Running a family business takes a lot of time and energy, hence the idea of hiring a family business coach often surfaces. The hope is usually to get some help in running or developing the business, yet the specifics of the role, mission and contribution of the coach often remain uncertain, sometimes even obscure.
What is the role of a business coach? Can family business coaching make a difference at all? What does a business coach cost? Should I take over the family business? Can you help me develop my profile as an entrepreneur?
These questions are more frequent than you would think!
At Impactified, we’ve supported dozens of entrepreneurs over the past decade, and, being entrepreneurs ourselves, we know how to help and make a difference. In this article, we’re elaborating on three ways a family business coach will help you do better. From a commercial enterprise perspective, but also from a personal perspective.
Spoiler: our role is (i) to help you think outside your box, (ii) to help you implement a 20/80 principle in a way that works for you and, (iii) help you figure out how to change your mindset for the better.
Curious to find out more? We’re telling you everything. Just keep reading!
A family business coach will help you think outside your box.
A typical trait of entrepreneurs these days is a tendency to go round in circles, with a daily (but also intellectual) routine that gets them trapped in a permanent mindset which becomes unproductive sooner than later.
To that extent, a family business coach will have a primordial role, i.e. help you think outside your own box.
Business coaching begins with identifying ‘your’ box.
You’ve heard the expression “thinking outside the box” before. But what if the expression was actually sending you in the wrong direction? What if the problem wasn’t to think outside “a” box, but to think outside “your” own box?
In our experience as business coaches, entrepreneurs tend to live a rather lonely life. Yes, of course, they are surrounded by other entrepreneurs and meet plenty of people of all horizons. Still, the opportunities to get into serious discussions about business strategy aren’t that common and that makes the decision-making process quite solitary.
Think about it, when was the last time you had a productive strategic brainstorming session with someone external to your organization? And the time before that? What do you mean you can’t remember?
Hmmm…
The point is, as an entrepreneur, your strategic thinking often takes place in your head, as a “me, myself and I” sort of discussion. That gets you in a very special box – your own box.
Sounds messy, hm?
Accordingly, the stake is super simple: to start thinking differently, you need to become aware of the way you currently think. You need to identify your blind spots – which is difficult because as their name suggests, they are “blind” spots. And you need to consider the extent to which your current thinking could be improved.
Does that sound like a program? That’s because it is. And that’s also where the role of a family business coach starts.
The usual box is…
If you’ve already talked to someone in the family business consulting industry, chances are that the box you are used to includes a mix of family interest preservation, asset management solutions designed to match family members’ interests, succession planning, so forth, and so on.
Yet, what if family business coaching involved a lot more than coaching family members for asset-related matters? What if strategic planning involved a form of executive coaching – entrepreneurial coaching, in fact – and some recurring brainstorming focusing on your own skills, team, and business development-related challenges?
Family business coaching is also about helping you to take responsibility.
A major aspect of thinking outside your own box lies in your ability to take responsibility for the things that happen around you and affect you, your business, or your business results.
Now, no need to panic. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean that you need to put everything upside down, and it’s not a question of looking for a fault (or guilt) either.
Instead, taking responsibility is a question of thinking objectively – trying to is a good start – so that you can map how things work around you, and how you can influence them in a way that makes sense and solves problems.
By helping to take responsibility, a family business coach will give you a way to expand your box, and make it more sensitive to the context that surrounds you.
While there are many things you can’t control (time flies, sh** happens, people change, business changes, etc.), you can have an effect on how you approach things, and you can try and influence whatever comes next. We call this business karma, and we spend a lot of energy helping entrepreneurs just like you improve theirs. All it takes is a try!
If you ask us, taking responsibility is a bit like a free hug. At first sight, you don’t need it, but once you get it your whole world shifts! Give it a try!
It’s also a question of revising business models.
Now, what if we told you that our contributions as family business coaches also give us formidable opportunities to help entrepreneurs (and small business owners more generally) to rethink their business models?
Your current business model is clearly one major component of your current “personal box”, and thinking beyond it is usually very complex because things are the way they are.
Unless someone from the outside steps in and asks questions about why this works like this rather than like that, what are the odds of shifting models? Well, the answer is simple. None.
