COMMENDABLE
BUSINESS COACH
VANCOUVER
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Stop wasting time wrangling business issues on your own.
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Spend more time making money with the extra time.
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Love being a business owner again.
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Get support from an experienced Business Coach in BC.
Your Business Planner...
Is Your Vancouver Business Coach!
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Think about it.
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Who helped generate your original business story?
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Who produced your financial growth projections and statements?
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Who prepared your 15-page investor ‘pitch’ that brought in your business startup capital?
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Who now helps you overcome ongoing ‘founder’s fatigue’ and ‘management minutiae’?
Your Business Planner, of course ---
is also your Best Business Coach!
Solo-entrepreneurship can be challenging, during start-up or any other growth stage. Friends and family can't be faulted for not fully appreciating the challenges you manage.
As a Professional Business Performance Coach I am dedicated to being your 'thinking partner'...helping you rise above the minutiae... to properly manage business issues at their root cause, and stay focused on continuously improving your key performance indicators.
The ROI of working with me as your Business Coach is easy to measure and justify.
Running a Small Business in Vancouver Can Be Daunting
In this vibrant business metropolis of Greater Vancouver, business founding and entrepreneurship is exciting...and daunting. However, your friends and family can't be faulted for not always appreciating the challenges you manage.
As a solo entrepreneur, wrangling a business boom on your own can be as challenging and isolating as tackling a big business barrier.
A ‘Thinking Partner’ to the Rescue...When You Need One
As your Vancouver Business Coach (and your original Business Planner) I am your 'thinking partner', the collaborator who helps you see the big picture even though you’re stuck inside the frame.
We isolate the critical business issues you are facing. I help you rise above the distraction of symptoms to choose the best solutions.
You take action and get the best use of your time.
Your return-on-investment for engaging me as your Small Business Coach (Thinking Partner) is highly measurable and justified.
That’s why I’m called a Business ‘Performance’ Coach.
Small Business Coaching in Vancouver
The usual background of a business coach in Vancouver and elsewhere is commonly centred around owning and growing a business of their own or managing other’s businesses.
They learned from experience how to deal with challenging business circumstances and the value of seeking advice at critical times. Their gained knowledge about business management is intrinsic and insightful and they use it to help their coaching clients...
When you search for advice for a particular business situation you can easily become overwhelmed with volumes of generalized information. Unfortunately, it’s general by nature and doesn’t fit your circumstances.
A Vancouver small business coach doesn’t try to make generalized solutions fit your needs. They spend time appreciating the particulars of your business issues. Then they collaborate with you to address the problem with a tailored solution that you make actionable.
How many endeavours can you think of which were easier when someone struck off on their own with limited or no experience? What were the general outcomes? How many of them would have benefited from having an instructor or coach? What percentage of businesses falter and fail because the founder squanders their time and money?
We accept expert help in many situations in our lives, without question. We seek out a doctor’s advice when we are sick. We sign up for guitar lessons rather than struggle with frets and fingers on our own. Many of us make regular visits to mental health professionals when life overwhelms our ability to cope.
Yet, when we see clear signs of business unmanageability, we become stoic and keep grinding away on our own. Often digging a deeper hole.
A professional business coach has the expertise to help you clarify vision, goals, strategies and objectives. It’s not a sign of weakness to accept their support. Sure, they get paid for their time, but you can measure that against actions you take and positive changes that result.
Your abilities on your own may be skilful to a degree. But, having two heads working together, one of them an expert problem solver/thinking partner will guarantee better outcomes. It’s possible to put a price on that.
Hire me for a trial period and test what happens. Soon you’ll be spending more time working on your business than working in it!
How Does A Vancouver Business Coach...Coach?
As your Vancouver business coach, I’m your business collaborator and an objective skills trainer. Because I’m also a business planning expert, I see your business from a holistic strategy and tactical perspective. I help refocus your attention on that level to better prioritize and align your focus and actions to get the best financial, efficient and goal-oriented results for your efforts.
Traditionally, newly hired small business consulting coaches spend time acquainting themselves with your business vision and business objectives before they can productively support you. Because of my added business planner role, I may have already written your business plan for you and been involved during your capital sourcing and startup efforts. I don’t require that preamble period to get up to speed with you.
