Some of you may have come across a great book called “Eat That Frog” by Brian Tracey, which is all about effective personal time management. It has a number of excellent and practical tips, but the thing that stands out from it is essentially that you should deal with the ugliest most distracting action first, and then all the other tasks will fall into place.

Funnily enough, however the “frog” is often not the thing which you might think it should be, such as writing a report, preparing the marketing plan, doing the budgets, or other such tasks. In fact it can be anything, and recently I have come up against two such “frogs” both of which were having a significant effect on the business owner.

The first was down to an employee who due to unfortunate circumstances was using the company in a number of ways, including using a company vehicle as their personal mode of transport, and had started cutting hours to accommodate the children’s needs. Understandably, the owner was not happy, but because of the sensibility of the situation, and because he cared for his staff, he kept on avoiding the issue, rather than dealing with it. Now in the overall scheme of events, it didn’t really affect the business much, and the monetary amounts involved were relatively small. However, the effects on the owner grew and grew, causing stress and worry, and also preventing him from working as productively; because issues like this if undealt with, tend to prey on the mind all the time.

When I finally urged him to deal with it, the results were amazing, not only because it allowed the business owner to get what he wanted, and move on, but also because the employee was naturally enough fully aware of the situation, and was hugely relieved once the issue was resolved, and the employee is now working far more productively as well.

The other example is again what might be considered relatively trivial, but while it persists, it is causing stress, simply because the owners know they need to deal with it, but are wary of doing so. Basically this is all about changing the culture in the business, so they can stop people wasting time through having informal meetings all the time. They clearly recognise that these meetings without structure, notes or actions are simply wasting everyone’s time (which they can ill afford) and they want to change this, but worry about the reaction from some of the other senior team members. They have yet to confront the issue, preferring for the time being to continue making excuses for not sorting it out, but they know and I know that once they face up to this “frog” and stop procrastinating, things will improve significantly.

Being a business coach and working very often with family businesses, one of the things I come across all the time is inability of family members to communicate with one another. You might imagine that having lived together for many years that husband and wife partnerships, or parent/child/sibling enterprises would be the ones where information was most readily passed from one to another, and where there are least likely to be misunderstandings. However, this is far from the reality.

In fact in these situations, a coach can often be invaluable purely as an “interpreter”, or go-between. How often have I heard a husband or wife tell me that they have been urging their other half to do exactly what I have just got them to do, for years and years? Yet because I am the outsider, some how I must be right, whereas the familiar face either can’t be, or they don’t want them to be.

Likewise with parent/child relationships, the child will seldom listen or do what their parent wants them to, because of their close relationship, and the perverse nature of most children, to deliberately ignore or disbelieve anything their parents say. Once again the coach can become an extremely useful tool in these situations, to be used as the conduit for parents to get their children to do what the business needs. The frustration I experience in all these situations is enormous. “Why won’t they listen to me, but they immediately take on board everything you say?” is often quoted at me. I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that, (human nature I suppose) but if you want to do something about it, why not get a coach to give you a hand.

Over the Christmas break two or three of my clients decided that it wasn’t worth meeting with me, as they felt there wouldn’t be much going on over that period. As a result of that it has been perhaps 6 or 7 weeks since we last got together, and it has been a real eye-opener as to how quickly things have started to drift.

Monetary controls, such as cash flow forecasts, lead generation numbers, average sales, and other such key performance indicators have lapsed, systems and procedures have started to be ignored, and the business owners themselves have slipped back into old habits of doing things, rather than delegating to others.

For me, this simply bears out the importance of ongoing support and coaching. It is all very well taking the initial steps towards changing the way you manage your money, your time and your team, but to make meaningful and permanent change you need to keep pushing it forward until it becomes the norm. Bearing in mind that there are nearly always some (or all) of your staff who are resistant to change, unless you keep up the relentless drive to make changes, they will quickly spot any weaknesses or diminished desire, and will allow things to go back to the bad old days, because it suits them. It also re-enforces their beliefs that if they hold out for long enough they will be able to get back to the “easy life” they had before.

So this is where the coaching comes in. I do not allow people to drift or take the easy path. If you have someone holding you accountable, and acting as a conscience on a regular basis, you are far more likely to make the changes you need, and stick to them.