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I am a business coach to both traditional and virtual businesses and have noticed some distinct differences between managing the two. Some of these differences go beyond the obvious, so I think it’s worth spending a little time looking at the special things you need to do as a business owner of a virtual business.
In my business coaching, I have noticed that business owners are often attracted to virtual businesses because of the advantages they afford them. Low overhead, for one. When your employees are scattered all over the place, you don’t have to pay to house them anywhere. Virtual businesses are also very flexible. You can scale them up or down much more easily than traditional businesses. They often use contractors, rather than employees giving them the advantage of flexibility. All this is great, but is there a downside to a virtual business? In my business coaching, I have seen that there is a huge one. It all centers around communication. Here are some keys I have learned through my business coaching.
Communication is an issue in most companies, but even more so with virtual businesses. In fact, it is one of the top issues I deal with in my business coaching. Here are some things to do to avoid costly communication gaps:
Business Coaching Tip #1: Create a Virtual Water Cooler. Because people can’t meet around the water cooler or in the break room in a virtual business, key information doesn’t get passed on as it normally would. Find a way to “gather” on a regular basis. Technology is a big help here. Have lunch together once a week, everyone can Skype or teleconference in. Some of my business coaching clients meet once a day for 15 minutes, just to get an update from everyone.
Business Coaching Tip #2: Establish Communication Guidelines. When you have a virtual business, the majority of your communication is by email. And, we all know the pitfalls of that. It’s hard to read tone in an email. People often misinterpret intent. In fact, they often attribute negative intent when none exists. Relationships can spiral out of control. In my business coaching, I’ve seen some ugly situations that were completely avoidable. Work with your team to establish communication guidelines. Here are a couple of examples from my business coaching clients who run a virtual business to start with:
- If I feel emotional, I will pick up the phone, not write an email.
- When I have an issue with someone, I will speak only to them about it first.
- When two of us cannot reach an agreeable outcome, we will seek a third party to moderate.
Business Coaching Tip #3: See each other in person on a regular basis. Nothing beats face to face to build relationships and establish a foundation so that the virtual interaction will go much more smoothly. My business coaching practice is a virtual business. I am really good at “reading” people and situations over the phone. Still, I find it very useful to look a client in the eye from time to time. Take some of the money you are saving on facilities and invest in some plane tickets.
Business Coaching Tip #4: Hire self-starters who like to communicate. You won’t be able to closely monitor the activity of your virtual employees. Some virtual businesses put in all sorts of expensive structure to make sure their employees are actually working. In my business coaching, I have found a far better solution: Hire the right people from the beginning and you won’t have to monitor them. Screen them in the interview process for those who are high achievers and who work well on their own. Find people who will communicate naturally with you, so that you won’t have to track them down to find out what they are up to. Use a DISC profile to find the right people. Those with a high I or S score are a pretty good bet.
I love virtual businesses, as you might guess by the fact that I own several of them. The freedom is great. And, if you take into consideration some of the special communication needs a virtual business has, you can love yours, too.
Nan O’Connor, MCC
noconnor@mindspring.com
www.nanoconnor.com
I owned and managed a corporate communications business back when there was not a profession called business coaching. It was lonely. I had two partners to share responsibilities with, but it was still lonely. I needed someone who wasn’t ensnared in the dynamics of my business. Someone who had my best interest at heart, but would also tell me the honest truth. No one like that existed. It is one of the great joys of my life that I am a business coach. I love being to help business owners in ways that I needed help myself, but found it lacking. That said, here are five ways business coaching can be helpful to you and your business.
Business Coaching Advantage #1 Objectivity. It’s the old forest for the trees syndrome. You are too close to your business to see it objectively all the time. Business coaching adds an objective viewpoint to each challenging situation you face. Here’s an example from my business coaching practice. I recently started an engagement with a new client. On our first call I said something like “You will never get to the activities you need to do to reach some of these bigger goals you have articulated until you get about half of what you are currently doing off your plate.” Seemed obvious to me. It was a revelation to the client. He said that after hearing my words, he knew they were true, but it had never occurred to him. Now this is a highly intelligent, successful guy. But, he has struggled with reaching his higher level goals for years. One session of business coaching and the objectivity of an outside view has transformed his view of himself in his business.
