The other day one of my clients said something to me, which surprised, but also pleased me. It was something I had never heard or considered before, but essentially she said she always felt very nervous before I came to see her, but really enjoyed the coaching sessions once we got started.

This prompted me to wonder if this is a common theme amongst business owners considering whether coaching is the right way forward for them, and it made me wonder if in fact this was one of the reasons why people do not take it on board.

I have often talked about fear of failure and fear of success being reasons for not making changes, but perhaps fear of the coaching process as a whole may also be stopping people. I suppose for many revealing their weaknesses, and admitting to not being able to deal with different aspects of running their business is a big step to take, and for many it may simply feel like a admission that they made a mistake starting up their own business, and that they are not capable of making it work without outside assistance.

However, allowing people into your business, and allowing people to help you is of course the most sensible way forward, and in fact I would argue that it is the stronger business owners who follow this path, because they don’t feel threatened by others doing things for them, or advising them on ways to improve things.

All the most successful people in the world surround themselves with other successful people, and people who are experts at what they do. So why not let go admit to yourself that you need help, and find a compatible coach who can lead you and your business forward.

Having an opinion is an important thing. Being allowed to have an opinion is perhaps even more so. Your opinion may be right and it may be wrong, but it is surely better that you are prepared to put it forward as an option, rather than shy away from possible confrontation.

The reason I raise this is of course because of the “Brexit” debate. In or out, which should it be? There is a great deal of rubbish being postulated or both sides of the argument, both citing exactly what will happen in the aftermath of whichever decision is voted for. However, it is of course largely unknown what will happen, and at best there can only realistically be “maybes” or “coulds.”

So how should we decide? How can we work our way through all the rhetoric and articles written, and somehow decide which way to go. It takes a very principled person to vote for something altruistically and as already stated how do we know which way would be better for the UK as a whole? Therefore for me it should come down to your own situation, and how best you feel it might affect you and the people you care about (your family and friends). Perhaps it is a bit selfish, but it seems to me that it is the best way to come up with the most honest answer for all of us.

So what has the EU ever done for you? (Much like the question posed in “The Life of Brian”). Does it make you better off, is it easier for you to travel, does it make you feel more secure etc, etc?

For me the answer is simple, as far as I’m concerned the EU has done nothing positive, it costs us money, it imposes unnecessary and overcomplicated bureaucracy, it is more likely to create conflict than present it (by telling us what we should think and how we should behave), and on a personal level, I have never felt or experienced anything beneficial from being in the EU. I may be wrong, but I see “out” as an exciting opportunity.

We had some Australian friends visiting us over the weekend. They have been liaising with us for quite a while with regards to organising car insurance and a bank account for their son who will be staying for the summer, but also organising hotels and taxis for them.

The thing that is most striking about our dealings with all these services here is their reluctance to help. They create obstacles wherever possible (particularly insurers and banks) and the majority of companies we have rung have made it seem like we are an inconvenience, and in fact they would rather not have the business at all.

Making it easy to buy is an essential part of running a successful, profitable business. The harder you make it to buy and the more hoops you require leads to jump through to become a customer, the less likely you are to get new business. The hardest part for nearly all businesses is getting new customers, so why would you make it any more difficult than you need to.

Once you have the business it is then essential to provide the excellent service by under-promising and over-delivering, but our Australian friends once again said that on the whole their experiences had been that they were being over-charged for the services they were receiving.

When my son went to Australia, he walked into a bank and set up an account within 15 minutes. People went out of their way to help and everything was made simple and straight forward. It seems that on the whole a lot of businesses over here could do with taking notice of this and think carefully about how they treat both their leads and their customers.

When business owners start up a business, more often than not they have never really considered all the things they have to be involved in. Some of these may come naturally to them, and therefore they find easy, other things are completely alien, and they hate the thought of dealing with them. However overall the 3 key scary disciplines for most business owners are taking on and managing staff, taking control of the numbers, and letting go.

Taking on and managing staff. The majority of business owners find this aspect terrifying. First they find it difficult to find the right sort of people. Secondly the thought of interviews and contracts is sometimes enough to stop them from taking people on. Thirdly managing and appraising staff is something they would do anything to avoid, rather than potentially having to face confrontational issues. A business coach can help them through all these concerns. Showing them how to describe the position they want to fill and the person to fill it, giving them the tools and knowledge to work with, and putting them in touch with experts to help and advise them.

