Top 5 Benefits of Business Coaching for Startups and SMEs

When you’re starting or growing a business it can be difficult to know where best to focus your time in order to reach your goals. Those goals might not be set in stone either. Are you seeking to expand to become the biggest and most profitable business in your space or would you like to build a business that makes a difference in your community?

You might simply want to generate enough income that allows you to enjoy a more favourable work/life balance. Have you ever sat down to think through and sketch out your ultimate aims?

Whether you’re starting a new venture or you’ve established a business that you want to take to the next level, the benefits of business coaching and mentoring shouldn’t be ignored. Getting the right coach in to nurture you as an individual as well as the operation you’re running can mean the difference between just about managing and pulling away from the competition.

So how does coaching help start-ups and SMEs to grow? Here are five benefits of business coaching.

You Get Direction

Most entrepreneurs recognise their businesses need a plan, not just at the off, but often one that responds as that business evolves. However, developing the ideal strategy to realise your vision isn’t always a simple process and it’s not likely to be something you can follow a template for either.

Having a solid but adaptable plan gives you and your business direction, but you as a business owner might not actually be the best placed to build that plan by yourself. Successful people recognise when they need support and if you’ve never planned and launched a business before, why would you assume you can do so without any assistance?

A good business coach can work with you to assess the market you’re in, the opportunity available to you and how best to exploit your natural strengths. This forward planning can be invaluable in terms of helping you achieve what you ultimately want to achieve.

You Get Support

If you’re a solopreneur, the world can seem a lonely place. Even if you have business partners and/or employees, your ideas often exist in an echo chamber, without being subject to proper scrutiny.

Your business coach therefore acts as your impartial second pair of eyes, a sounding board for your suggestions and someone to support you in making rational and confident decisions. A coach can help with advice on all sorts of matters from building out your team to better client management and plenty more besides, assuming you’ve found a good one!

You Get the Benefit of Learning from Someone Else’s Mistakes

Business coaches will have different skills and expertise, but the ones who really know what they’re talking about will have built their own businesses from scratch. They’re going to understand the pain points in your own journey because they’ll have encountered them before and should know how to overcome them.

From knowing when is the right time to expand into new serviced offices in Brighton to recognising how to keep spiralling expenses in check, why learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from someone else’s and avoid ever making them yourself?

You Can Build and Develop Your Own Skills

A jack of all trades is a master of none, so don’t kid yourself that you can manage every function of your growing company with complete success. We all have strengths and weaknesses but part of being an effective leader is recognising the traits you need to work on, along with the skills you just don’t have or at least don’t have the time or inclination to build.

Some people excel in the world of sales but might come unstuck when it comes to completing tedious compliance paperwork. Similarly for some people the ability to say no to client or customer requests that aren’t going to represent enough value to their business might be the biggest hurdle, even though they have otherwise excellent time management and organisational skills.

It’s obviously entirely possible to identify and work on your weaknesses by yourself, but by engaging a specialist business coach you’ll very likely find out more about yourself than without that support to guide you. It can also be incredibly useful to have somebody to challenge your own preconceptions about your strengths and weaknesses.

Personal growth is about working on yourself so it’s important to recognise what you want to change and to improve, whilst also determining where you would most benefit from outside support, beyond your business coach. Hiring staff or relying on external contractors doesn’t just add capacity to your organisation, it takes the jobs away that you aren’t best suited to doing.

You Can (and Should) Make More Money

From cutting unnecessary costs to homing in on the products and services that net you the best return, it often takes an outside party to help you recognise how best to increase your business’ profits. By working with an experienced business coach your personal and professional performance can reach far greater levels than trying to work on these skills by yourself.

Executive coaches and business mentors exist to help you achieve more so if they’re not overseeing improvements in your bottom line something is going wrong. Utilise a good coach to improve your confidence, develop your leadership skills and provide support with effective management. But most of all, hire a coach to bolster your business’ ultimate success.

Interested in speaking to a specialist business coach and growth consultant? We can recommend Willcox Advisory.