Small business coaches have become a critical member of the business planning team. In the 21st Century we will see their role expand exponentially in importance, especially among the members of successful family owned companies.
Successful family owned companies, those whose decisions are often – probably too often, driven by non-business issues make up the vast majority of all companies. Companies with less than 500 employees, 90% of the businesses across North America, are overwhelmingly family owned or privately held by people who, whether they are actually related or not, act like it.
Family feelings, mixed messages, long held grudges, lack of trust, envy, respect, grievances, love, and every other human emotion possible conspire to muddle otherwise straightforward business decisions. Someone has to help them sort it out. And not someone who is deemed to be, accurately or not, on the side of one group, person, faction, or another.
Business coaches, those not brought in by one group or another – each looking for an outsider to validate their position, do not have any baggage when they begin the engagement. Depending on the reason they were hired and the degree of conflict, or misunderstanding, or disagreement – often business coaches have their first meeting with all the principles together.
That first meeting is the time and place to clear the air. Everybody will end up knowing what everybody else knows and when the decision to hire the business coach is made – everybody will be on record. Getting agreement on the way forward right from the start is vital if this is to be a successful engagement from either the coach’s or the business owner’s point of view.
Business coaches are not motivated to make a sale. This is important, but not in the way you probably expect. For some reason, maybe it’s their over-developed BS detectors working overtime, business owners think that their lawyer and accountant are just trying to create more work for themselves and run up their fee. Some feel that their insurance agent is motivated only to sell a policy and make a commission. Generally this is not true in either case.
Business owners often confuse the value of the advice, council, and professional insights with the way their advisors get paid. If you have a trusting relationship with a professional advisor, you really need to get over that. If you don’t have a trusting relationship with your advisors, get rid of them.
In any case, because business coaches are not selling anything, it’s one less thing for the business owner to concern themselves about. Successful well respected business coaches enter every engagement with the objective of working themselves out of a job. Ask your business coach what I mean by that and if they agree with that assessment or not. Typically they do not want to be part of your overhead forever – they want to help you by enhancing your ability, your capability to work things out for yourself.
Business coaches arrive on the scene with no previous advice to protect. If there is any single reason why it is so hard to get your advisors to cooperate and work together on your behalf, it’s because instead of working to create the future you want, your advisors are scrambling around trying to justify the work they’ve done for you in the past.
Business owners seldom mandate that their advisors cooperate and work together as a team. So each provides their best advice in a vacuum or at least a partial vacuum. Years pass and either you or they are too busy to keep the plans they created or the insurance you purchased up to date. Each of them was sure, based on what they could find out from you about your plans for the future, that their recommendations made perfect sense – then.
Now, it’s all going to come out. They may feel that you will blame them if things have to be re-drafted or re-organized, even though they may have tried endlessly to get you to sit down and review it. They may feel that they will have to justify the advice they provided years ago in front of your other advisors, who may be all too willing to second guess them.
There is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking going on when advisors get together as a group – when they each have been providing their services to you for years without their benefit of knowing what your other advisors know.
You should have had a real team of professionals working together seamlessly for you since you started. But that didn’t happen. There is an old old saying that the best time to plant an oak tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is today.
The ideal way to begin is with the appointment of a planning coordinator, someone who is formally put in charge of expediting things, making things move, and getting things done. Without someone to coordinate things planning eventually grinds to a halt.
Planning for the future of your business is far too important to be left to chance, to the self-interests and prejudices of others, or the pushes and pulls of personal loyalties.
Your professional advisors want to help, want to be part of the solution. Sometimes they need a nudge from someone who has been tasked into the role of the “nudger” – someone hired by you to help you uncover what’s important to the you. As planning coordinators business coaches are uniquely qualified to do that, and then to take what’s important to your to your advisors.
Business coaches are also trained to help you figure out what the situation is today, really – what is going on here? When they compile the information from everyone in the business and the family around what’s important and what the situation is right now, they are ideally suited to work with your traditional professional advisors to figure out what’s possible.
When business coaches operate as planning coordinators for your business, your professional advisors will have the most coordinated and complete input they have ever received from you, putting them in the best position possible to help you manage your business affairs so that your business will be the vehicle that will make your family’s dreams come true.
