The United States is renowned as a nation friendly to small business entrepreneurship, and today, 99% of all businesses are small ones (those with under 500 employees). Over 30 million small businesses are in operation today, and the owner of such a business has a lot to juggle. This leader must take out smart loans and keep the cash flow smooth, create and maintain a positive and welcoming work place, maintain morale, find ways to increase profits, and hire the best employees for the job, among other duties. Many small business leaders may feel overwhelmed, and they might fall behind and put their company at risk. Fortunately, they can hire help: a business coach. Business coaching can help a client learn more about their field and set clear goals and ways to achieve them, and the best business coaches can help a small company flourish within a few years.
Setting Goals
When a client hires a business coach for aid, that coach will know the ins and outs of the chosen field, and offer particular advice, rather than generic business advice (which can make quite a difference). And of course, that business coach will ask their client to create a list of short term and long term goals. The good news is that setting goals and defining actionable steps toward those goals is not necessarily complicated or difficult; in fact, it can prove downright easy, so long as the business leader has the will to do this and feels confident in themselves and their business. It is an easy step that ultimately, anyone can do. The question is not if they can do it, but if they will.
A business coach can assess the current state of their client’s business and help them determine challenging but realistic goals that will make the company grow. Achieving the goals, as well as making the effort to reach them, can both prove beneficial, and striving toward a concrete goal can help a business leader and their employees alike improve themselves as working professionals. What should a goal look like, though? Vague or lofty goals are not helpful, since there is no real way to measure any progress toward them or know when they are achieved. Goals such as “be the best in the business” or “get good customer ratings” might not help much. But a concrete goal is measurable, such as “double our number of clients this time next year” or “open a new location within six months” or “double our profits by the fourth quarter.” Goals with even more specific figure can be set, too, and the coach can help with this.
Once a goal is set, the business owner can get some advice on how to reach it. Achieving a goal does not mean becoming a better professional overnight or making it big in a week; rather, steady and measurable progress is best, and consistency is more important than speed. If the company’s rate of growth and other factors are measured and tracked, the owner can determine how close they are to the goal, and the numbers may prove quite encouraging. Seeing concrete progress can be a huge morale booster for everyone involved, which can make further progress easier.
Productivity
Setting goals and having a positive work environment lay the foundation for what comes next: the hard work itself. but many sales reps are inefficient in this department, spending only a third of their time or even less on their most productive work, and instead they take up their time with busywork, procrastinating, chatting with coworkers, checking the news, and the like. Often, workers are prone to distractions as well, anything from other people’s conversations to email alerts to text messages and more. This battle for the employee’s attention can ruin their focus, so they ought to remove all of these distractions and dedicate all of their mental power on one task at a time. And of course, those tasks should be the most productive and relevant ones of all; not all tasks are created equal. A business leader, with a coach’s aid, can help their employees recognize their most important tasks (no more than a few) and dedicate most of their time to those tasks alone.