People ask me often and I always find it genuinely difficult to answer in the abstract. “Business coaching” means different things to different people — some picture an inspirational speaker, some imagine goal-setting worksheets, some picture a mentor who’s done it all before. So rather than try to define it, let me just tell you what it actually looked like six months ago with a real client.
Manufacturing business. Twelve people. Turnover just over £40K a month. When they came to me, they arrived with a list — cash flow challenges, a difficult member of the team, not enough new client enquiries. A lot of business owners would recognise at least some of that.
And we didn’t tackle any of it. Not straight away.
Why I never start with the list
When a business owner comes to me with a list of problems, the list is almost never the problem. It’s the symptom. And if you jump straight into fixing the symptoms — tightening cash flow processes, addressing the team issue, setting up a lead generation system — you might make progress, but you’re probably not working on the thing that matters most.
So the first thing I do in every single session, with every client, is ask a version of the same question. Not “what are your goals?” Not “where do you want to be in five years from now?” Those are fine questions but they’re too easy to answer well and too easy to forget the next day.
The question I ask is this: what’s the one thing that, if we sorted it out, would make everything else easier?
It sounds simple. It rarely gets an instant answer.
This particular client went quiet for about 30 seconds. That’s a long time in a conversation. Then said: “I think it’s me. I think I’m the bottleneck to this business.”
That’s where the real work starts. (This mirrors the first problem in our article on why coaching fails.)
When the owner is the constraint
It’s more common than most business owners want to admit. You build something, you grow it to a certain size, and then somewhere along the way the very habits and behaviours that got you here start to limit what happens next. You’re involved in too many decisions. You’re the only one who knows how certain things work. Things slow down or stop when you’re not around. The business is dependent on you in a way that feels necessary but is actually a constraint.
Recognising this isn’t easy. It takes a level of honesty about yourself that doesn’t come naturally when you’re in the middle of running a business day to day. That 30 seconds of silence was worth more than any process improvement we could have started with.
Once we had that clarity, we built a 90-day plan around it. One clear constraint, one focused plan, consistent accountability. Three months later this client had their best ever month.
That’s not a coincidence. When you remove the right bottleneck, everything moves faster.
So what does a business coach actually do?
The honest answer is that it depends on the coach and the client — and if any coach tells you they do the same thing with everyone, that’s worth being slightly cautious about.
What I do is this. I start with diagnosis, not prescription. I ask questions before I suggest answers. I try to find the thing that’s actually holding a business back, not just the thing that looks like a problem on the surface. And then I help the owner build a plan around that and work through it — week by week, with accountability and honest feedback along the way.
It isn’t cheerleading. I’m not there to tell you everything is brilliant when it isn’t. It isn’t therapy, though it can be surprisingly personal at times. It isn’t consulting in the traditional sense — I’m not delivering a report and walking away.
It’s more like having a very invested, very straight-talking thinking partner who knows enough about business to know which questions to ask, and who’s not emotionally tied to the answers.
We build a focused 90-day plan around this one constraint — similar to our Business Success Formula.
What coaching isn’t
It’s worth being honest about this too, because not everyone gets the result that manufacturing client got, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice.
Coaching works when the business owner is genuinely ready to look honestly at what’s going on and to do the work. If you’re looking for someone to validate decisions you’ve already made, or to give you a quick fix that doesn’t require you to change anything about how you operate, then it probably isn’t the right fit — at least not yet.
The clients I see make the most progress are the ones who already suspect that they’re part of the problem. Not because they’re failing, but because they’re self-aware enough to know that what got them here won’t necessarily get them to where they want to be.
Is it the right time for you?
There’s no perfect time. Most business owners who work with me wish they’d done it sooner. But the most useful question isn’t “is it the right time?” — it’s the same one I ask in every session: what’s the one thing that, if you sorted it out, would make everything else easier?
If you already know the answer to that, brilliant — go and work on it. If you’re not sure, or if you’ve been circling the same problem for a while without making progress on it, that’s probably worth a conversation.
For more context on pricing and what to expect, check out our article on coaching costs.
There’s a link below to book a free discovery call. No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about what’s actually going on in your business and whether there’s something I can help you see more clearly.
