Networking Now

To me Business Coaching was a must have during my lasy employment before deciding to do it myself. I found it great to focus on my work, and to have someone who kicked me up the bum when required to, to really help me deliver results to the company i worked for. What he did for me was to cut out all the mumbo jumbo business speak that you get bogged down with. This is why i use a common sense approach to coaching business owners.
The purpose of a business coach in my opinion is to support and provide guidance to the client and help them achieve their goals in business, which normally leads on to their personal life. Our approach is to get together to discuss what you want from your coach and to discuss options available to you. We then come up together with a timeline of what you will achieve over a prefixed period (usually 1-2 years), over that time we work together to achieve those goals, if we don't succeed at a specific point we stop, look at what went wrong and try to fix it, but we try to still meet the objectives of the original plan. Don't be put off by your coach if you don't share the same thought process, this might be a bigger reason why you need one, as they 'll look at your business with the idea for improvement with what you got first rather than what you need, there might be areas that stand out from the start which you may have thought about but forgot to do due to other things taking over. If you don't get on with your coach don't dismiss them, talk to them about it. All coaches are good listeners, in my opinion its there best asset. Your coach will be non-bias towards your business as he works with you not for your company. I'm lucky to pick and choose who i work with as this means i can balance my time working with my family ( you just have to follow my twitter @MAXIMATTITUDE to realise where my balance is ) Life is all about balance and finding your personnel preference on it. for me the ultimate goal of any business owner is to have a business that is self sufficent, my definition of a business owner is someone who owns a business not works for it, Richard Branson owns lots of businesses under the virgin umbrella ( i think its about 300) but he doesn't work on all of them apart from some initial marketing. Any business owner can achieve the same ideals, might not be at the same level of business success, but can still achieve there own.