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What to Consider When Hiring a Business Coach?

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by Kent Boehm

What to Consider When Hiring a Business Coach

Looking for a Business Coach?

Business coaching is an industry that is well over 30 years old and may even unofficially be over 40 years old, with 20% to 35% of business owners using a coach. While many are familiar with the term “Business Coach,” not everyone knows how business coaching works, how it can benefit them, or what needs to be considered when hiring one.

This article will share insights that have been helpful to my family, friends, and fellow entrepreneurs when hiring a business coach.

Fun

First and foremost, your relationship with your coach should be fun. Business ownership should be enjoyable, and since we spend so much time thinking about and at work, working in our businesses, the relationship with your coach should also be enjoyable.

Financially Beneficial

What is the plan to “find the fee”? A coach should demonstrate strategies that will increase your revenue and profit in the short and long term to cover their fee. If a prospective coach cannot demonstrate these strategies and timelines, do not hire them.

A strong, competent, and experienced business coach should improve your profit by at least their fee within 4 to 6 months of starting the engagement. For example, if the typical fee is $3,000 per month, your business should see this increase in profit.

Once the “initial fee” is covered, the next profit layer should be a minimum of 5:1 ROI in the first 12-18 months and then a 10:1 ROI. For instance, if the coaching fee is $36,000 per year, there should be a $360,000 per year improvement in profit or equivalent benefit to the organization.

It is also critical that the coach provides a plan to track the results of the program.

Faster Results

Simply put, will you and your business achieve the same or greater results faster than you would without using a coach?

Guarantee

Does the prospective coach guarantee results? With over 30 years in the industry, there are proven methods and strategies to help you achieve your goals. If a prospective coach cannot offer a guarantee, keep looking.

Expertise & Experience

Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. You have no excuse for not finding and working with an experienced business coach. In an industry older than Google, Facebook, and social media, you need a coach with a proven track record. Consider the prospective coach’s industry knowledge, track record, and relevant certifications and credentials.

Hours Learning Per Year

Hours spent learning are crucial for many reasons. The top reason is whether the business coach dedicates time each year to learning and studying all things related to business coaching and their area of expertise. This includes attending conferences, staying updated on marketing strategies, leadership, management, financial knowledge, industry trends, and improving communication skills.

Another reason to assess a prospective coach’s free time learning is that the coaching world is easy to enter, with many calling themselves “business coaches” without ongoing education. Ensure your coach is committed to continuous learning.

Another way to assess expertise and experience is by reputation. Look for online reviews, testimonials, and client success stories to gain insight into the coach’s effectiveness, style, and impact.

Long-Term Support

A successful business coaching relationship can last for several years. Ask how the prospective coach handles and works with their clients throughout various growth stages, both business and personal. Does the coach provide other resources or expect you to source all the necessary tools? Additionally, does the coach have access to a network of other professionals to support your needs?

Coaching Style and Approach

The coaching style of the prospective coach should not be discernible by you. A great coach will adjust their style to make you feel welcome, heard, and understood. They should switch between the communication style you like and the one you need. A successful coaching relationship is about what you need to achieve your vision and goals.

Communication Skills

Effective communication skills are essential. Evaluate the coach’s ability to communicate complex concepts clearly and understandably. Their listening skills are equally important—assess their ability to hear what you say and rephrase it in a way that reflects your words, feelings, and intentions. Constructive and actionable feedback is vital. The coach should provide insights that challenge you and offer actionable strategies and direction.

Personal Development

This is the most important aspect of your relationship with a business coach. Most entrepreneurs seek a business coach to solve a problem, overcome an obstacle, and achieve business objectives like revenue targets, sales goals, or profit improvements. To change your business results, you must change. A coach’s job is to grow your mindset, leadership skills, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and other critical decision-making skills so you can continue to grow and scale your business and the people around you.

By carefully considering these factors, you can find a business coach well-suited to help you achieve your business goals and foster your growth as a business leader.

Kent Boehm

Nine Business Group

ActionCOACH

More Successful Than a Professional Athlete: The Numbers in Your Business

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by Kent Boehm

More Successful Than a Professional Athlete: The Numbers in Your Business

Frustration in business and sales is real. One of the most common sources of frustration is a lack of success—whether it’s not enough sales, a lead generation strategy converting at only 20%, or a sales funnel with a 33% conversion rate where only 1 in 3 prospects buys from you.