If I was not involved in the early stages of your business, I still have an advantage. My business planner skills save a lot of time and assure the highest level of comprehension. I quickly interpret your company documentation or get fully familiarised in a fast structured discussion.
While addressing immediate concerns may be our priority, I will also determine your mid to long term objectives. Is your business intended to scale quickly into a larger company with exponential sales and staff growth? Or are you happier with a smaller ongoing enterprise that you can personally manage that provides a healthy personal income for you and your family?
Once the introductory insight is established, we will immediately triage the most critical challenges you are facing. We filter them again their impact on your business direction. Challenges tend to be described symptomatically, which is quite natural since it is their effects you are wrestling with. My job here is to ask enough of the right questions to discover the root cause of the most critical problem. This can be challenging since causal factors are often masked and it’s easy to get misdirected. So we drill down aggressively to the actual source of the problem.
We then agree on a plan of action for you to follow. Included is a description of the planned outcome, a schedule, and any additional resources needed other than your own time and attention. Ideally, we can relate the outcome of your actions to one or more important business key performance indicators (KPI).
We will have scheduled 60 to 90 minute in-person or online business coaching meetings weekly or bi-weekly to review progress. I capture the essence of outcomes and agreed on actions in a follow-up email. In the interim, you are welcome to unlimited follow-on chats with me by video call, telephone, email, or text messaging.
Online Business Coaching
When you first meet briefly for an assessment, it will happen via online video or by telephone. That is enough contact time for me to appreciate your business circumstances and for you to test our working chemistry.
If things are agreeable you will schedule an initial ‘paid for’ working meeting.
At the end of our first working meeting, we will contract for weekly or by-weekly 60 minute meetings over a minimum 3 month period.
I believe live in-person meetings are a step up in effectiveness from online business coaching sessions. I realize too, it takes extra client time and possible inconvenience for business coaching clients to physically attend an in-person meeting. I offer you the option of in-person live or online sessions. Since I benefit from a slightly reduced time commitment when we meet online, my online fees are somewhat less. We just need to agree on which mode in our coaching contract.
Some meetings may benefit from going beyond the minimum one hour. I also have a per-minute rate for those occasions. You can decide when to end an extended meeting at any time.
‘No Limits’ Small Business Consulting Services
I coach and consult on behalf of small to medium size business owners and founders. Executive coaching is another type of business coaching intended for high-level managers in larger corporations.
I don’t work with corporate clients. Other than that my business coaching focus has no boundaries. My clients tend to fall into the following broad circumstances:
Business Founders With New Capital Who Are Beginning A New Startup
My expertise as a business planner gives me insights to help new business founders expeditiously turn their business story into reality. Our meetings are review sessions to ensure the new business roll-out is on schedule and on budget by addressing barriers to progress as they occur. When the new business is commercially launched our sessions evolve into dealing with more traditional business coaching issues.
Established Solo-entrepreneurs With A Desire To Grow Their Business Beyond The Current Trajectory
A business can be successful at current levels, but there are often indicators it can and should reach for more market share. Expanding more broadly into a market niche implies substantial changes to the company status quo. I help business owners to evaluate and make strategic choices to grow the business. I also help the owner cope with the new pressures and distractions that accompany their expansion plans.
Established Business Owners Experiencing Harmful Symptoms Of Looming Or Present Business Problems.
These business owners are the more traditional professional business coach clients. Something goes wrong in their business and they realize their efforts are likely not sufficient to resolve the issue. Working with these clients is most rewarding when a downward trajectory is turned around through good collaborative analysis and prescribed actions taken by the client to save the day.
Small Business Consulting Services Stats
It’s great to learn about a positive coaching and consulting experience your business acquaintance is having. But that is anecdotal evidence.
Here is empirical evidence of business coaching effectiveness.
Several years ago a much-referenced business coaching study was conducted by MetrixGlobal LLC showing that companies that hired business coaches saw:
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$7.90 return on each $1.00 paid for coaching services
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53% of coaching clients experienced greater productivity
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61% of coaching clients said it heightened job satisfaction
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23% of clients say business coaching helped lower operational costs
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22% of clients report business coaching helped drive up their profitability
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67% of clients say business coaching improved their team working abilities in their business
Another study by Manchester Inc. revealed that businesses that hired a business coach experienced an average ROI of 5.7 times the business coaching fees.
