I don’t want a Coach, I want a Concierge! In Blackboard Fridays Episode 129, Jacob talks about Growth Planning. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.
Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?
“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.”
Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.
At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.
You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.
That’s me.
Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.
Transcript
Business Coaching Doesn’t Work
I’ve said it before, folks: “I’m a business coach who doesn’t believe that business coaching works”. And yet I’ve been helping people for more than 20 years?
This is where it’s important to understand – especially as a small business owner who is asking “Is business coaching a good investment?” – that there are 6 different Advisory Skills in each time of advisory firm, and each is different for example between coaching and mentoring, consulting, facilitation, and so on.
Coaching absolutely has a place, but it is very much over used and far too much of a buzz word in modern business. Coaching works on assumption that you, as the business owner, know everything. You have all of the information and desires within you and that if I, as a coach, simply ask you the right questions than I can draw that information, that expertise out of you.
Because it was within you, you will believe it, you will own it, you will take responsibility, sooner or faster get an outcome.
For business owners, that’s complete bunk!
For Life Coaching (and there’s a lot of terrible life coaches just like there are a lot of terrible business coaches) it is possible to use only questioning, coaching techniques to go deep into individuals and help them to self identify and self actualise. But if I sit down with you as a business owner and say, “Let’s talk about tax returns, I’m only to ask you questions because you already know everything you need to know about tax” you’d realize why I believe business coaching can be a whole lot of hot air.
Coaching: One Tool in the Tool Kit
For helping you make decisions, take responsibility for decisions, and for transferring some information, absolutely coaching is one tool, in my tool kit, that can support my clients. But it’s quite often not what a business owner is looking for.
Coaching almost assumes that you know where to start, and you have the time to really develop those skills for yourself. As with the example of tax returns, that’s really not the case. There are things that you know you are best outsourcing to a specialist expert, who can do that work for you or who can give you the information, so that you don’t have to dive deep into your own resources to develop it yourself.
Sometimes I have to put the Coaching tools back in the tool kit, and produce something else. Never trust a Coach who says Coaching is better or best – it’s only one way to help, and a naïve coach is like someone with a hammer turning every problem into a nail.
Coaching, Advisory Skills, and the Layers of Learning
You might recognize the diagram behind me in this week’s video – these are the three Layers of Learning that we discussed in Episode 32, when I talked about doing a Training Need Analysis for your business. When it comes to developing skills, any kind of skills from driving a car to running a business, we go first through Inspiration, down into Strategic Design and Education, and lastly, into Execution, where we actually out what we’ve learned into practice, and we do it, we make it, and we move it forward.
This is the Depth aspect of learning one skill. The Breadth aspect is then applying this framework to a wide variety of different skills in your business.
Great business coaches are Generalists. They can have conversations with you about topics as diverse as culture, valuation, marketing, or business financials – and I could make that list go on much further.
Rather than expecting you to have all the answers, these good Coaches also recognise they need to be Trainers and Consultants sometimes: meeting with you, and taking you through a concept, ensuring you understand why it’s important, educating you, and then coaching you through the road blocks to implementation.
This can be a slow burn, and it can be delivered at a pace that works for some business owners.
- If you want gradual, sustainable change that you manage – meet with me once a month;
- If you want to grow revenue by 25% in the next 3 months – then you want my Transformation Program.
No, I Absolutely Don’t Want a Business Coach!
So I’m a business coach, I’ve convinced you that business coaching is a waste of time and money … or maybe you didn’t need convincing.
You. Don’t. Want. A. Coach. But you still want someone to help – what then?
This returns to the Advisory Skills I shared above. You’ve moved past the “Do It Yourself” approach when you want someone to “Tell” you what to do (eg, Corporate Training). But you also don’t want the delays of a “Done With You” approach, with a Coach or Facilitator constantly stopping to “Ask” you for direction.
You just want somebody who can take your needs and get it “Done For You”, who can point you in the right direction, and either give you the answer or connect you with the person who can get shit done. I call that person your Business Concierge.
The Business Concierge doesn’t sit in any of those advisory disciplines, because they’re not delivering on those outcomes directly. Their value is having the deep general wisdom to understand all of the different areas of your business and to a high level of skill, to be able to have a meaningful conversation with you.
This means that they can sometimes see what you need, even when you don’t know what you don’t know, looking over your shoulder in a benevolent way.
The brilliance of the generalist concierge is that they don’t come to you pre-loaded with a solution.
- Ask a Sales Trainer what your business needs, and they’ll probably say ‘Sales Training’
- A web developer will tell you that you need a new website
- An accountant will suggest improving your financial reporting
- And you’ll never find an AdWords guru who says you should spend less money doing online marketing.
And unlike a Coach who wants to take you on a journey of learning and discovery through this whole process, the Business Concierge arrives with laser accuracy to inform you that *boom* what you need right there is sales training, or *boom* what you need right there is somebody who can actually do that accounting work.
More valuably, just like a good New York Hotel Concierge can hook you up with Broadway Tickets, the good Business Concierge can connect you with exactly the right person who can solve that pain, solve that problem in your business.
Rapido Rapido
It’s faster.
Sure, it doesn’t transfer the skills and the expertise, it doesn’t make you the sales, accounting, and marketing guru. Chances are though, you started your business because you love and are good at whatever it is that your business does not because you want to be the sales, accounting, or marketing guru!
Actually, developing the business skills on top of your industry expertise is a bit of a perk, and I hope you’re loving that part of the business life cycle. But you’re going to gain much more traction becoming better in your industry, and learning some of these on a simple level, while working with the experts to go deeper and to make that change happen.
If you want to find the right expert in whatever area of your business, even if you don’t know which area you need to look at, don’t go looking for a coach, who’s going sit there coaching. Go looking for a concierge, someone who can send you in the right direction, in the way that works for the realities of your business.
Next Steps
Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:
- Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
- Call, Text, or WhatsApp me +61 427 151 181
- Or just Subscribe https://jacobaldridge.com/about/subscribe-to-jacob-aldridge-com/ to stay in touch
