First Class Business recently asked 291 experienced business coaches to identify the greatest challenges they are currently facing in the business coaching arena. The answers these professionals provided were both startling and frustrating, especially in a training industry built on knowledge, expertise, and experience.
First, these seasoned professional coaches expressed their frustration and annoyance with inexperienced coaches who attain widespread notoriety despite being under-qualified and lacking the credentials that validate training, experience, and success in the business world. A chief criticism directed at the more popular coaches has to do with their inability to scale their clients’ businesses to the same extent they have grown their own businesses.
Second, these novice coaches receive broad exposure across multiple media platforms. The attention garners contracts with business owners who hope to achieve a similar level of success. The “rising star” fails to provide meaningful value that the client can measure in concrete terms such as lead generation, conversions, and revenue growth. These metrics are a window into the soul and health of any business. Too often, business owners and their loyal employees are left in precarious and frightening financial straits.
Third, these very likable and charismatic but incompetent and unproven business coaches bounce from client to client, leaving in their wake many failures and occasional outliers of success. These unmitigated and repetitive failures further cripple the economy while putting businesses at risk of failure, loss of ROI, and bankruptcy. While small business clients often have growth limitations due to their geographical constraints, that is far from the case for an online coach with the entire world at their fingertips. The irony is that the amateur business coach has little accountability and millions of potential clients from which to choose, so there are few consequences for poor performance.
Fourth, business owners must assume the responsibility for properly vetting the coaches they hire. The same rigorous hiring standards that businesses utilize when hiring employees should also be applied when hiring a coach. Business owners can avoid the trap of working with an inexperienced coach by doing their due diligence to know industry benchmarks, call references, looking deeper into case studies, and asking for an outside opinion. Too many business owners lack skill in navigating HR processes and have no idea how to expand their business. The vicious cycle of lax hiring practices runs rampant in the market and is a factor in 96% of businesses failing within the first 10 years of operation.
How First Class Business Addresses the Challenges
Jackson Calame, owner and founder of First Class Business, offers the following advice to entrepreneurs seeking the services of a business consultant to expand their business coaching brand: “What can an experienced coach do? Power up your brand and compete toe to toe. Your only real option as a seasoned coach is to learn to outshine them, settle for less, or remain bitter. As mom always said, ‘The squeaky wheel gets the oil.’ And in the world of dating, ‘The lovely gets the attention.’ In a coaching world full of online competition, learn to stand out in ways and provide value that you never had to before.”
The key to success is to embrace what it takes to stand out among a growing crowd of competitors, fully implement positive changes and improvements, and deliver substantial value that is well-defined and quantifiable.
First Class Business strives to empower business coaches to achieve sustainable revenue growth by providing business consulting at a higher level than would typically be available from other consultants. The business executive training specialists at First Class Business can be reached by email at hello@firstclassbusiness.io or by phone at (866) 895-1853.