Business Coaching Advantage #2: Experience. A good business coach has owned successful businesses themselves. Not coaching practices, but real businesses. They have been through the life cycle of a business. Started it, grown it, almost lost it, restructured it, made money through it, sold it. Business coaching can bring you a lifetime of experience the first month. Good business coaching is about helping you find your own solutions. It’s a lot easier to do that when you have the support of someone who has been through exactly what you are going through.
Business Coaching Advantage #3 Accountability. When you own the place, who holds you accountable? No one. Except the marketplace. Business coaching can help you reach your goals sooner, because the coach can hold you accountable for taking the steps you really want to take. Nothing like a deadline.
Business Coaching Advantage #4 Better guesses. That may sound strange, but the truth is that business management is no more than a series of guesses. Some things are cut and dried, but most are not. Everything is about judgment. It’s about analyzing a situation and taking your best guess about the right thing to do. Should I hire this person? Will the market pay this much for this product? Is this the time to sell my business? It’s all a big guess. There’s not a textbook for real business. Good business coaching helps you make better guesses. It improves your odds. I cannot count the times in my business coaching work that a client has come to a call having decided to take a particular action, but just wants to run it by me. By the end of the call, they have often decided to go another direction. It comes down to thinking through an issue with someone who has been there.
Business Coaching Advantage #5 Hearing yourself think. I have found in my business coaching that most business owners are verbal processors. They figure things out as they talk about them. They hear themselves talking about something and know whether it rings true or not. They hear themselves saying things they didn’t even know they thought. They reach clarity through conversation. Business coaching is about an extended conversation with a trusted adviser. Much of the time what the client says is much more important than what the coach says, but it would never come out without the coaching.
I offer a complimentary session to discuss whether business coaching might be right for you. Feel free to give me a call at 404-378-5026 or email me at noconnor@mindspring.com.
noconnor@mindspring.com
www.nanoconnor.com
Business coaching has become quite the thing these days. For business owners, the question is whether you really need a business coach. Business coaching can be expensive, but only if it’s not giving you a good return on your investment. The best way to decide if a business coach is worth it is to ask yourself the probability of getting a positive ROI on the money you will spend. Here are some ways to determine that:
Business Coaching Tip #1: Is your business experiencing more competition and lower margins? If so, you are becoming a commodity. A business becomes a commodity when the main decision factor for the buyer is price. This is a place you seriously do not want to go! If you are finding yourself having to lower price to get business, you would benefit from the right business coach. Find a business coach who understands these concepts and has a track record of helping clients innovate in their marketplace in a way that makes the competition irrelevant.
Business Coaching Tip #2: Do you feel overwhelmed? Not enough time and money to do all the things your business needs? Here’s where a good business coach can really come in handy. Find someone who knows how to help clients come up with a practical, simple business plan. One that has an action plan. That’s the first part of your work with that coach. Then, have them coach you through the implementation of the plan. The right plan and the right coach will give you a huge return on your investment.
Business Coaching Tip #3: Is your business capable of selling more products or services, but something is stopping you? If the answer is “yes,” then a business coach might be a good investment. You would want to look for a business coach with a proven track record helping clients increase revenue by removing the limiters to the business (not enough clients, not charging enough, not enough capacity, not the right marketing or messaging).
Business Coaching Tip #4: Have you, as a business owner, reached your “wing span”? This means that your business has grown to the size that you can no longer run it on “gut feel.” If you have reached that point, you will know what I mean when you read these words. I see this all the time with my business coaching clients. See, most business owners intuitively know what moves to make in their business. They manage by their guts. They are successful and the business grows. Then one day they wake up and it feels like they have never run a business before. They feel like they have lost their touch. They haven’t, but the business has grown to the size where they need to grow their wingspan. One of the fastest ways to grow yourself is to hire someone who has been there. Here is where the right business coach can be very valuable. Hire a coach with years of owning their own business (not their coaching practice, but a business that has overhead and employees).
Business Coaching Tip #5: Do you feel trapped in your business? If your business is not giving you the freedom you want then it’s time for a re-design. A good business coach will start with a behavioral profile that will tell you your natural style. Then the coach will help you transform your business into one that calls on your natural style to come into play. The coach will also help you get clarity about what kind of life you want and build the business to support that lifestyle. Too many people who start businesses for the freedom they imagine they will have end up trapped in them. It’s not necessary and the right business coach can help break you free. When you break free, so does your business, and the bottom-line is often impacted very positively.
