When I first meet with business owners they will often challenge me, by telling me that I know nothing about their line of business – and more often than not they are completely right about that. But of course knowing about the technicalities and intricacies of their line of business is what all business owners are best at, and I neither need to, nor always want to know, about those details.

The point is all businesses come up against the same issues, and it is these things which I concentrate my coaching skills on. I have coached close to 175 different businesses now, over 14 years, and whether they are animal behaviourists, arboriculturalists, builders, doctors or electricians, I have always ended up helping them to change the same things.

Over the years I have naturally learnt a lot about many different business sectors, and this has helped me occasionally to understand some of the idiosyncrasies which can arise, but on the whole I take businesses through the same processes, so they can create a business which works without them.

With the amount of business coaching experience I now have, I can quickly get a feel for the key areas which are not working in a business, and I can generally ask the right questions to unearth the underlying problems very quickly. However, I have to be careful never to make assumptions, for although my initial diagnosis is probably right, there are often other circumstances which are causing the problems, and they are invariably unique to each different business I work with.

The thing is, being among some of the first business coaches in the country, over the years I have grown and honed my own skills, such that I am seldom stuck for a way forward. And whilst there will always be new challenges to face, it is far less often that I meet a situation I haven’t dealt with before.

So if you are struggling to find a way forward, to pass a seemingly insurmountable problem, why not speak to a business coach who has probably experienced and solved your issue?

One of the biggest problems I find as a coach is getting the business owners to let go. This is perhaps hardest when I start working with a new client, because they are still set in their ways, and are largely at a stage when they are involved in huge parts of the business, and don’t trust others to do it for them.

However, once the initial break is made, there is a time where things get a lot better, until the business starts to grow at a good rate. When that point arises, I often find that we hit the same problem again, because the business owner starts to get pulled back into the day to day issues. The people they have entrusted to take tasks off their hands find they become overstretched and perhaps a little less sure of themselves once the pressure is on, and they often turn to the owner for advice and support.

This is when the owner must be strong, and continue to push their staff away, so they learn to stand on their two feet. It is all too tempting to accept the questions from their team, and give them the answers, but this simply leads to the owner becoming swamped and unable to take things further forward,

At this stage it is often a good plan to do a check on the way the top management are spending their time. Are they genuinely over-stretched so that they genuinely need help from the business owner, or are they short of time because they are being drawn into tasks which are not their responsibility? By checking this, you can quite quickly assess if you are at a stage where you may need to employ more support staff, or if it is more a case of good leadership and management.

Something which seems to be a fairly common theme at the moment is that a number of the networking groups I have been attending seem to have stagnated, and in many cases numbers of attendees are dropping.

Networking groups do tend to go in cycles, but it is surprising that they all seem to be struggling at the same time, so I wondered why this might be?

Increase in business and activity could be one reason, and that coupled with the accompanying complacency it brings, could well be why people see less need for going out and finding new business. However, as we should all be well aware, this can quickly lead to the “feast/famine” syndrome, whereby we live off the immediate successes we have now, but fail to plan for the future, which is most likely to end in problems. It will be interesting to see if this theory is correct, and in 6 months time we find people running back to networking groups, in an attempt to bring in more business quickly.

Another theory that others have, is that there are simply too many networking groups, and it is very difficult to decide which to go to, after all there is only so much time to spend on this marketing strategy. However, there is only one way to find out which are good, and which not so, and that is to try them out.

I find that I seldom waste time meeting new people, and I am a firm believer that networking invariably works for most businesses.

Of course networking is only one marketing strategy, but as ever, be it good times or bad, I would always encourage my clients to keep their marketing activity up, as you never know when things may take a turn for the worse.

To follow on from last week, I thought I would have a more detailed look at my clients results over the past year to see if my optimism was well founded or not. As it turns out I am delighted to say, that in nearly every case it is, with businesses in many different fields flourishing and growing.

Taking a cross section of clients from building to IT, engineering to plumbing, and retail, the worst increase in turnover last year was +9%, with the best at +50% and the majority in excess of +20%. On top of this margins have also increased, and the business owners have on the whole been able to increase their drawings.

In addition because of the increase in turnover and margins, they have all been recruiting new staff, and have as a result been able to free up more time for themselves to work on the business, concentrating on strategy and further growth in the future.

In fact several of my clients have also started up or taken over a new business (all related to their current one), so that they are now jumping forward in quantum amounts. In fact only yesterday another of my clients asked my advice on growth through acquisition.

So would all these businesses have achieved such success without the input and driving force of my coaching? Certainly in some cases some of the growth and changes may well have happened anyway. But on the whole it is the controlled and managed way in which these things have happened which ensures that the positive changes are planned and permanent. Without coaching this would not be the case.