The key to overcoming this frustration? Knowing your numbers. Measure everything in your business. Why? Because you can’t improve what you don’t understand.

But there’s hope—a lot of it. Many of our clients are actually outperforming professional and Olympic athletes. Surprising? Not really. Once you look at the numbers, you’ll see that athletes are often highly paid to fail. In any given year, only one team wins the Stanley Cup, meaning 31 other teams “fail.” The same holds true for the NFL and MLB—only one team is crowned champion each year while the rest technically come up short.  Compare this to Erika, owner of Effortless Marketing, she was able to increase her sales by 92% in just one year, I think business owner should be winning all the time, there is no excuse for entrepreneurs to loose.

What does this mean for you, as an entrepreneur?
In business, everyone can win. Unlike sports, success in business isn’t mutually exclusive. An industry can have 100 businesses, and all of them can be profitable. There’s more than enough to go around. In fact, the better we all get at business, the better the world becomes. Look at Amazon—they’ve transformed global business standards, from free delivery to same-day shipping. While some may see that as competition, it actually pushes all of us to step up our game and improve customer service.

As an entrepreneur, you can succeed. Let’s explore the numbers. Recently, we’ve had conversations with clients who were frustrated by their sales results and hesitant to make follow-up calls, fearing failure. These discussions got me thinking about professional athletes and how often they fail. We rarely focus on their failures; instead, we get swept up in the success and the thrill of their wins.

Take baseball, for example. My son plays baseball, so I know firsthand how much the sport revolves around failure. A well-paid MLB player who bats .250 is considered successful. That means he only puts the ball in play once every four plate appearances. But that’s just part of the story. When you factor in swings and misses, foul balls, and other factors, the success rate is even lower. In the 2023 MLB season, the average player took 1.89 swings per plate appearance, meaning that the real success rate—putting the ball in play and reaching base—is around 13.2%.

How does this compare to your business?
Chances are, your business numbers are better than 1 in 8. Let’s look at another famous example: Michael Jordan. He once said:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Your numbers should far exceed those of a professional athletes, I much prefer 1000%’s as performance numbers not portions.  Take for example 2 other local companies, who increased their revenues by 1500% and the other by 1000% in just under three years.

What about Olympians? We celebrate them all the time, but are you more successful than an Olympian? I’d argue that you are. Olympians compete once every four years, while you get the chance to win in your business every day. In the Tokyo Olympics, only 8.9% of athletes won a medal, and just 339 of the 11,319 athletes took home a gold medal.

Now let’s talk about hockey, specifically Alex Ovechkin—one of the greatest goal scorers in NHL history. He’s on track to break Wayne Gretzky’s all-time scoring record. Impressive, right? But when we dig into his stats, we find that Ovechkin has taken 10,993 shots in his career, with only 6,657 hitting the net (about 61%). Out of those, he has scored 853 goals, meaning he scores on just 7.8% of his total shots and 12.8% of the shots that actually reach the net.

How does the rest of the NHL compare? The top 10 goal scorers in the 2023-2024 season scored 511 goals on 3,139 shots—scoring 16% of the time.

What’s the takeaway for you?
As an entrepreneur, you get to compete every day and don’t have to win at the expense of your competition. If your business numbers are better than 16%, you’re already outperforming:

  • Alex Ovechkin (7.8% overall, 12.8% of shots on net)
  • The top 10 NHL goal scorers (16%)
  • MLB players (13.2%)
  • Tokyo Olympians (8.9% for medals, 2.9% for gold medals)

Know your numbers. Keep improving. And remember—you’re already more successful than a professional athlete.

Public Relations: A Necessary Tool in Your Marketing Kit

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by Kent Boehm

Interviewing businessman or politician, press conferencePublic relations, by it’s most basic and simplistic definition, is using media contacts and exposure to make a person or business famous. It’s an important facet of any marketing strategy, and is, unfortunately, also one of the least practiced and understood.

So, what are public relations? Well, it’s basically an effort to influence the public or target demographic in some way. This could mean drafting a press release, pitching media or coordinating media outreach for an event.

