Better Business Coach Transcript
This is Better Business Coach session number six.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Better Business Coach. My name is Matthew Pollard, and as always, I’m your rapid growth guy. Now, again, if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, please take a second to subscribe to both the audio and the video version of this podcast, as I don’t want you to miss a thing. We’ll be offering ideologies and trainings like this in the audio podcast. The video podcast will also provide you step-by-step training that will show you how to use the worksheets and the templates that I have spent over a decade creating and perfecting.
Now, in this session, I want to talk to you about the four focuses of a business coach. As a business coach, we can’t just focus on an isolated problem. Before we get into templates and things you can do to actually start helping a business, we need to understand that as a coach, we need to focus on vision, strategy, systems, and people.
Earl Nightingale said that successful people are successful purely because they know where they’re going. It’s that simple, and this is so true. So the first thing that we need to focus on as a business coach is the organisational vision. If they don’t know where they’re going, then there is no future growth for the business. You need to have a plan of where you’re going and why it’s important, and not only why it’s important for making money, but why it’s important for the business owner.
If you want them to drive their business to success, there needs to be a “Why?” that they can identify with. More than that, it also needs to be relatable for each and every one of the staff members. See, if they can get behind the vision and if the business owner is driving that vision, then the staff will feel like they’re on a bus that’s on its way to success, and as a result, everybody will work hard to achieve that goal.
You’ll also find that customers will get behind the vision and start to promote the business because they understand where the business is heading. As a business coach, this is one of the major milestones that we need to achieve. You will be surprised how many businesses don’t have a vision at all, let alone something that the staff, the business owner, and their customers can get behind.
Next, strategy. See, even if you know where you’re going, you need to have a step-by-step plan on how to get there. If you don’t, then you will never achieve your plan. You’ll have the mindset of “We’ll get there one day,” but one day will just never come.
Therefore, as a business coach, we want to work with them to map out a step-by-step plan by using things like gap analysis and some worksheets that I will give you access to that’ll help them create a list of milestones to achieve on their way to success. We’ll talk about things like smart goals, which are goals that are specific in their nature and time-based so that a client commits to the specific milestones and when it will be achieved so that they can start to see themselves working towards success. When they hit certain milestones, they’ll see that they’re getting closer to their vision. This works so well for motivation, because as you get closer to that vision, you will find that people work harder, longer, and become more productive as well as working smarter and thinking better because they are motivated by the fact that they’re achieving.
Next, we need to focus on organisational systems to make processes repeatable, to measure performance, and to hold people accountable. So many people have systems that just don’t work, and especially if we’re looking at obtaining rapid growth for a customer, the last thing we want to do is have a whole influx of sales and then find out that their systems don’t work and that they have to go out and get paperwork re-signed, all paperwork issues fixed, or that they sent a bunch of orders and they were the wrong orders because the system doesn’t work. It’s fine to have to redo things occasionally if you only have a few customers, but if you start to grow your customer base, all of a sudden, you can have huge problems.
I find when I start working with clients, huge amounts of the business owners’ time is spent apologising to clients and redoing jobs to make sure the quality is there just because the systems aren’t where they need to be. So what we need to do is coaches is help them structure and set up these systems, and again, I will offer you templates and worksheets to help you do this. It’s just important that, as a coach, you understand that you need to be constantly working on this.
And the other topic that you don’t want to avoid is the sales and marketing system. You need to help them understand that niche marketing differentiation is important, and so is sales. If this is something that isn’t your passion or isn’t something that you have experience in, it’s quite frequently something that a coach will shy away from.
Now, in about two months, I’m going to be launching a podcast called Get More Customers, and that will help you develop those skill sets to be able help your clients with that. In the meantime, don’t shy away from it. Use a sales coach to offer you the ability to be able to provide that service, because while it may cost you a few hours of coaching in the initial stages, it will surely make up for it in the number of hours you get from the increased sales in the future.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you start by outsourcing to a sales coach. Certainly not. You need to get your strategy, you need to get your vision, and you need to get all the systems in place to handle your current customer base and a growth in sales. Then, once you’ve built their trust and you start to show them increases in productivity and profitability, you can suggest bringing a sales coach in to be able to assist with the things that you’re not as competent with, unless by then you’ve listened to my podcast and it’s making you feel comfortable enough to be able to help clients with that as well.
Finally, you need to be conscious of the people, and people is a massive focus. We need to make sure that we’re hiring the right people to help the organisation grow. So many business owners hire the wrong people just because they need somebody quickly, they don’t have time to interview, and they don’t want to hire a recruitment agency because they’re trying to save costs. That is perfectly understandable; however, you still have to make sure you’re hiring the right people, because otherwise, the people leave, all the people don’t provide the job the way you need the job done, and the business owner ends up focusing continually on fixing problems and retraining people because they didn’t get it right the first time and the staff member has left.
You also want to make sure that each staff member is on board with the vision; if you don’t have the vision yet, you can’t hire staff who are on board with the vision, and you don’t get an inclination of whether or not they’re excited about it, so make sure the vision comes first. That’s why we’re doing it in this order. When you’re hiring, you want staff to hear the vision and get excited about it and be pumped about growing and moving forward together.
See, if a staff member isn’t excited about the growth of the business and isn’t excited about the organisational vision, they’re not going to portray that to customers, and then the customers won’t get on board with the vision, and they won’t recommend your service to their friends and business colleagues. So that’s why all of those are so, so important. If you’ve got a strong sales system, for instance, when you’re hiring salespeople, you can have a different strategy. If you’ve got a strong sales script, you don’t need to hire people that have huge amounts of sales experience. As a matter of fact, sometimes it’s better to retrain them with the scripts that you have.
So to go over them again, you need to work on four things with your clients. You need to help them create a strong vision that the business owner, the staff, and the customers can all get on board with; you need to create a strategy for how to get to that vision, as well as come up with the steps along the way that are necessary to get there; you need to create systems that handle all the processes without defects and without customer complaint for the clients that you have now, as well as create systems that can handle your growth for future sales that come in and in the event of rapid growth, which is what you’re going to be able to help them achieve using the coaching templates that I will provide you with; and you need to make sure that all current staff and all future hires get on board with the vision and that you hire people with the right competencies, the right communication skills, and the right motivation to help the business owner get where they need to be.
See, if you don’t focus on all four, none of it will work. You can’t get to the vision if the staff aren’t on board with it. You can’t get to the vision if the systems don’t work. You can’t get to the vision if the strategy and the steps aren’t mapped out, because the staff members don’t know what they’re doing to help you get there. So as a coach, we have to focus on all four, and that’s how you’re going to achieve complete success.
So as we go through the templates, make sure that you are speaking about each one of these four elements. What I want you to do is when you leave any coaching session, ask yourself if you focused the session on each one of these. If not, did you leave one of them out or not focus on it enough? If that’s the case, remember that, and make sure that you compensate for that in the next session by focusing more on the one that you left out, because, again, the last thing you want is to have a strong vision without strong staff or for any of the other situations to occur.
So, again, I hope that helps your understanding about what we are trying to achieve and what we need to work on as business coaches. As always, if you haven’t posted a review on iTunes yet, please do so. I would love to hear what comments you have, and I would love to hear if this is helping you as much as I hoped it would when I decided to create this podcast for you. So please hop on iTunes, post a review, and give it the star rating that you think it’s worthy of.
Thank you very much for your time. I love sharing these sessions with you, and I look forward to the next session of Better Business Coach.
