One of Bristol’s leading Executive & Business Coaches

No. You only need business coaching for the time needed to be really clear about your purpose and strategy, and for you to know what you need to do to implement that strategy. However, as a rule, based on my experience and many, many past clients, I have generally found a minimum of 6 sessions to be the tipping point for real change. This is not a hard and fast rule but anecdotally based on my experience. Although, I have had clients who found that 2 or 3 sessions was enough, whilst others have been with me for years. It depends on so many variables, but it is always down to the client to decide on when they wish to end the sessions.,

Often, some people come back for a quarterly or annual strategy refresh, or they come back for another few months because their business has changed, or they want to change it again.

But business coaching isn’t a quick fix. Most people work with me for an average of 6-12 months, and although I’ll be looking for some early wins (especially ones that generate fast cash flow), you should count on it taking that sort of time to transform your business.

I only take on clients who have a potentially profitable business. In fact, I only take on business coaching clients who have a business with the potential to make more than at least 25K a year in profit, because that’s the minimum return on investment I think you should be getting if you’re spending between £400 and £600 a month on business coaching.
Of all the people I have coffee and cake sessions with to talk about business coaching, about 20% of the time, I end up either telling them that their business wouldn’t be able to give them that kind of ROI, or that, sadly, they’d be better off closing it down and starting something new.

With one of my group coaching programs, on a weekly basis, I run a 1½ hour coaching sessions with suitably matched other business owners and managers, with a max of 6 people per group.

I’ve analysed this carefully. I’d say that 75 – 85% of the businesses I work with definitely make more money and move forward so the owner is no longer panicking and firefighting. There are some great success stories, with some of my clients reporting profit increases. And some of the businesses I’ve worked with over the years are growing into quite substantial enterprises.

But it doesn’t always work. Sometimes a business has great potential, but something outside of the business happens to disrupt this. This might be competition from an area we could never have foreseen. Or more often, it’s some big challenge that comes up in the business owner’s life, which means they can no longer concentrate on what they need to do to grow the business.

Once or twice, I’ve misjudged things, and I’ve taken on a client who doesn’t actually want any advice or input, but just wants a sounding board. My coaching style is challenging, and it’s not for everyone, so if you already know what you need to do and just want someone to agree with you, I’m not the right choice for you.

If you don’t have 4 hours a month to come to coaching sessions, we need to talk right away about why this is.

To have a successful business, you really need to be able to free up time to work on the business and to do those important things that are going to make all the difference in the long term. You can book me for just for a couple of hours on a one-off basis to talk about a specific issue in your business. But in the past, when I’ve worked with people on an ad-hoc basis, it hasn’t had the impact on the client’s business I wanted it to, so I really try to avoid this.

The regular, two or four time a month sessions, and keeping in touch in between sessions, are what makes the business coaching process work because the changes you need to make to your business are cumulative and take time to put into place.