and sales capacity. Help them fi...

You may need to help your clients to get useful management information from their computer systems. An example would be project tracking; by recording the status of each project and the date that it changes they can create a simple traffic-light system that shows at a glance how projects are progressing. This illustrates a general point that efficient management is about the efficient use of information.  Efficient in this context means to provide the information necessary to make a decision in the quickest time with the least amount of data.  You can teach your clients to do this by using a generic management model: All businesses can be thought of as a series of flows and balances (or pipes and buckets if you prefer). Management information tracks the speed of these flows, the volume of flow and the level in the buckets.  Examples of flow volume are number of new enquiries per day, value of invoices issued per month or, in my client’s case, projects completed per w...

 Delegation is the single most important skill for a business owner to master - and most business owners (including your clients) won't be very good at it. Here are some reasons you will be given and some suitable responses: My employees will make mistakes.   Of course they will.  That’s how you learned.  Support them so that they don’t make big mistakes I do not have the right staff, they are not up to it.   From experience I suggest that this may be the case, but probably isn’t.  Employees’ performance usually reflects their manager’s capability.  Leaders understand that people live up to (or down to) their leader’s expectations. It is quicker to do it myself.   Well, it might take you an hour to show someone else what takes you five minutes – but if you don’t invest that hour you will still be doing it yourself in one year or ten years It’s cheaper to do it myself.   This is clearly nonsense unless your time is worth le...

Some of your clients may ask about the benefits of appraisals and how to do them.  This shows they understand that developing their business means developing their employees, which is good.  Don't just rush into appraisals though. A client who owned a fast-growing business once said to me that he was concerned that he hadn’t had time to “do all the HR things I should do” for the past couple of years. Two years before, business growth was being hampered by quality and delivery problems. His staff were avoiding answering the phone because they knew it would be an angry customer. Sales, Design and Operations were at loggerheads. The company did have, however, lots of HR stuff going on. Appraisals, reviews, training and so forth ran like clockwork and my client devoted a lot of his time to HR initiatives. We spent a lot of time when I started working with him talking about structure and how to solve the customer service issues. He had an effective project manager (he called him “a...

Do you ever talk to your clients about leadership?  How do they react?  I bet a lot of them don't see themselves as leaders – even though they are. Try explaining that leadership doesn’t mean they have to suddenly become Napoleon or Gandhi, but it might help them to understand what leadership looks like and do the things that leadership requires.  The quality of the leadership will to a large extent decide the success of a business. Google returns over 244 million pages when you search for “leadership books”.  Amazon returns over 60,000 titles.  The subject has been fascinating people for thousands of years.  We all know it when we see it, and recognise when it is absent, but a practical, implementable definition remains elusive. The development of leadership thinking and research over the last few decades can be summarised as: First, people started by examining leadership traits Leaders were born Certain traits recurred, like intelligence, empathy, confide...