Taking control of the numbers. Many business owners simply run their business on gut feeling, hoping that it will all work out O.K. while putting their head in the sand. They don’t set targets, they don’t know their break-even, and they don’t set out yearly cash flows, and they seldom look at their accounts figures yearly, let alone monthly. A business coach will help them to over come their fear of numbers, providing templates to work with, explaining in layman’s language what it all means, and why it is so important, and they will hold them accountable to filling in monthly figures.

Letting go. After all the business is their “baby”, and the last thing they want is to see all their hard work turn to dust. A business coach will help them to hand things over bit by bit. Having taken on the right people to free up time, they will help them to delegate, and after a while create a business which works without them. They then have a business.

One of the things I encourage my clients to do is to always ask for testimonials. Most people acknowledge that the power of someone endorsing their product or service is extremely persuasive, so you would think that they would immediately embrace this, and use this as part of their marketing strategy.

However, rather surprisingly, the actual response is rather more muted. The thing is that it turns out that people are fairly sceptical about testimonials, often stating that they don’t really believe them, or that the supplier themselves has made them up. Consequently their belief is that their clients will think the same, and therefore their credibility could possibly suffer as a result. It is true that a short one-liner with no name or company beside it might be considered a bit “iffy”, but a proper testimonial, proudly endorsed is without doubt worth its weight in gold.

The first thing about a good testimonial is that it is very cheap marketing, and that secondly you can use it on all sorts of your marketing materials, such as website, flyers, or newsletters. The other thing is that with contact names and company names included, people can actually enquire about you without you knowing, which means they know they are getting a completely unbiased opinion.

I recently met with a very nice lady who wanted to do the coaching course, but was clearly a little unsure even after she had agreed to go ahead. Subsequently she called one of my clients on my website testimonials (without my knowledge) who immediately calmed all her fears, and in fact re-inforced her certainty that coaching would be right for her. When we next spoke she was much more confident about it all, and whilst she was a little sheepish about having contacted my client without my client without asking me first, I was delighted that she had.

What do you consider most important when you are hiring new staff? To some extent it will depend on the sort of role you are filling in terms of seniority and/or technical skills required. But the majority of roles should be fillable by any number of different candidates, providing of course, that you have systemised your business sufficiently, so that your new employee can follow the instructions given verbally and supported by manuals.

However, it is something which is foremost in my thoughts at the moment as I have a daughter who is just coming to the job market and a son who will be following her in a couple of years. Reading an article in the Sunday papers this week made it quite clear that on the whole, most employers were no longer looking for the smart young things fresh out of university with impressive degrees, but much more for people with experience, both in work and ideally the ways of the world.

The trouble is, in the various government drives to make our teenagers look cleverer, and give them “more confidence”, there has without doubt been an easing of pass marks in exams (and exams getting easier especially as a lot of results are boosted by coursework). As a result far more graduates approach the job market with high degrees, but unfortunately no ability to communicate, tackle problems, use common sense, or even turn up on time and look presentable. Hence the general feeling of employers that they would rather turn to those with experiences of some sort.

Nevertheless, whilst I completely understand and support this viewpoint, we must also be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bath water”. There are of course still plenty of good graduates, and providing they have a good positive attitude, are willing to listen and learn, and fit in with your business culture, I would still advise that in many situations, you would be well served employing these people. After all it is much easier getting people with open minds to fit in, than teaching old dogs new tricks.

This week I thought it might be a good idea to list all the good things around us, so as not to be dragged into the despondency the media would like us to believe in.

In reality, who are actually suffering due to the effect of the drop in the stock market? Apparently this has happened because the financial markets believe that there could be problems ahead largely due to China’s slowdown. However, apparently another key factor is due to the decrease, and continuing low price of oil, and the knock on effect this is having for the big oil companies, and the big brokers in the city. The people involved in these businesses are no doubt having a tougher time of it the usual at the moment, but most of them have had countless years of huge profits and bonuses, so relatively speaking surely they can survive a small “blip”. The point is why should these people who are the source of all the bad news and the ones who determine market prices around the world thrust their apparent woes on us, when in fact for the majority of people and business, there are lots of good things going on.