The point is, business coaching is not a ‘soft service’ to simply help business owners cope psychologically with their everyday business issues, although reduced stress is a welcome outcome. Coaching is a performance-based problem-solving service that produces higher earnings, reduced costs and positive results in other quantitative and qualitative business performance indicators.
I’m Also Your Exit Business Plan Coach
It may seem counterintuitive to discuss exiting your business when business coaching has a reputation for improving the ongoing performance of your business.
The truth is many owners plan ahead for exiting their business. Most do during the preparation of their initial business plan. When I help clients write business plans I encourage them to add a Business Exit Strategy section. It’s a must when business founders plan to sell their business to a larger company. This ensures the original investors can determine when they get the return on their original investment.
But there are many other reasons for exiting a business. Many of them are not defined in a business plan.
Here are several:
AN IPO (Initial Public Offering)
Some businesses generate huge exponential growth due to broad market acceptance of their products. As the business addresses the fast-paced growth the owner takes on a bigger and better management team, income continues to increase and in some cases, profitability also increases. More capital, beyond the resources of the founder, is needed to serve the ever-increasing demand.
If the company meets the required stock exchange financial thresholds and other metrics, it is then possible to go through the IPO process.
This can be a stressful period for a business owner. My support as a business coach is used to help keep my IPO client focused on maintaining revenue streams and management of the rather complicated and costly IPO process.
MARKET VOLATILITY
Occasionally my business owner clients realize there are negative market conditions that are beyond their capacity to overcome. A business sale in this situation, if possible, is preferable to winding down the business.
A major downturn in business caused by an economic crisis for example. Or, a competitive situation, like owning a taxi business when Uber and similar ride-hailing companies came to the market. Airbnb also changed market conditions for smaller hotel owners and travel agents.
I help a client exiting due to market volatility, by keeping their focus on all the actions necessary to put their business into presentable order to get the highest selling price possible.
BUSINESS COLLAPSE
When a business owner has tried various strategies to recover from a backward slide in business traction, it is time to quit and prevent any further loss of their net worth.
I assist my client in this circumstance to focus on winding down actions and getting clear of the business with a minimum of further loss.
I also coach my client in this situation to deal with the real sense of personal loss and possible self-blaming that is misplaced and unproductive to the business exit process.
BORED WITH BUSINESS OWNERSHIP
Many entrepreneurs had regular boring salaried jobs that they left to take a fresh new exciting startup company to market. Writing their original business plan, pitching the business story to lenders or investors and launching the business were all tremendously exciting steps in the early life of their company.
But, after the initial buzz has worn off and the business is growing well, running the enterprise is mainly a day-to-day operational repetition. Owners will sometimes be turned off by the lack of fresh excitement and feel they have exchanged a 9 to 5 job for managing a business that is now similarly routine.
I encourage my clients in this situation to plan an exit to sell their successfully running business to another, larger company. And occasionally to think about starting another exciting new company around another exciting product or service idea they are nurturing.
BUSINESS FATIGUE
I discovered a study of the psychological state of entrepreneurs by Dr Michael Freeman which demonstrates the stress-induced mental state of business owners, with the following results:
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49% of entrepreneurs have mental health problems
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30% of these business owners are suffering from depression
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27% have some form of anxiety
Being 100% responsible for the ongoing success of a business and being virtually totally alone with all of the ensuing issues can be stressful.
When a client of mine shows signs of mental health problems over an extended period, without relief, I help them assess if it’s time to leave their enterprise, usually by selling off the business.
LIFE CHANGES
Life circumstances inevitably change and can sometimes create a reason to leave a fully functional business.
Examples include:
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Financial goals you set for yourself are achieved
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12 hours a day, 6 days a week was maybe okay in the early phase of your company, but other personal circumstances are now demanding more time and are more important
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You found a new activity that you want to get involved in that is more interesting
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Very personal circumstances, like declining health or a divorce, can dramatically interfere with a business focus.
Business coaching during a business exit due to any of these life-changing events is valuable to help keep my client’s mind and actions directed on completing all the necessary steps to leave the business through a successful sale or a clean company wind down.