“Tell me why I should trust someone who’s never worked in my industry to help me make things better?”
I get it. Really I do.
The issue here is that many successful businesses learn from other businesses and industries. A service industry can learn from retail. Retail can learn from Hospitality. Hospitality can learn from manufacturing. Manufacturing can learn from service industries.
The building blocks of every successful business are the same in every industry. The systems can be different and it’s the unbiased, unemotional and logic thinking opinions that often make the BIGGEST impacts, in a shorter time.
So me, as a good coach not knowing how to fit valves, put computers together, serve a Michelin starred meal or understand computer code, don’t make a blind bit of difference…it’s the impactful difference a good business coach will have on your business and all its building blocks that counts.
“Why should we trust someone that’s never ran their own business?”
My answer is…you probably shouldn’t.
Whilst many will cite the fact that their coaching business IS their business, they have qualifications, have done a course or two, or bought someone else’s IP, I would ask wether they would objectively understand the real trials and tribulations of running a successful business with an element of unemotional involvement. We learn more when we feel and experience things, like love for instance. A marriage counsellor who never married, had a partner, had their first kiss or even been on date will struggle to understand the complexities of marriages.
The same could be said about business. Being a manager somewhere doesn’t mean you understand the differences between making a decision that might fail spectacularly and lose everything, or making the decision about who starts at midday on a shift. Books and someone else’s systems can always be a starting point, but open minded experiences and empathy goes far further.
(And btw…I started, ran and sold my own business 5 years ago, after I had spent 2 decades of getting to a senior level corporately and walking away to do my own thing.)
“Why should we change things; we’ve always done it this way?”
It’s the death nell sentence of any business and any industry. The reason you are reading this is because you changed. You are unrecognisable from the person you were 5 years ago; 10 years; 20 years ago..and you’re still here right? Things change in business and industry. Things HAVE to change in business and industry. Good coaches open up the possibilities of changes that you may have become ‘snow-blind’ to. The open up those opportunities so in 5, 10, 20 years, you’re still here; better, stronger and getting a business your hard work deserves.
Obviously these are my own personal opinions, but as a coach into his 7th year of doing this, and with 25 years of experiences, I’ve seen more come and go than stay. Short term will come and go, but there’s a bigger, more impactful way of getting results when you think longer term and choose to walk a path with a person that is willing to walk along side through the good and the bad.
