Nobody is born to be in business. Instead, the purpose of being in business is to give you, the owner, the kind of life you want to live. So many of the owners that I work with, when we start working together, are not very happy with their life. They have concerns piling up about working too many hours, pressures at home, not being able to spend time with their family, strain being placed on their marriage, not being able to develop the team, culture, and business that they want, etc. Many of them are also dissatisfied with the amount of money they are able to pull out of the business. So as a business coach what I do is put your business on life support. Because if your business is not supporting your life, what is it supporting?
Beyond simply helping you and coaching you to run a better business, a business coach is a resource that will help you develop better systems, skills, and strategies. You’ll become better at leadership, communication, and delegation which in turn will mean your business produces better results. A business coach is there every step of the way to hold you accountable for improving both your personal and professional performance.
A client once told me that what they liked most about working with a business coach was having a friend. Instead of being embarrassed from feeling like I was trading friendship for payment, I realized that being a business owner is often one thing above all others: lonely. You can have a team surrounding you at work and a support system of family and friends at home, but there is no one that you can really talk to about your business and the challenges you face on a daily basis. Even your closest confidant may listen and want to understand and be supportive, but seldom do they truly understand the context of your situation enough to provide actionable, relevant advice. A business coach already understands where you are coming from and will help you clearly see the way forward.
I work with a framework called The Five Steps to Freedom. It’s a process that takes you, the business owner, from the Creation Stage (typically the pre-revenue stage where you are figuring out your business plan) through a series of steps culminating in what I call the Freedom Stage. Within this framework on your way to the Freedom Stage you will work through the Chaos Stage, where you have launched and are working out your sales and marketing approach, the Control Stage where you are starting to turn a profit, and the Prosperity Stage where you can begin to scale for growth. Many business owners are satisfied with remaining in this fourth step, the Prosperity Stage, and ultimately it is your decision where on The Five Steps to Freedom you would like to end up. However, my business coaching has the ability to take you to that next level, the Freedom Stage. The Freedom Stage is where you have freedom of both money and time. Time to spend as you wish with whom you wish, and the money available to do so without worry.
With my help as your business coach we will start by working together to find what I call the “burning bushes” in your business - the immediate problems that demand action. I know the questions to ask to quickly identify those primary challenges and from there we work towards finding an appropriate balance between solving immediate issues as they appear and working towards your long-term goals.
Once you’ve decided that you are interested in at least exploring what it’s like to work with a business coach there are usually a few steps to go through before putting pen to paper and signing a contract. When you decide you are interested in working with me as a business coach the first step is to book a preliminary discovery call. This call usually lasts about 15 minutes during which we will take a few minutes to talk about what’s going on with your business. If it doesn’t feel like a fit, I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction to get you the help you need. If it does feel like a fit, that’s great, I’ll go ahead and book a full discovery call which takes about an hour. In that call I’ll tell you more about my background and what makes me qualified to be a business coach. You’ll find out about the W5 Coaching Philosophy and the system I use called The Five Steps to Freedom. Then we’ll do a deep dive on you and your business to see where we are starting from. If it still feels like a fit after this we’ll discuss the various programs and levels of investment, choose one and get started.
So, all it takes to get started with me is to go to timewithjohn.com and book out 15 minutes of your time. That’s it.
I work with two primary kinds of clients: those who own a professional advisory practice (doctors, lawyers, health practitioners, wealth advisors, etc.), and those who own a trade business (general contractors, electricians, plumbers, etc.). What’s interesting and common in both of these kinds of clients is that it takes several years to get into their chosen profession or trade; a PhD takes five years, a Journeyman’s Ticket takes seven. So, my clients are all very skilled at the practical elements of their business, but nowhere along the way were many of them educated about actually running a business. So, I can’t help you become a better electrician or a better lawyer, but I can help you become a better business person.
The skills you develop working with a business coach are exactly that, what it takes to be a successful business owner. We work on improving your leadership, your communication, your delegation, and eventually tackling the numbers and the metrics that matter in your business. A business coach teaches you how to market your business to gain more leads and what to do with those leads to convert them into customers. You learn how to recruit, onboard, train, and foster the team that you want to create the culture you need. You develop an understanding of how to manage your time and stop feeling like you have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ultimately, the skills you gain from working with a business coach aren’t to do with your profession, they aren’t to do with your trade, they are to do with the thing you haven’t gotten yet, which is a business education.
One of the best things about being a business owner is that you get to grow your own business and choose your own path forward. One of the best things about working with a business coach is having someone to hold you, the business owner, accountable for your decisions, your words, and your actions. When we set up a system of accountability we get way more tasks done, and we get them done more effectively. To that end, I drink my own Kool-Aid, I have my own business coach. Partly because I know that I get more done when my business coach holds me accountable, and partly because I know what it’s like to be coached, to wake up on the morning of my coaching call and think “I better get my stuff done” and that helps me be a better business coach for my clients. I’m able to put myself in their shoes.
