A Business Coach will first seek a rich understanding of your business, its needs, challenges, and opportunities. Secondly, they will understand what keeps you awake at night, your leadership challenges, and your development areas. Utilizing targeted open-ended questioning techniques, the Coach will help you uncover blind spots and identify solutions and action plans for the issues and opportunities you face daily in your business.

The difference with a mentor is more about their approach to supporting the Business client. The focus is centred on providing business advice and imparting knowledge, skills, and experience to the client. The mentor will tend to tell more in the scenario – sometimes called the ‘wise sage of the stage’.

At Business Coach Sydney, our natural bias is Coaching; however, we will adopt a mentoring posture, depending on the client’s needs, with the client’s agreement.

A Business Coach will support and facilitate you in identifying solutions to the challenges and opportunities you encounter in your business. Our experience is that if a person (with expert support) arrives at their solutions, then their commitment and ownership to implementing these solutions in their business are that much stronger than being provided with all the answers.

A consultant will take a brief from a business owner, conduct research and analysis, identify the solution/s, and provide the client with a written recommendation or solution. Some consultants will conclude their work at this juncture, whereas others will project manage the implementation stage. So, the consultant will bring expertise and objectivity, which may be missing in the client company.

Business Coach Sydney provides support in three key areas:

1. Coaching: Business coaching for SME’s, Executive coaching, and Career Planning Coaching
2. Strategic and Business Planning, Organization Change Management
3. Facilitated workshops on Team Alignment and Purpose, Emotional Intelligence, Personal Effectiveness, Leader as a Coach

It comes down to who the clients believe they feel most comfortable with, i.e., whether there is good chemistry. That’s why BCS always provides a free Meet and Greet session.

The purpose of this session is three-fold:

1. An opportunity for the coach to understand the prospective clients’ business, their developmental areas, and their family context.
2. A time for the coach to explain BCS’ approach to Coaching and the nature and level of support that BCS provides. This is also a time for the business person to ask the coach questions about their background, credentials, and experience.
3. Time for the prospective client to reflect and decide if the coach is the best fit for them and their needs and challenges.

What are the key behaviours, qualifications, and experience that I should expect of an effective Business Coach?

Some of the behaviours and qualifications we believe are critical:

• Professional qualification in Coaching/psychology minimum of an undergraduate degree; ideally postgraduate.
• Sound business acumen with a wealth of business experience in a leadership capacity.
• Total commitment to the growth, well-being, and development of the client.
• An active listener.
• Able to facilitate the client to reflect before making decisions
• Expert ability to ask the right open-ended questions at the right time.
• Able to effectively hold clients accountable to their coaching commitments and actions.

Regrettably, there are many examples of people who attend a weekend course, build a flashy website, and call themselves a Coach.

• Coaching organizations who insist on you signing a legally binding document for six months to one year.
• Coaches who provide you with a folder and use the contents of the folder as the driver for your coach’s sessions, i.e., a prescribed ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to coaching.
• Coaches who try to sell coaching and offer you the world.
• Coaches who talk too much and fail to get to know you and your context.

At Business Coach Sydney, we support the whole person, so at the beginning of the session, we will check in on how you, as a person, are doing and how things are on the home front, followed by matters related to your leadership and your company.

The next area we will explore concerns the progress you were able to achieve in the actions/tasks you set yourself at the conclusion of the previous coaching session. This goes to the heart of supporting you to take accountability for your commitments to self.

If, since the previous session, you have been encountering significant challenges on the home or work front, it would make more sense to focus on these challenges rather than other issues.

Alternatively, we would then support you to work on one of your coaching goals. (Your coach will have earlier facilitated you to identify at least three to five developmental areas you want to work on and improve during the coaching cycle).

The coaching itself involves face-to-face sessions at one of our offices and is typically fortnightly, depending on circumstances.

At the end of every session, we will support you to commit to specific actions (related to the topic during the session).

As coaches, we will always take process notes and capture your actions for follow-up. We encourage you to also take notes for your reflection and accountability.

Post sessions, we may send you an HBR Article, podcast, white paper, etc., which will be relevant to the area you were coached in.

You may also reach out to your coach in between coaching sessions to discuss challenges that arise.

BCS believes a minimum of six months so you gain actual traction in your leadership modification and/or development. You also need to allow for significant shifts in how you operate and manage your business. Many clients stay for as many as three years, appreciating a space to be heard, supported, and held accountable.

Absolutely, that is a large part of the coaching process. Through ‘healthy’ questioning, they will support you in considering various options and perspectives and then provide the space for you to contemplate the best option for your context.

A qualified coach will bring different tools and techniques to the coaching sessions to help the business owner determine the business drivers for growth, profitability, and sustainability. They also help the client to create robust business processes such as executable business plans, measurement tools, and business review cycles.

The business coach will work closely with you (and your team) to determine the most desirable culture for the business, including helping you gain clarity around its mission, i.e., why your business exists and for whom it exists.

Your coach will support you to identify a clear Vision and Purpose for the business, and then identify values and key behaviours. This includes your future business strategy, culminating in an executable business plan.

Yes, the Business Coach will support you to crystallize what your role will be once a successor is selected, what this change may mean for you, and how best for you to navigate this change; ensuring an effective transition for you and your successor. This includes gaining a clear understanding of the key experience, knowledge, and behaviours that will be important for your successor to bring to the role.

Yes, that is a key focus of any effective Business Coach, as their work is all about supporting you to be the best version of yourself in your personal and business life.

BCS will seek to understand the current culture and how the team operates. This may entail asking the team to participate in a survey or agreeing to be interviewed by the coach. Following these interventions, the Business Coach will initially work very closely with the primary client to determine what’s working well, what needs to change …. what the ideal state might look like. Following these sessions, the coach may undertake team coaching to facilitate a team charter or team commitments (Purpose, Vision, Key principles, or Team Behaviours). Naturally, this team coaching will focus on Change Management.

This is a perennial issue that arises for many, if not all, of BCS’s clients at some stage in the coaching cycle. Our approach to coaching is to firstly support the person (i.e. their personal journey), secondly as a spouse (if they have a partner), thirdly as a parent (if they have children) and then as a business owner/manager. We recognize that what affects us in our personal lives will also affect us in our work life and…vice versa. So we always adopt a holistic approach to caching…coaching the whole person (their personal and business life).

At BCS, we will support and facilitate you to determine your personal and business goals, determine boundaries between the two, help you to employ effective delegation and prioritization techniques and then hold you accountable to ensure those commitments you make to yourself STICK!

At BCS, we will support you to transition to become a ‘Leader as a Coach’, i.e. adopting a style where you coach your people rather than manage them. We will also spend time supporting you to cultivate and further develop your Emotional Intelligence which is so critical for any leader who seeks to engage and retain their staff.

We have set a very high bar for anyone who wants to be a Business Coach at BCS. All our coaches have postgraduate qualifications in Psychology, Coaching, and/or Leadership, coupled with decades of business leadership experience. We believe that the client’s needs are paramount, and as such, if the client does not value the service, we do not want them to be locked into any binding ‘legal coaching agreement’. We provide all our clients with an agreement that confirms the client’s and BCS’s mutual expectations, the pricing, frequency, and duration of meetings, etc. If the client is dissatisfied with the service, they may cancel at any point without any obligation.

We also allow our clients to utilize more than one of our coaches during a coaching cycle. E.g., During a normal cycle, the client indicates they have a challenge in an area where another coach has expertise, and then the client may switch to that coach for two to three sessions to address the issue. Once those sessions are completed, they will rejoin the original coach.