10 Tips to Leverage Business Coaching to Grow Your Business

What Is A Business Coach?

A Business Coach is an experienced entrepreneur who’s been where you want to go and experienced what you want to experience who can give you the outside perspective and counsel to build a more successful business—without having to go through all the painful trial and error yourself!

In a real way, Business Coach is similar to sports coaching in that your coach’s role is to help you focus, plan, prepare, execute, and regroup so that you get the results you’re committed to in your business.

Building Your Business

Too many business owners build their businesses in isolation, lacking the outside perspective and feedback from an experienced business mentor.

In fact, too many business owners don’t have anyone in their business lives who will challenge them to think through their business moves and to question their assumptions.

The Right Business Coach

The right business coach will not only provide this valuable sounding board for ideas, but more importantly he or she will help you concretely craft your business strategy so that you focus on the right things at the right time.

What’s more, the right Business Coach will also help you turn your business strategy into a definite, written action plan that maps out the precise steps you need to take and by when to grow your business.

Finally, now that you have this clear action plan, your Business Coach will provide the accountability and support you need so that you stay focused and on track doing the things you need to do so that you get the results you are committed to get.

Here are 10 tips to get the most out of your business coach.

1. Pick a coach who has deep experience set and knowledge-base to draw upon.

The whole idea of leveraging a business coach is to help you avoid a lot of the expensive trial and error that most business owners take as they build a business.
While many of the situations you come up against in your business (whether they be about managing your team, growing your sales, creating your next products or services, or controlling your expenses) may be new to you, your Business Coach can draw on their past experiences to share with you how they’ve dealt with it and how you can too.

2. Pick a coach who can articulate and explain things to you in simple, step-by-step language so that you can integrate what they share and put it to immediate and effective use.

In fact, ideally you’ll work with a business coach who has a structured process to scale a business that has been validated and proven to work.

Priceline.com founding team member Jeff Hoffman with Maui CEO David Finkel after a joint interview at a television station.

“What I get out of having a business coach is that my coach has run and worked with so many companies that they’ve seen that they’ve seen every situation. So when I don’t even know how to handle a new situation, my coach says, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ve seen this pattern a dozen times. Here’s how to best handle it.” — Jeff Hoffman

3. Meet frequently with your business coach – but not too often.

We recommend every two weeks. You want to meet often enough that you can have effective accountability, but not too frequently that you talk a lot, but don’t have time to get things done.

4. Get your business coach weekly updates on your progress.

We’ve found that by having our clients take 5-15 minutes each week to use our “Big Rock App” to update their Maui Business Coach about their progress, it both gives the client a useful way to review their own progress, and it also keeps their Maui business coach up to speed on their company. This means that you’re much more effective and can maximize your bi-weekly coaching sessions.

5. Share your numbers–candidly.

Yes it can be scary to share your revenue, gross margin, and operating profit figures with complete candor, but by being open you will get valuable outside perspective and feedback. Don’t sugar coat anything. Our business coaching program clients share their numbers with their Maui business coach on a quarterly basis through our “Quarterly Review” web app.

6. Don’t just focus on one-off challenges – look for systematic, global solutions.

Solving a challenge is great, but solving a challenge in a way that improves and develops your company’s internal systems and controls is even more valuable. Ad hoc solutions are hard to scale. Systems driven solutions are more stable and easier to grow.

7. Give permission to your business coach to hold you accountable.

The right business coach will always be in your corner, and sometimes this means being the one person in your business life who calls you on the mat. Your employees can’t do this – you sign their pay checks. As I’ve worked with my business coaching clients I’ve seen the impact on their business when they play full out and allow me to hold them accountable.

8. Don’t rationalize or explain away reality, because even if you “win” the discussion, reality will still win the day.

I smile when I think about all the exceptionally smart and articulate business owners I’ve coached over the years. At one point or another most thought they could explain away a challenge or situation with a well-rehearsed argument. I smile. Reality is what reality is, and the objective facts are the objective facts.

You don’t need to defend or make excuses with your coach. Use your business coaching relationship to be the place where you can be fully transparent with what is going on in your business life. Your business coach will help you take full responsibility and accept the objective facts on the ground. And from this place you can both come up with an effective plan of action to harness those facts to reach your business goals.

9. Let down your ego and accept the help and insights of your business coach.

You don’t have to posture or look good. Your coach has seen just about everything your dealing with and worked through it. Let them save you the time, energy, emotion, and money by helping you learn from his or her experiences versus painful and expensive trial and error.

Tiffany Prinster of DIYHCG.com with her two business partners:
“One bit of coaching on a joint-venture partnership which I was about to enter literally saved me about $100,000 per year! You can’t really put a price tag on that.”

10. Get rid of your excuses.

Some business owners say, “I don’t have the time,” but really, how much longer will it take them if they do it all on their own—isolated.

Other business owners say, “I want to work with a coach, but now is just not the perfect time,” as if someday, magically, the perfect day will appear.

My final piece of coaching to you is that if you want to enjoy the growth and freedom that our Business Coaching Clients have, then you can’t wait for “someday”. You have to start right now, right where you’re at, and take that leap of faith.

The most common feedback we hear from our clients is, “I wished I would have gotten started sooner.”

What will you be saying 3 years from today? “If only I had…” or “I’m so glad I did!”?