A question often get asked is what kind of alternatives are there to getting a business coach? To my mind there’re several different things which I’m going to go through.
The first thing is you can get a mentor. A mentor is usually provided through certain programs, some wealthy business people will also spend their time mentoring other businesses.
A word of caution with this approach is some people will say, “oh yeah, yeah, I have a lot of experience with the business.” I would definitely check them out, make sure that they have done what they’ve said they’ve done, and that they were also instrumental in that.
I’ve heard of numerous sales and marketing guys who say, “oh yeah, well, the business sold for X” and they attribute that solely down to them. It doesn’t matter that they had a fantastic leadership, fantastic direction that they’re going with, it might have been nothing to do with them.
You can also get these mentors through certain programs as well that might again, I’d certainly say do some vetting yourself first. Now, the good thing about getting a mentor is a lot of times they are free. It’s a way that people use to give back to their community and to the business community as a whole.
The next option is a consultant. There’s a very thin line between what is consultant and what is a coach. To me, a coach is somebody who you will set actions with and you will physically do those things they’re more of a guide to tell you what you need to do, agree what you’re going to do and hold you accountable.
Whereas a consultant, a lot of the time it can also be referred to as a done for you service. So they will actually do things within that business. Now this can be fantastic if you’ve got a great direction, a great vision, but you’re struggling for time. The only pitfalls for this is one, it’s likely going to be expensive which I’m sure you can appreciate.
It’s always going to cost more getting someone else to do this than it is going to be for you to pay your staff to do it. But you probably need to think of this in terms of time investment, particularly for the time that you would have to spend doing it.
Your time is going to be worth, and it should be worth, far more to you than it’s worth than a consultant doing that work, certainly more than your own staff of your own team doing it.
The other thing that can happen is when you get a consultant, if you are not bedded in with wanting to implement this, and I’ve been guilty of this, I’m sure we all have, we don’t delegate to the consultant, we almost abdicate and the consultant puts in place some fantastic systems, but we don’t run with them, we don’t monitor them going forward and as such, we don’t end up with the growth that we would expect.
Then we end up with the coach, which as I’ve said, is the coach is somebody who would work with you on setting a plan, but you would do a lot of the work yourself. You do a lot of the implementing but they’re there as a guide and to hold you accountable and keep you on the right track.
Another couple of options that you have, actually, you have the option of if you have a close advisor anyway, like an accountant, sometimes they might act great as keeping you accountable, but just bear in mind, sometimes people that have that kind of interest do not understand marketing as well as somebody external.
Another thing I would say, even for coaches as well as consultants, is having massive knowledge of your business is a plus, because just because it worked for other people’s businesses doesn’t mean it will necessarily for yours.
Where you might want to verify this is ask for success stories. Ask for testimonials from other clients. I might even ask to speak to other clients that they’ve had that might have succeeded.
Now just because they don’t have somebody does not mean they’re a bad consultant “everyone has to start somewhere, right?” But just bear it in mind when you’re selecting someone because this is obviously a big time investment and also cost investment for you on a way that you’re going to grow your business, even if it’s not an accountant who you’re going to get, even somebody else in business who you respect , even if they’re not going to give you advice on the various areas.
They can be great still to hold you to account and hold you accountable to actions you’re going to do, even if you just tell them “here’s what I’m going to do this week”. Can you just I’m going to give you a call next week just to make sure that you can check in and say that I’ve done them”.
The final option is, that some people forget is that you have nobody to hold you to account. Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend this, there’s a statistic, which I’ll get at some point I’ll put into a future video on the likeness of people achieving their goals, even when there very focused and have got them very clearly mapped out.
If they don’t have somebody external who is going to hold them to account, sometimes it can be very difficult to get there without external accountability just because they get caught up in our own things.
We call it getting, you know, trapped in the weeds really in business, makes it very difficult to do that. Hope this helps.
Good luck on finding the right that the works for your business.