A lot of the time we as business owners walk around with vague, undefined, inarticulate ideas in our heads about something that needs doing or fixing. When we say it out loud to another person, it’s no longer something we can ignore, it becomes tangible. So, a business coach is there to bring those ideas out into the open and walk you through discovering how and when to take action. Working with me, we’ll determine what the steps are that need to be taken, and you’ll commit to doing what needs to be done. We’ll have a system wherein we create a weekly agenda and together make a record of the commitments that come out of each call. Then, in advance of the next call I’m going to ask you to make a note of your number one challenge and any hot topics you had over the week. That agenda gets updated week after week, leaving a record of what you said, what I said, and what we each committed to doing.
There is a great Chinese proverb about the best time to plant a tree. It says that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, because today you’ll have the shade from that tree. But if that’s not possible, the next best time is today.
As business owners there is always a reason to put things off for ‘not today’. We will say why not wait until a new week, a new month, a new year to take that next step? Well, every time you put it off, you’re putting off getting your business to the place you want it to be. So the best time to hire a business coach is the moment you want to start getting different results from your business. So many business owners I speak with are not happy with how things are going. So if that is you, and you’re a business owner who is looking for more out of their business, then today’s a great day to hire a business coach.
I’d like to borrow a proverb here, and it’s “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” Consulting is giving the man a fish, thus feeding him for a day. Coaching is about teaching the man the skills he needs to eat for a lifetime. The ultimate goal of business coaching is to teach you, the business owner, the skills to move your business forward on your own, not to just give you the answers.
When you hire a consultant, the consultant does the work for you, and you’re always dependent on their help. When you hire a coach the goal is that at some point, you become self-reliant. On average I work with clients for 18 months. I won’t ask you to commit to a term of X months on paper, we reassess and handshake on a month-to-month basis. What that means is at any point during our working relationship you feel like you’ve gotten everything that you wanted, or that it’s not working for you, you aren’t stuck. On the other hand, if I feel like you aren’t doing your part or that it’s not working for me, we have a conversation to determine if we move forward together or not. In that way, taking on a business coach is risk free, because it only works if both partners put in the work. Taking on a consultant, on the other hand, leaves you in a position to become reliant on that external support, long term.
The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome. If your business is growing and along the way things are going smoothly from one situation to the next, you don’t need a business coach. But if you aren’t getting the outcomes you want from your business, you need a business coach to help you navigate what happens as your business grows. You need a business coach if you want better results and you aren’t getting them on your own. If this is the case, now is the best time to start thinking about how you can get some help, and what the right kind of coaching is for you so that you can begin a working relationship with someone who will keep you accountable for your actions and help you reach your goals.
Like any profession, there exists a range of quality and qualifications among business coaches. For example, if you’re a lawyer, there are two things I know to be true. First, you passed a university program that gave you a degree, and second, you passed the Bar. If you’re an accountant, the second qualification is articles and if you’re an engineer, it’s a qualification certification. The thing about business coaching is that we’re a relatively new profession. And as a result we do not have a regulatory body like lawyers, accountants, or engineers and there is no single way to become a business coach. There is no apprenticeship program as there is for craftspeople. So, just about anybody can hang a shingle and call themselves a coach. That’s all it takes. Get yourself some business cards and you’re ready to go. But it doesn’t mean you’re a good business coach. As a business owner looking for help and support, you need to ensure that the person you’re going to for that support has enough of a track record that you can be confident they will be able to pass their skills on to you.
Look for a track record of success. Part of that could be that they’ve somewhere been certified as a business coach. I myself am certified as a business coach, but I also have lots of testimonials from previous and current clients. Those testimonials give me the ability to simply direct prospective new clients to my website where they can get in touch with any one of these business owners and ask them directly about their experience working with me. Those testimonials are my most powerful credentials.
As it happens, in November 2019 I earned something called Canada’s Most Trusted Advisor for Small Business Owners. That’s another form of credential. Before becoming a business coach I was the President of a $3 billion company based here in British Columbia. That company turned about $1 billion in profit and employed about 4,000 people full-time. That’s another form of credential. Before that I was employed by Tip Top Tailors and went from starting as a salesperson on the retail floor through levels of management until eventually I earned an executive position in Toronto. Essentially, when you are looking for a business coach’s credentials, you need to be looking for a track record and evidence of success. What have they achieved in their career? What do others say about them? Are their claims verifiable? Look them up, look for reviews, and ask the questions until you are comfortable that the person you’re contemplating as a business coach has the kind of track record that supports their claim that they can help you with your business.
In my business coaching, I practice the Socratic Method of Teaching. Socrates’ idea was that the best way to help somebody is to help them figure it out for themselves. This works because when you, the business owner, figure out the solution to the problem or the answer to the question yourself, it’s yours. You came up with it, you own it, and you’re much more likely to act on it.
Often the best answer is only available when you properly define the problem and truly understand it. So, the questions that I ask my clients help you to examine and get a clear picture of the situation at hand, allowing you to do your best thinking. We need to get to the root of the problem and decipher what your options and alternatives are as well as the consequences of each. You will often feel as if you are in the horns of a dilemma, but the answer to a dilemma isn’t to make a choice, it is instead to define alternatives and discover more options. As you do this, the alternatives become more possible and realistic. That is my job, to ask the questions that force you to think outside the box and come up with new, fresh, original solutions to the challenges that you face as a business owner. This leads to some tough questions, certainly, but those tough questions are really about getting you to break out of the current context, your internalized framework, and the set of assumptions that are holding you back from getting to that next level.