The key to an effective PR campaign is understanding what IS a story and what is not a story. This can be a tricky task if you have no experience working with media. But there are a few guidelines that, if followed, may help you better how to navigate these muddy waters. Continue reading “Public Relations: A Necessary Tool in Your Marketing Kit”

Helpful Strategies to Meaningfully Increase Sales at Your Store

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by Kent Boehm

Conversion Rate Optimization ToolStarting a business is the easiest thing that you can do. Running it successfully is the hard part. If you are business minded and have the finances to support the opening and execution of a business plan, you are well-positioned to set your business up for future success. The hard part, however, is consistently increasing sales and making sure that your customers return to you for their particular needs.

Moreover, when it comes to sales, the success of a business isn’t only about increasing them. You want to benefit from a rise in profits – after all, an increase in sales is meaningless if you aren’t actually generating money after your expenses are taken into consideration. Do you want to know how to increase sales? The following tips in this article will help you get started on the path to greater profitability. Continue reading “Helpful Strategies to Meaningfully Increase Sales at Your Store”

Top Three Advantages of Video-Conferencing

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by Kent Boehm

Businessman video confrencing with colleguesThe business world thrives off of communication. In many instances, the failure of a business can be traced back to a lack of communication between its different divisions, and an inability to execute its mission effectively. Businesses, small or big, need to find an effective option when it comes to communicating with different levels of management. A popular format that many businesses are turning to is video-conferencing.

Video conferencing has been a staple of the corporate since the 1980s, and its use has slowly perfused into the small business across America. If you are convinced that video-conferencing is right for you, the reasons below will help persuade you to make the switch. Continue reading “Top Three Advantages of Video-Conferencing”

Begin Your Journey Towards Mastering Anything

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by Kent Boehm

For many people, the hardest part of getting good at anything is consistently repeating and practicing a certain task until they are good at it. For others, just getting started is really difficult in and of itself. It’s easy to admire skilled musicians and artists for what they can produce, but what you don’t see is the years of practice, hard work, and mistakes that led to their mastery. Because of that, many people fail to realize their true potential – they are unable to chart out a clear path towards realizing the goal they have in mind. They want results but have no way of achieving them.

What do you hope to achieve in the future? Do you want to learn how to play an instrument? Do you want to learn how to speak a foreign language? Do you want to educate yourself in a demanding yet rewarding field? Now ask yourself why you haven’t done it yet. Most people give themselves the same kinds of excuses year after year: it’s too difficult. They don’t know how to get started. They don’t have a natural talent that other people have. They don’t have enough time in their day. Continue reading “Begin Your Journey Towards Mastering Anything”

Common Cash Flow Problems and How to Remedy Them

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by Kent Boehm

Past due billsAre you experiencing troubles with maintaining consistent cash flow in your business? If you are, you may find that you can’t pay your bills on time, and expenses are fast getting out of hand. Cash flow problems plague every small business owner at one point or another – it’s natural to go through the occasional rough patch. However, that doesn’t mean that these rough spots can’t leave lasting damage to your finances. To avoid letting these problems ruin you, here are few ways of improving your net cash flow.

Accept Credit Cards From Customers

You do not have to be a retailer to accept credit cards. Many small business owners make this mistake, and it can potentially cost you a lot of business. Consumers use credit cards to make a variety of purchases, and a lot of them don’t carry cash on them. When they use a credit card to pay for things, you will typically get the money in two to three days. While this can seem like a bit of drag at first, it will quickly remedy itself as the cash flows from these transactions pour in. Continue reading “Common Cash Flow Problems and How to Remedy Them”

Which Key Elements Are Present in Every Small Business Success Story

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by Kent Boehm

People at a party talking to eachotherIt is the dream of most entrepreneurs to hear that their business has become the “next big thing” in the eyes of its customers. For most business owners, this is the single driving force behind everything that they do. All of the long work weeks, sleepless nights, stress-filled days, and agonizing decision-making are to make their dream become reality.

Unfortunately, reality does not typically work like that. In order to have your very own small business success story, one must put in a lot of effort, time, hard work, and dedication. However, you need to do so much more than that. A common element in small business success stories is that the owners did more than just put in long workweeks. There are key elements which play a very important role in helping one achieve their very own success story, and you would be doing yourself a disservice by disregarding them. Continue reading “Which Key Elements Are Present in Every Small Business Success Story”

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