7 Aspects to Growing Your Business

Enterprise Issue

7 Aspects to Growing Your Business - for Business + Executive Coaches

1. Tactics for generating more income in your business.

First and foremost, every business must be profitable so it can serve its clients. Offer great customer service at a profit, NOT a loss. Develop a growth mindset. Business, including business and executive coaching isn’t child’s play.

2. Transforming for leadership in business.

Running an enterprise will put a lot of weight on your client’s shoulders. You are not there as a coach to lift that weight from them, but to help them build the self and business leadership muscles needed to carry it. Your client may be skilled in their industry; even the best at what they do, but leadership is a whole new sphere.

3. Putting personal branding before marketing strategy.

If you are coaching someone who is running a business, where customers are associating the business name with the service provided, you can let them know that they have a personal and business brand and they may even be incongruent. An incongruence means money being left on the table or running out the door.

The next step is for them to capitalise on that brand’s strengths which means developing an authentic brand positioning so the connection between the service and the business is strengthened. Customers can then grow a stronger understanding of what the business is about.

Remember, that if your clients aren’t developing and managing their own brand, it will be done for them and they might not be pleased with the result.

4. Coaching to build a great team.

Encourage your client to demonstrate real leadership and abundant thinking when building their team - either internal or external. As I noted before, leadership is a heavy weight. Your client will need to adopt the mindset that a team is there to help them. If they find their team an added burden, then something is very wrong.

5. Don’t forget the mentoring aspect of coaching.

Coaching should take into account the personal as well as the professional. A booming business and a stagnant personal life is not a sign of success. Sooner or later the rest of your life will impact on your business, so you want that to make a positive impact. Focusing too narrowly on business means missed opportunities for a successful life.

Always take the time to smell the roses.

Mentoring is a relationship, one that should encourage the mentee to take that same authentically relational approach into all their business interactions. These days, people want to work with a live human being. They’re tired of businesses that are simply too large and impersonal for their own good. The advantage of a small or new enterprise is that you can present that personal, personable face.

6. Coaching so that your client doesn’t miss opportunities.

We all know the value of hindsight. A good coach should offer this sort of valuable insight before it is too late to capitalise on it. For example, new business trends, changing economic conditions ie. helping the client discover “what they don’t know that they don’t know.” Teach your client to get the maximum value from all their hard work by repurposing ideas and make them aware of new product launches that they hadn’t even dreamed were possible. If your client looks to repurpose whatever they can (reinventing their success stories, and salvaging the viable kernels of failed projects) then everything, even supposed failures, serve to grow their business.

7. Coaching your client to set satisfying goals.

Goals can be reach-for-the-moon-crazy, but they must, at some level, remain achievable. The easiest way to determine whether they are is to ask - Is this within my client’s ability to control? If a goal requires hard-work, innovative thinking, and acceptance of risk on the part of your client then the goal is achievable if the client is willing to do these things. If, however, the goal relies on outside forces - the economic climate, government regulation, their business competitors - then there is a good chance the goal is, and always will be, outside the client’s control, and will never provide the stable framework necessary for a business plan.

Jon Michail and his team at Image Group International partner with smart and ambitious executives and entrepreneurs to achieve breakthrough results with contrarian and disruptive ways to grow and monetise their personal and business brands. An author, veteran, multi-award winning coach of over 400 coaches, with a Who’s Who clientele, Jon is the CEO and Founder of Image Group International, an Australian-based corporate and personal brand image advisory and coaching organisation that conducts transformational seminars, workshops and one-on-one coaching in over four continents. He is recognised as Australasia’s No. 1 Image Coach.