Should I Hire a Business Coach?
Why do people hire a business coach? This can be seen as an additional expense that at times feels unnecessary. After all, running a business already takes so much work and money, that it’s tempting to skip this expense and spend your hard earned money elsewhere. In reality, hiring a business coach is one of the best financial investments that you can make to grow your business. Before you delve into finding the right business coach for you, ask yourself:
- Do you need to hire a coach, mentor, or teacher? Teachers have studied a topic and can teach learnings to others, mentors have experience in your industry and coaches can assist with internal aspects such as personal growth, goal setting, entrepreneurship, etc.
- What stage is your business currently in? Consider where your business is and where you want it to go. Maybe you need help establishing lead generation or you need additional salespeople to help capitalize on expansions. The business stage that you’re in can help you determine whether you need business coaching services. As you transition into other business stages, you can continue to rely on your business coach along the way.
- How are you feeling about yourself and your success? Perhaps the most important consideration is whether you feel like an imposter or a true business leader. Your business will only be able to grow as much as you can. For example, you might have some hesitations about charging a higher price or being more visible. Make sure that you’re taking care of your inner life to help you reach unfounded business success.
The above can help you navigate this important decision and help you establish a thriving business.
1. Get a Clear, Exciting Vision for Your Life
A coach will help you write out, visualize and gain clarity on your goals in your business and life. We often have ideas in our heads, but then life gets in the way and we never find the time to make them a reality. Or when we do take the time to draw them out, we are hit with challenges that stop us cold in our tracks. A coach will help you get a crystal clear image of where you want to take your business and life, and will then move that image into realistic achievement timelines and actions.
2. Map Out Bold, But Realistic, Goals for the Future
After you have your vision, it’s time to map out more specific goals to help you achieve your ultimate results. It’s not difficult to set goals and create dreams (I’m sure you already have multiple ideas for your business listed out right now), but will you ever attain them?
With a coach, you can! A coach will push you to reach every goal you mention, and they won’t let you make excuses for not trying. As they challenge you to try new things, they will also strongly encourage you to think bigger, jump higher and really go for what you want. Most times, they expect you to reach for the stars because they can see your potential.
Bold goals are the ones that can scare us to death, but an experienced coach knows audacious goals are also closer within reach than you may realize. Once you reach those crazy goals, you will feel invincible, and your confidence will skyrocket. You will ride the momentum tidal wave!
3. Get Unstuck and Find Motivation
The best thing a business coach can do for your business is get you unstuck. As a business owner, you can get in your own way quite often. You might spend a lot of time in your own head, so you sometimes need someone to pull you out of the funk.
No matter how much self-motivation you might have, days happen when having someone to encourage us and ensure that you are on the right path can instantly change your state. That outside push from a coach is what you need to get moving and get going; even if it’s just a confirmation of what you were already thinking, a coach can give you that momentum to keep going.
4. Increase Your Creativity and Income
Once I could get past my (often self-imposed) roadblocks, I unleashed my creativity and started brainstorming ideas for better products and services for my customers. A coach will give you the courage to charge what you are worth, create a line of products to make more money, or increase your prices through tailored financial advising.
A coach also creates a safe place for you to hash out ideas, test theories, and ensure you showcase your work properly. They will help you get past insecurities about taking a proactive approach to finding ways to increase your income and creativity.
The entrepreneurial mind is a beautiful thing, but it comes with its fair share of challenges. One of them is that we have so many ideas, we don’t know where to start, or on the flip side, you might be clinging to an idea or direction a lot longer than you should.
Having a coach on your side will help you gain a fresh perspective to harness your ideas. A coach will also allow you and encourage you to pivot directions if it’s time to move on.
5. Find Support and Encouragement
You will be amazed at what you can accomplish when you have someone who believes in what you are doing. Having a support system around you, or hearing a few words of encouragement, can lift your spirits when you are down. Helping you increase your confidence in how you approach your business can help you achieve your business goals and encourage you to maximize your strengths.
With everything going on around you, a business can get overwhelming, frustrating, and even lonely at times. A coach will be right there with you the whole time, though, helping you take that next step towards success and acting as a reliable support system.
Of course, the point is to get to a place where you have all the tools to handle on your own what life throws at you, but until you’re ready, the encouragement you get from a coach might be just the thing you need to continue doing your great work, and they can help hold you accountable along the way.
6. Maximize Your Skillset
It’s easy to think that we know ourselves really well and understand our likes and dislikes, but when it comes to bringing out the hidden talents and deep desires, you will likely surprise yourself.
It often takes an outside perspective of someone who knows you really well to tell it like it is. A coach can identify patterns and help you maximize your strengths while softening your weaknesses.
7. Gain More Confidence
You will never truly know what you’re capable of until you have someone who pushes you outside your comfort zone. After working with my business coach for the last year, I’ve built up more confidence in my ideas, thought processes, and even how I approach my business. If you are like me, you know you have greatness within you, but you aren’t always sure if an idea is good or something that will get you rejected. It’s hard to convince yourself that you can accomplish your business goals, and that’s where having a coach is key. They can help instill the confidence you need to accomplish your big goals while offering support and guidance for your (sometimes not so great) ideas.
8. Prioritize Your (Business) Needs First
As a business owner, it’s easy to put your customers, clients, and even your family ahead of your own needs. This is especially evident if you are a solopreneur who single-handedly keeps the business going. A business coach will help you prioritize your business needs in a way that will enable it to be successful without sacrificing the other parts of your life, including your mental and physical health. Additionally, you can work with your coach to seamlessly integrate your work into your life. With the technology available today, you have ample opportunities to take care of yourself, so you can then give the best to your business and those around you.
9. Hold You Accountable
What did you accomplish this week? Are you making progress on your goals? What are you proud to have achieved since we last spoke? These are standard questions at the beginning of each coaching session that will get you sweating if you haven’t put in the work.
A coach is a built-in accountability partner who nudges and reminds you of what you promised to do and of what you’re working towards. It’s all too easy to make promises to ourselves and then break them because we don’t feel like it or they are too hard. When you are accountable to someone else, you don’t have that luxury. If you really want to accomplish your big goals and take your business to the next level, hiring a business coach is the right step.
10. Give You More Energy
Think about your energy right now. Have you ever noticed in your life that there are certain people you hang out with and certain activities you do which either give you energy or drain your energy? A coach will help you make a list of all the things that drain your energy and all the things that provide you with energy, and then one at a time, they will help you remove the things that drain your energy. From my experience, many times that activity alone lets everything else in your life flourish. After all, if you don’t have enough energy, how can you fly? When you handle these things and focus on activities that energize you, the things that looked so far off before all of a sudden look much closer than you could have possibly imagined.
A Coach Can Be the Best Investment for Your Business
Even though I am a coach, the above comes directly from either working with clients or my experience with investing in my own coaches. Do your homework, talk to people for references, and if you feel like talking to a coach, reach out. Many coaches offer free or low-cost discovery sessions to help you experience what a coach can offer.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Cultivate works, schedule a free two-hour session to see if it’s a good fit for your business.
Cody Muenster is a business advisor who believes in work/life balance and empowers professionals to gain back control of their time. His enthusiastic approach encourages business owners to reach the ultimate business and life achievements.