Oil prices being down has allowed many industries to save quite considerable sums, either from lower haulage costs, or because it is cheaper to operate machinery. The lower prices at the petrol pumps also make it cheaper for everyone to get around, and of course the low oil prices have made it far cheaper for many people to heat their homes.

Unemployment continues to drop, wages continue to rise above inflation (which itself remains steadfastly close to zero), building work is going on everywhere, and overall there is more money in circulation.

In other words shouldn’t this be creating more confidence generally, because hopefully with more disposable income available, there is increased likelihood that more and more people will be spending money on things they have resisted for some time.

All in all, for the average person, things look good, and we can continue to make that happen if we ignore the money men, and concentrate on the positives.

When I first meet with business owners they will often challenge me, by telling me that I know nothing about their line of business – and more often than not they are completely right about that. But of course knowing about the technicalities and intricacies of their line of business is what all business owners are best at, and I neither need to, nor always want to know, about those details.

The point is all businesses come up against the same issues, and it is these things which I concentrate my coaching skills on. I have coached close to 175 different businesses now, over 14 years, and whether they are animal behaviourists, arboriculturalists, builders, doctors or electricians, I have always ended up helping them to change the same things.

Over the years I have naturally learnt a lot about many different business sectors, and this has helped me occasionally to understand some of the idiosyncrasies which can arise, but on the whole I take businesses through the same processes, so they can create a business which works without them.

With the amount of business coaching experience I now have, I can quickly get a feel for the key areas which are not working in a business, and I can generally ask the right questions to unearth the underlying problems very quickly. However, I have to be careful never to make assumptions, for although my initial diagnosis is probably right, there are often other circumstances which are causing the problems, and they are invariably unique to each different business I work with.

The thing is, being among some of the first business coaches in the country, over the years I have grown and honed my own skills, such that I am seldom stuck for a way forward. And whilst there will always be new challenges to face, it is far less often that I meet a situation I haven’t dealt with before.

So if you are struggling to find a way forward, to pass a seemingly insurmountable problem, why not speak to a business coach who has probably experienced and solved your issue?

One of the biggest problems I find as a coach is getting the business owners to let go. This is perhaps hardest when I start working with a new client, because they are still set in their ways, and are largely at a stage when they are involved in huge parts of the business, and don’t trust others to do it for them.

However, once the initial break is made, there is a time where things get a lot better, until the business starts to grow at a good rate. When that point arises, I often find that we hit the same problem again, because the business owner starts to get pulled back into the day to day issues. The people they have entrusted to take tasks off their hands find they become overstretched and perhaps a little less sure of themselves once the pressure is on, and they often turn to the owner for advice and support.

This is when the owner must be strong, and continue to push their staff away, so they learn to stand on their two feet. It is all too tempting to accept the questions from their team, and give them the answers, but this simply leads to the owner becoming swamped and unable to take things further forward,

At this stage it is often a good plan to do a check on the way the top management are spending their time. Are they genuinely over-stretched so that they genuinely need help from the business owner, or are they short of time because they are being drawn into tasks which are not their responsibility? By checking this, you can quite quickly assess if you are at a stage where you may need to employ more support staff, or if it is more a case of good leadership and management.

Something which seems to be a fairly common theme at the moment is that a number of the networking groups I have been attending seem to have stagnated, and in many cases numbers of attendees are dropping.

Networking groups do tend to go in cycles, but it is surprising that they all seem to be struggling at the same time, so I wondered why this might be?

Increase in business and activity could be one reason, and that coupled with the accompanying complacency it brings, could well be why people see less need for going out and finding new business. However, as we should all be well aware, this can quickly lead to the “feast/famine” syndrome, whereby we live off the immediate successes we have now, but fail to plan for the future, which is most likely to end in problems. It will be interesting to see if this theory is correct, and in 6 months time we find people running back to networking groups, in an attempt to bring in more business quickly.

Another theory that others have, is that there are simply too many networking groups, and it is very difficult to decide which to go to, after all there is only so much time to spend on this marketing strategy. However, there is only one way to find out which are good, and which not so, and that is to try them out.

I find that I seldom waste time meeting new people, and I am a firm believer that networking invariably works for most businesses.

Of course networking is only one marketing strategy, but as ever, be it good times or bad, I would always encourage my clients to keep their marketing activity up, as you never know when things may take a turn for the worse.