Introduction to Business Coaching

Successful business owners make the best decisions about things like what products to sell to what market. Conversely unsuccessful business owners tend to make bad decisions or delay or, worse still, make no decisions at all.

However good decisions don’t just happen; they come as a result of great thinking. To do that you need the right mind set or ATTITUDE.  In other words your ‘hard drive’ needs to process the information you put into it in a consistent and effective way, the way a successful business owner does.

The role of a business coach is to help you to think, act and react like a successful entrepreneur, leader and manager. So the information put in gets processed well enough to make great decisions about your marketing, resources and finances.

This process does not need to be difficult or complex.  We have made it simple and easy to do by establishing the key attitudes a business owner needs to have to be successful in business. Coaching may be well known in the field of professional sport, just think back to the many excellent performances in the recent Beijing Olympics but now it is spreading into business as well.

So…

·         Is your experience of business planning, marketing and accounting mainly negative?

·         Do you think that conventional business practise, training and advice is irrelevant, difficult or even getting in the way of working the business.

If so then it is time for a change.

The Leadership and Management Programme

The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s 60s helped to advance knowledge of the art of persuasion. In Hovland's view, one should understand attitude change as a response to effective communication. He further indicated that the easiest way to do that is on a cognitive basis, by presenting the data to an individual and motivating them to evaluate the data themselves and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion.

The Leadership & Management Programme is designed to help the owners and or managers of small businesses (0-75 employees) find and maintain an inspirational and innovative attitude. So they avoid the danger of falling into a ‘fear of failure’ attitude. This is done in 4 main steps.

1. Attitude:

·         We will introduce you to the 7 key attitudes that all successful business leaders and managers have in ‘spades’

·         We will show how most small business owners and managers are ‘conditioned’ not to have these attitudes because of their previous experiences.

·         We will then help you ‘benchmark’ yourself against the 7 attitudes and develop strategies towards achieving a more positive attitude and act and react well towards business planning, marketing, customer experience and accounting.

2. Planning:

·         We will introduce you to the concept of process based management as opposed to project based management, this ‘un blocks’ your attitude towards business planning.

·         We will assist you to gather and interpret the essential internal and external information you require to ‘create’ a plan for your business and help you to commit this to print so you can clarify your thinking

3. Inspiration:

·         We will introduce you to the concept of ‘vision building’ thus allowing you to put the complexity of the plan into simple context.

·         We match this understanding with your emotional thinking and thereby establish your objectives so that we can then revisit the plan and write the executive summary.

4. Action:

·         We will meet and/or speak with you on a regular basis, to help you interpret the results of your planned actions and consider innovative changes and improvements as a result of this.

 

Because of the nature of the programme, and depending on your circumstances, it may be possible to offset part of the fees for this programme from both Business Link and The Learning & Skills Council.