The best way for you to understand how business coaching works is to recognise the importance of coaching in sports.

Can you imagine recent football World Cup Winners, Spain; The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team; Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt or Tiger Woods performing without a coach who pushed and guided them? 

Their coaches were instrumental in:
*  Ensuring that the team performs at optimum levels;
*  Devising specific strategies and plays to defeat opponents;
*  Ensuring team harmony and that everyone worked for the benefit of the team as a whole
*  Providing one on one support for each player by encouraging and counselling them, where necessary.

Business coaching is no different.  Many small-business owners often have specific experience only in a limited number of areas and lack the holistic vision and skills to grow their business as a whole.

Business coaching should therefore be seen as an investment, rather than an expense or an overhead. You should therefore evaluate your investment in business coaching in terms of return on investment (ROI). You should also remember that business coaching is a long-term investment that will only pay dividends over a period of time and your evaluation should be based accordingly.

But a word of caution.

A business coach is not a magic solution to your problems and you should not think that just by having one, your problems are going to vanish overnight.  You will have to work very hard to translate the input you will see from your coach into concrete action. You are the entrepreneur and the coach is merely a resource or conduit to make things happen.

Some of the areas in which business coaching works well:

Creating an environment for growth. One of the key requirements for managing change and growth is to put in place the proper organisation and create the kind of work environment that promotes teamwork and encourages people to work with one another. The challenge is to acquire and retain high-quality talent. This is not an easy job and involves a number of areas ranging from job evaluation and appraisal to designing the right compensation packages.

Designing and managing systems. Systems are critical to establishing a backbone and a framework for providing support for all employees. Business coaches will often have extensive exposure to a range of systems for different functions such as sales and marketing, governance and human resource management. The right systems have the effect of improving productivity and quality and the ultimate benefit is increased customer satisfaction.

As I have said above, business coaching is only a helping pair of hands and the responsibility for growing your business is yours; fairly and squarely. To make optimum use of your resources, consult with your business coach frequently and extensively.

Do not implement key decisions without fully understanding what to do and how to do it. The consequences of your action should form part of an integral part of any business coaching process.