Posted by stevezog on December 10, 2010 under Business advice, Business Coaching, Business Help | 
Our sister blog, BusinessCoaching.com, has some interesting tips for small business coaching.
Business coaching is a form of training and education that helps business owners get better results in their businesses.
With a series of proven system and strategies, business coaching helps guide owners to find their own answers that best fit their company and industry. Business coaching also holds owners accountable for getting results.
Like a sporting coach, business coaching seeks to achieve optimum performance by getting business owners to improve their systems and teams.
Business coaching, like sports coaching, also relies on measuring performance against metrics and benchmarks.
Business coaching is perfect for small-and-medium sized businesses, because the coaching programs are designed as simply as possible and are easy to implement.
In today’s world, business coaching can mean the difference between the success and failure of your company. Check out ActionCOACH’s business tips to prevent failure!
Posted by stevezog on November 29, 2010 under Business advice |
Success in business is something that all people who own their own business want, and yet for most business owners it’s something they may not have clearly defined for themselves. During business coaching sessions, when asking business owners what they want from their business, they usually say more freedom, but rarely do they end up with that freedom, as they get lost along the way and bogged down with the challenges of running their business. This article shows how business coaching will help you understand a process and simplify creating freedom in a business, by explaining the crucial steps every business owner must learn to get the freedom and lifestyle they’ve always wanted.
Business is a commercial, profitable enterprise that works without the business owner having to be there. How does your business measure up? Here are four steps a business coach would tell you:
Step 1. Building The Foundations For Growth. Growth foundations are built on knowledge, and with that knowledge, very accurate decisions can be made that will turn into leverageable outcomes for success. So the first step is to measure everything that happens in your business. The turnover per day, the profit per day and every single sale, in fact measure anything that you do not know for absolute certain.
Every single expense must be paid from every sale, so it’s important to know that from each sale a profit is being made. Then work out if there is a profit for a day’s worth of trading. If the profit margin isn’t high enough then the prices will need to be adjusted.
The number of leads per day, week and month needs to be recorded along with the conversion rate of enquiries to lead and from each form of lead generation. Next, the average sale value of each form of lead generation needs to be measured and total sales: daily, weekly and monthly. Just doing this can show where extra opportunities lie to grow the business further.
By testing and measuring your marketing campaigns, you will easily see if they are making a profit on their cost or not. And if not, you will know for certain that you should change your marketing efforts. These numbers will indicate how much you need to spend to get a customer, determine if you make a profit from your marketing campaigns and much, much more.
Step 2. Turn Your Staff Into A Team. The difference between staff and team is that staff do what you tell them to and you have to oversee everything they do, but team members take responsibility for their role and they know how to solve their own problems and are held accountable for their actions.
Once you have a “team” your productivity will increase. This leads to greater profit and more time for the business owner to focus on growing the business.
Step 3. Introducing Systems. Systems are a documented, reproducible way of undertaking a task and they are required for everything, from opening the door each morning to answering the phone on the 3rd ring. Systems are a key to leveraging your team’s time. To begin implementing systems answer these questions: Who does what, why and when? You must decide, which single person is responsible for a task then if that person is not there who is next responsible? Shared responsibilities can mean no responsibility as tasks are forgotten.
Step 4. Sales and Marketing. Effective sales and marketing is the only way to grow a business, yet so few people focus on it. Every successful company knows a business needs to focus half it’s time on distribution and half it’s time on marketing. For most business owners, it’s about 5% of their time on marketing and 95% on distribution. Reading books and attending seminars will reveal dozens of ideas to grow every type of business. Strategies virtually every business can implement include: strategic alliances, pro-active referral systems, scripts, guarantees and defining your uniqueness.
So by implementing the steps above, you’ll have more success than you ever imagined possible. But be aware, often a business owner’s first instinct is to hire a consultant to do the work for them. This will only end in tragedy, a traditional business consultant will very seldom explain to you what they are doing, or teach you how to do it yourself. Instead look for a professional coach to help you, guide you and allow you to make the changes that are right for your business – not someone else’s. So what are you waiting for, get out there and make the change, because you can build yourself a business that works without you or you can build yourself a job.
Want to learn more about business success or business coaching? Click here to find out more and how you can find a business coach in your area.
