Business Coaching

The Business Coaching Blog

As if you haven’t been inundated enough with tips on how to blog well and attract more and more readers, we’ve got yet another list for you. It’s a good one, and from Techipedia.

If you’ve wondered how seemingly anonymous bloggers have managed to become well-known in the blogosphere, read some of your favorite bloggers’ posts and see if they have some of these 11 things in their posts. Of the 11 — consistency, specific, personal and thought-provoking, for instance — many of these tips parlay into business coaching.

Business coaching can cover similar tips like these, but instead of getting readers to a blog, it covers how to get more customers to a business. Curious about what else you might learn from a business coaching session? Click here and find out.

Students set themselves up for failure when they procrastinate.

With all the advances in technology, people might believe that there will be shortcuts in running their business, or to the path to success. After all, will people really need to learn how to do something if some technology comes out that might do the job for you?

Not surprisingly, research has shown that college students who cheat will fail later in life. But, surprisingly, those students don’t cheat because they don’t know the information…they cheat because they put off their work until the last minute, then scramble to get it done.

Behaviors, like this one, can be detrimental once those college students graduate and become business owners – the behaviors learned when they cheat in college are those that are necessary to fail: avoiding accountability, lack of commitment and poor time management.

In business coaching, what coaches are especially conscious of is how to help their client succeed – and to obviously prevent them from failing. But it’s equally important for clients to figure out why things aren’t working in their business during business coaching, and to put a stop to learned behavior. Figuring out their behaviors – even things like whether or not they procrastinated and therefore cheated during college – can be important in ultimately changing their behavior for the better.

TechCrunch.com recently published an article about instilling ethics in small businesses. It sounds like it should be an easy thing – people should, after all, be moral and ethical in their everyday life, for the most part. But, as Enron and Lehman Brothers have demonstrated, it’s actually harder than it looks. What does that say for American businesses?

Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer researched the difference between companies that perform at high levels for extended periods and those that implode when they reach a certain size. When analyzing the spectacular failures in the recent financial meltdown, he found that:

• Of the original Forbes 100 (named in 1917), 61 had ceased to exist by 1987. Of the remaining 39, only 18 stayed in the top 100, and their return during the period 1917 to 1987 was 20% less
than that of the overall market.

• Of companies in the original Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index of 1957, only 74 remained in 1997; of these, only 12 outperformed the S&P 500 in the period 1957 to 1998.

• The average CEO tenure in the U.S. is 4.2 years, less than half the 10.5-year average in 1990.

Beer’s research left him with three core reasons for the failure of so many Wall Street firms in the fall of the economy in 2008: the firms lacked a higher purpose, and instead were focused on short-term gains, profits, and bonuses; they lacked a clear strategy; and they mismanaged their risk. Companies like Charles Schwab and US Bancorp were able to avoid the fallout by having a strong focus on customer service, honesty and transparency.
In business coaching, ethics can be a tough issue if the client’s ethics don’t match up with the coach’s – and it can matter so much, that some coach/client relationships have dissolved over it.

TechCrunch had some pointers on how to not get caught up in letting ethics slide. Do you agree?

Lately, and probably in the future still, people have had a habit of blaming things that go wrong in their business on the economy. But unfortunately, the economy can’t be the only thing small businesses blame.

Sure, the financial crisis didn’t help the small business environment. But other things have been slowly changing as well, which have also slowly but surely been affecting small businesses.

For instance, cheaper imports from overseas and vast improvements and updates in technology changes the way things are run. When cashflow is in order business is booming, it’s easy to miss the effects of these changes. But when the economy is bad and business decreases, the effects are magnified.

Small businesses need to stop blaming the economy, but instead, start working on the issues that are really effecting their business – changes in demand, competition, products and services.

With business coaching, it’s important to keep this in mind. Instead of simply blaming something for what’s going wrong, it’s imperative to fix the problem or make changes…because otherwise, you might be out of business!

Had NBC been your business coaching client, what would you advise?

Lots of people have their opinion on the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien-NBC debacle. Whether you’re on Team Coco or a longtime Leno fan, from a business perspective, did NBC make a good business decision?

Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, gave O’Brien a contract to host The Late Show, something he’d waited for years to host, and yanked it away once the Leno “experiment” – Leno’s half hour show before the Late Show with Conan O’Brien – failed.

Zucker took a risk with the Leno show, and it failed. But where many people are finding fault are with the callousness in which he took back O’Brien’s contract.

So, was this a good business decision? Business coaching would tell us that ultimately, since Leno is the late-night meal ticket for NBC, it was a good decision…but the issue is in how the entire renegotiation (if you can even call it that) was handled.

Business coaches, would you have coached Zucker to do anything differently had he asked your advice on how to handle things? Could he have done anything differently to avoid the backlash NBC and Leno have ended up getting?

Liquid Media Group, conference events production company, hired an ActionCOACH for business coaching to help them stabilize their focus. Watch how business coaching helped them…

Yesterday we reported Google has listed Facebook as a top competitor. Then Hitwise released a report saying Facebook was more visited than Google. It seemed like social media had overtaken the search engine! Huzzah!

Not so fast.

Industry Pace has pointed out a few facts that make the above false. A major biggie that affects the above statistic? Hitwise purposely didn’t count how often people visit both sites via mobile phones. That’s a huge chunk of people right there that weren’t even counted!

What does this have to do with business coaching? A lot — if a client ignores parts of their business that should be helped, a business coach can’t help them. If they tell you they know their numbers and give you wrong ones, or try to cover up “embarrassing” parts of their business, all will come out in the end, and even though that’s a better situation, you’ve wasted a lot of time where you could have been helping their business.

Keep that in mind next time you take on a new business coaching client. Encourage honesty…it’s the only way clients can be held accountable.

Google used to have just two competitors...that number has grown.

Google reported just two competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in their 2008 10-K report. For 2009, however, their number of competitors grew to 10.

Facebook, Twitter and Yelp are listed as Google competitors, as well as specialty search engines like WebMD.

Google probably didn’t anticipate social networking sites or specialty/specific search engines being their competitor, but that’s a fact. As Google stated: “Our filing reflects the reality that we compete against a number of alternatives, including traditional search engines, e-commerce and specialty search sites, social networks, and other forms of online and offline advertising.”

Something like this that’s happening to Google is important to keep in mind for any business. As times change, new competitors in various niches can pop up…and your business should be prepared for anything.

In business coaching, business owners will hear often that they should always be prepared. If the recession didn’t teach it enough, it rings true; more competitors in seemingly different niches can come up, as is the situation for Google, or with technology advancements, what many businesses found during the recession.

To see if your business might benefit from a business coaching session, take our Business Health Check. A healthy business makes for a happier business owner.

Ferengis follow the Rules of Acquisition

If you’re a Trekkie, you might know the Rules of Acquisition of the Star Trek universe, a set of guidelines intended to ensure the profitability of businesses owned by the ultra-capitalist alien race known as Ferengi.

Turns out, these rules also apply to businesses in the U.S. and can be useful with business coaching. Well, not all of them (#31, Never make fun of a Ferengi’s mother, for example), but most of them. Here’s the complete list of the Rules of Acquisition. How can these rules help in your business?

Facebook is joining the world of location sharing.

That might not be such a good idea, as we’ve mentioned before. With the increase in popularity of such apps and sites like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, it’s even easier for just about anyone to see where you are. There are even new sites like this on the way, like Plancast. And now, Facebook is getting in on the action, and will debut a new location sharing feature next month.

This sort of thing might be an advantage when business coaching; clients can see where their business coach is, whether it be out networking, running a ProfitCLUB, in a business coaching session, or enjoying their free time at the newest restaurant in town.

But with everyone having access to where you are and what you’re doing at all times, is it safe? Are people setting themselves up for break-ins or attacks, or making it easier for stalkers to find them?

The location feature will have two basic components: the location-sharing capability offered directly to Facebook members and a set of APIs (application protocol interfaces) for third-party developers to add location-based elements to their Facebook apps.

So, is location sharing a good thing, that can help people network and meet others? Or a bad thing, that can lead people to you for not so nice purposes?