There are more businesses then ever starting up and there has rarely been a better time to start your own business with access to great information at your fingertips and free business advice available from many avenues.

So why are more and more people choosing to seek out the help of a coach for their business and just what are the benefits of using a business coach? Well there are lots, as it happens, from helping you build and focus on your core strategy to tapping into their huge catalogue of business experience, all aimed towards helping you succeed.

Let's take a look at our top benefits of using a business coach.

Lots of successful people have a coach

Think about a popular business personality that you admire, or elite athlete at the top of their game, or even a performing legend; none of them work alone, each is surrounded by a team of advisers or coaches.

Why? Because you might have the expertise in one area, but running a successful business demands many other additional skills - just as being a successful popstar requires more than the sheer talent to be able to sing and dance. 

A coach can help you identify your weaknesses and improve them whilst highlighting your strengths and bolstering those. Plus, as your business develops it's good to have the support and motivation that a coach can provide to keep you enthusiastic and focussed on your goals and ambitions.

Let's take a look at what other benefits you can see when working with a coach:

1. They see things you can't

It's very common in new and small businesses to see the owner / operator setup where you have a lone director and perhaps a handful of staff. This works well for many firms and allows for an unparalled flexibility when it comes to business. 

However it's all to easy to become too personally involved with too many areas of the business; after all it's all on your shoulders. You've got to steer the ship, win new sales, carry out the core business activities or manage the staff that do and it's easy to lose sight of where you're headed or to miss upcoming roadblocks and obstacles.

A good coach will help you see the wood and the trees and be able to highlight things you might have missed, but that nevertheless addressing.

2. They'll help you focus on what's important

Again, like first benefit, it's all too easy to become a busy fool in business, either taking on too much, stretching yourself too thinly, or spending too much time on activities that pull you away from the important core of your business.

By helping you strip away the unhelpful and unnessary and devote yourself more fully towards the activites that matter, a coach will help you see your time better spent, your business start to grow, and ultimately you'll be moving towards your goals rather then potentially stalling or moving further away from them.

3. You'll learn to do more in less time

In all businesses time is money. Whether you're paying someone for their time, or doing something with your own, in the end you'll help your profits by spending less time but getting more out of it. 

It sounds backwards, but it's possible. For example, you might spend up to an hour each day dealing with social media updates, publishing content, investigating new accounts, etc. which amounts to five hours a week. By simply using a social media scheduling tool you could spend two hours curating and scheduling your content and you've instantly gained three extra hours of work back - almost half a day!

And marketing's just one aspect. A good coach would look at all areas of your business and see where your most profitable time is spent and see how you can do more of that. 

4. You'll get objective advice and constructive criticism

Because they're not part of your business, however closely they work with it, a coach has a unique view of things that isn't made personal by their relationship to the business. 

Any good coach worth their salt will give you objective advice that is aimed squarely at helping you and your business succeed. It might not always be easy to hear, but it will always be void of office politics and won't simply be the soft option. 

Remember, it's not easy to get a truly objective answer from yourself, but it is very easy to sabotage your efforts by making do with a solution you know isn't the right one.

A strong coach will also hold you accountable for sticking to your goals and promises and seeing them through. After all, the drive and determination to reach your ambitions is great, but it's the physical action and work that will ahieve them and see your business succeed.

5. They'll give you access to years of experience

Depending on the route you choose to go down (using a business owner turned coach, or one of the many franchisee coaches out there) your chosen coach will have had many years in business. It might be that they've started and grown a successful business themselves, or took the helm of an ongoing concern and helped it blossom.

Either way, they will bring a wealth of experience in business to your door and give you all the best bits as part of the deal.

There is something to be said for learning by your mistakes, but wouldn't it be nice to have someone on your side to help you avoid the mistakes in the first place? Especially the great big ones? 

Using an experienced coach means you don't have to walk the unknown path by yourself, learning as you go. Instead you can benefit from their guidance to help you dodge the pitfalls and walk a shorter, smoother path to your goals.

6. You'll gain a sounding board

Maybe you're in business with a partner, or a few other directors. But if you're alone, or your other directors are all at the same level of business experience as you, then where do you turn to discuss new ideas?

Using a coach doesn't mean you get a constant stream of 'yes's' or a bank of easy answers, but it does get you access to a knowledable advisor whom you can run ideas by and get their valuable feedback. 

This benefit is particularly helpful for sole traders or lone directors who perhaps don't have a listening ear available when they have a new idea to put out there.

7. A business coach will help you develop a long-term strategy

Starting a business is relatively straightforward, but keeping it running, juggling the many and varied responsibilities a business involves, such as manging staff or bringing in new work can prove increasingly difficult as time goes by. In fact it's well documented that many new businesses don't make it past their first few years, even seemingly successful ones with lots of work on their books. 

The reasons can be many and varied, but they're all usually rooted in a lack of planning at the start, failing to stick to or adapt your business strategy and through sheer lack of experience in the art of business, regardless of your individual area of expertise. 

Coaches know that the key to running a ship shape outfit is in developing and refering to a comprehensive business development strategy. It might be that you work together to develop an overall plan, which translates to a series of smaller, short-term strategies to hit closer milestones, but in order to hit your targets and reach your goals it's vital to have a solid plan in place.

This is one of the most important benefits of using a coach.

8. You'll make more profit!

A lot of business coaches operate on the premise that if they're not 100% confident that their work will pay for itself in terms of ROI, then they'll refuse to accept the job in the first place.

Even without ambitious targets like that, any solid coaching plan will focus on achieving at least some the following outcomes:

• Reducing time spent on unimportant activities
• Working out the best pricing for your products and services (this is usually more than you're currently charging!)
• Creating short-term and long-term strategies to improve your business activities
• Becoming more efficient and aglie as a business
• Doing more in less time

As you can see the overall aims are to really see you do more with your time, charge what your time is worth, and put in place a plan of action to help you both achieve these goals and maintain or surpass them in the future.
 

Working with a mentor or business coach can help transform your business

Everyone needs help from time to time and there are lots of great resources out there to find free business advice and support if you need some quick tips, or a starting point. 

For more indepth solutions or to help your business develop, grow, and succeed, using a business coach is an increasingly popular option for many business owners. The benefits far outweigh the investment and will enable you to build a strong, healthy, profitable business.