Working with a business coach can be a transformative experience for any enterprise. This is what happened when one organisation opted to test out what this kind of professional expertise really has to offer.

The coaching

In the second week of December, just before everyone started winding down for Christmas, the team spent three days with a business coach. This was basically the result of a new relationship established with an investor in the business. The investor had made a number of useful suggestions about the way that things were being run and one of these was to spend some time working with a business coach.

The goals

There were two main reasons identified as to how working with a business coach could provide some very specific benefits. These were:

1. Introducing an element of accountability. Particularly for new enterprises that have already gone through an initial stage of growth there may be no accountability at all other than to the business itself. A business coach can be the person who asks the questions “Did you set out to achieve what you’d hoped?” “Have those goals been reached?” This is something that was viewed as particularly beneficial for the business in terms of helping it to move on to the next stage of growth.
2. Accessing specific expertise. For this business the missing expertise was in identifying the necessary processes that would enable the business to scale up in a repeatable and predictable way. Although impressive growth had already been achieved the business had reached a stage where this required a more expert input to design a robust approach for ongoing implementation.

The sessions (and the outcomes)

• Prior to the business coaching sessions those who were attending were asked to comment on a range of different aspects of the business, such as strengths and weaknesses, strategy and vision.
• The session began with an icebreaker to help people get into an open and engaged place and then moved on to an introduction to a “30,000 foot view of the company.” This had the desired effect of enabling everyone to better understand the perspective of the team.
• Participants were encouraged to speak up in terms of areas they believed needed work and where the business could do better.
• Crucially, the business coach asked everyone to focus on what the business was really about and, in particular, why the team was doing what it was doing – a question that rarely gets repeated after the initial start-up stage. Most of the time was spent on these big picture questions, as opposed to looking at day-to-day decision making.
• New goals were set for the following year and accountability was established – the coach would come back in and review progress in the next quarter.
• There were a lot of benefits to the coaching sessions, in particular bringing the team together – many of whom work remotely – and identifying clear direction for the business going forward. This simply wouldn’t have been achievable in the same way without the involvement of a coach.

Working with a business coach can bring a new perspective to any organisation, help to streamline goals, create accountability and clarify vision going forward.