Business View Magazine September 2018

220 221 with a coach who has a system that is knowl- edge-based so, time-wise, it’s much better. The second reason coaching works is that you have someone that is on the outside looking in. The reality of business is that, if I said to you, ‘I want you to look at these 10 other businesses and tell me 20 things they need to do to fix it,’ you’ll spot them, immediately, because you’re on the outside looking in; whereas if I said to you in your own business, ‘Tell me the 20 things you need to do to get your business growing,’ it’s the forest for the trees. The third reason coaching works is account- ability. The best thing about being a business owner is you’re your own boss; the worst thing is that you’re your own boss. The business will grow to your level of incompetence and then it will stop and that’s where a lot of business owners really do struggle. Luckily, we come along and give them a bit of a reminder of what they should be doing. If you’re the owner and the CEO of the business, you’re really good at lying to yourself from both sides, and you tell yourself, ‘I’m doing a great job; I’m working as hard as I can.’ But I bet if you employed someone else to do the job of being the CEO of your business, I guarantee you’d push them harder than you push yourself.” Sugars adds that there are four main reasons why ActionCOACH is the company to call when business is less than booming. “Number one is 24 years of systemized methodology on how to coach a business,” he declares. “Before I wrote the book, The Business Coach, which actually shows the recipe for business success, we’d already coached 13,000 companies. So, we didn’t write ACTIONCOACH the system until we’d actually succeeded at im- plementing the system. The second reason is my people. In a service-based business, your people are your biggest asset or your biggest pain in the butt. So, when you find great people and you keep building great people that, in and of itself, is amazing. The third thing is community.We build a community of business owners, where we bring them together and we help them share and learn with, and from, each other. It gives them hope and the feeling that there are other people out there, like them, who have had to go through the same things. The fourth thing is the education that we give business owners is second to none.We make sure they all learn while they’re getting the coaching. Coaching is about setting them up to succeed for the next level and the next level after that.When business owners go into business, they have big dreams and big goals, and most of them, somewhere along the way, lose those dreams and goals and end up with a goal of just paying the bills. If we can give them the education that allows them to make far better decisions and allows them to build a bigger dream and a bigger goal, then we’re doing a good job.” According to Sugars, finding the right people who can do that job involves a strong measure of selectivity. “We accept only one of every 115 people that come to us wanting to be a coach,” he says, “because we look at personality traits, we look at skill sets, we look at past experience, trainability, coachability– so we have quite an extensive matrix to find the right people. That being said, the most common factor is that they