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then ask yourself what your bottom-line could look like if you could change the answer to “no” by hiring the right business coach. If you could, for example, say that your business is no longer pushed by competition to lower your price. How much would that impact things? Then determine whether investing in business coaching would be worth it. My guess is that if you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, you should take a serious look at hiring a good business coach.
I am a Master Certified business coach who has been helping clients improve their bottom-lines by an average of 47% since 1998. If you would like a complimentary session to see if coaching might be right for you, call me today.
noconnor@mindspring.com
www.nanoconnor.com
404-378-5026
Through my business coaching, I lead a lot of strategy sessions for small and mid-sized companies who want to truly differentiate themselves from their competition. I use a lot of different processes, including Blue Ocean Strategy. Most most of my business coaching clients would like to know where their market is going before they plan their strategy. They would like a crystal ball. Wouldn’t you like to know where your industry will be in five or ten years?
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I do have a simple concept I use in my business coaching that I have found to be amazingly accurate. My dear friend, Ron Fleisher, introduced me to it years ago and I have been using it ever sense. It’s actually from a system of reasoning formulated by German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770–1831). He says that each historical phase will be replaced by its opposite and that new (opposite) phase will be replaced by a resolution of the two extremes.
Huh? That’s what my business coaching clients say until I explain further. Let me give you an example of this formula applied to market dynamics, using something we are all familiar with: pizza. When I was a little girl growing up in Galveston, Texas, the only way you could get pizza was to drive to the local Italian restaurant and order it. The Italian family who owned the restaurant would make it to order. It took a while, but it was so delicious that no one cared about the wait. We didn’t do this often, because it was actually fairly expensive. Then, one day we walked into the local Piggly Wiggly and found something never seen before. It was in the freezer section and it was a pizza! Suddenly, we could have pizza at home. I wasn’t a business coach back then, but even as a teenager, I could tell that this was innovative. It was cheap and fast. It didn’t taste great, but boy was it convenient. A few years later, what happened? Domino’s! They would cook it, deliver it to our home, it was more expensive than frozen and less than eating out. They didn’t promise great taste, but they did promise to deliver it in 30 minutes.
This is a great example of Hegel’s theory applied to free market dynamics. Here is a simple explanation I use in my business coaching: Let’s call what exists the “thesis.” The next market move with be the opposite, the “antithesis.” The next market move will be “synthesis.”
Now, let’s go back to our example, and look at it through the eyes of a business coach applying Hegel’s theory. The Italian restaurant pizza was the thesis and had these elements: you go out to eat it; they cook it; the taste is great; it takes a long time; it’s expensive. The next market move was frozen pizza, the antithesis, with these elements: you eat it at home; you cook it; it doesn’t taste great; it’s quick; it’s cheap. Every element of the antithesis is the opposite of the thesis. The next market move, Domino’s, was a synthesis: you eat it at home; they cook it; it tastes okay, not great; it’s fast; it’s moderately priced.
Now we are starting to see how this works. I love this because, as a business coach, it helps me see what my client’s markets will do. You can use it, too. Here’s what you do:
Business Coaching Tip #1: Ask yourself what the elements are of your current market (the thesis).
Business Coaching Tip #2: Ask yourself what the opposite of those elements would be (the antithesis).
Business Coaching Tip #3: Ask what the synthesis of the thesis and antithesis would be. What would those elements be?
This will give you a pretty good idea of where your market is going.
That’s important, but here’s the real key to using the theory. Don’t make your next move the antithesis. Make it the synthesis! Your competition will move to antithesis. Don’t go there. Leapfrog them by going directly to synthesis. You will be way ahead of the game. If you go to antithesis you will only be keeping up with the competition. That’s too expensive. It doesn’t differentiate you at all. You want to get ahead of the game. I want my business coaching clients to be so far ahead of the competition that they don’t have to worry about competitive pressures. I want you to be ahead of the game, as well.
With this simple thesis you can! Apply it to your market and let me know what you find. It’s an exciting, fast, free way to have a little bit of that crystal ball.
If you have owned a business for over three years and would like some help with this, I am happy to do a complimentary 30-minute business coaching session.
Nan O’Connor Business Coach
noconnor@mindspring.com
www.nanoconnor.com
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