A family business coach will help you implement the 20/80 principle.
Efficiency and productivity are big words these days. For some, time is money hence productivity is a matter of doing more to earn more. For others, however, running a family business is mostly a matter of developing an asset that ought to work for them, while having time to actually enjoy family outside of work discussions. The question is, where do you stand?
Less is more.
In our opinion, your family business should work for you, not the other way around. In line with the 20/80 principle popularized by Pareto (or more recently Richard Koch), your focus as a family business owner should be to focus on making sure that 20% of your time is used to make progress on matters that will affect 80% of your results.
Said differently, productivity should be a matter of working smart rather than working more.
The story is always the same! The reason why entrepreneurs spend hours working is that the processes in place are insufficient and because the automation potential of the company is totally underused.
Even more frequently, entrepreneurs are so busy working on the urgent that they forget to work on the important but non-urgent tasks – which usually are the strategic ones.
The good news is that a family business coach will be at best to do just that. By making you work on your organizational (and personal) efficiency, your coach will make you realize what makes sense and what doesn’t.
Working ON your business.
Another way to say this is as follows: a family business coach will give you an opportunity to work ON your business rather than into it.
Our interventions typically push entrepreneurs to consider the way they use their time, money, or resources more generally. We make them identify organizational blind spots (yes, blind spots again).
And we give them an unprecedented opportunity to consider how inefficient ways of working can be revised to become a no-pain-total-gain super value sum.
Oh yeah!
At the end of the day, giving an entrepreneur an occasion to work ON their business on a routine basis is one of the most efficient ways to get a business to the next level. Why don’t you give it a try and see for yourself?
A family business coach will help you figure out how to change your mindset (for the better).
You’re probably beginning to see a pattern here, right? Overall, our role as your family business coach is to help you figure out how to change your mindset for the better.
Acquiring the mindset of an entrepreneur.
Like it or not, but there are various types of entrepreneurial mindsets out there! We wrote a very complete article on the topic some time ago so we won’t go into the details here – just follow the link or test your own entrepreneurial profile here:
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Long story short? Many people see themselves as entrepreneurs but act as technicians who refuse to let go of their daily tasks and routines. Some agree to move on and become a managerial type of entrepreneur whose focus is mostly on managing people in the organization.
Entrepreneurial entrepreneurs, in contrast, rather focus on big picture thinking. They look forward, define visions that get people on a mission, and they work on inspiring more and more people so that the cause they defend and the agenda they push keep going forward.
Said differently, the role of a family business coach is also – not to say essentially – to help you acquire the mindset of an entrepreneur, focused not merely on the daily to-dos, but on what really needs to be done to get the business to the next step. Makes sense, right?
It sounds so logical, right?
It sounds logical, now that you read it. Right? Well, it is. The question is, are you working on shifting your habits and acquiring the best entrepreneurial mindset possible already, or are you focusing on doing whatever you can to get things going?
In both cases, the best you can do is focus on what makes the most sense ever! If you are already working on big picture development (or change!) then a family business coach will be at best to help you gear-up and obtain even sharper results.
If, however, you haven’t really started yet, then a family business coach will be the push you need – perhaps even the kick! – to gear up and start a change dynamic you really can’t play without.
Change is like a free hug – you love it once you’ve experienced it – but until then, it’s very much like an elephant in a corridor. You know it’s right there, you can’t ignore it and you can’t really go around it either. The only way to get through is to get it going!
No need to be alone, your family business coach is there to support you.
We often hear that change is a daunting perspective and that entrepreneurs are scared of kicking off on their own. Here is another good news: you don’t need to do this alone. In fact, your family business coach will support you throughout with adapted coaching services you will love.
At the end of the day, you can use business coaching in different ways. Some clients ask us to give them a kickoff boost, in which case we help them find a direction they can then follow on their own, with minor interventions on our sides.
For others, the idea is rather to begin a long-term relationship, in which we act as follow-up powerhouses, whenever we are needed.
More often than not, the reality is that we – the family business coaches – end up being so close to our entrepreneur clients that we know them, their business(es) and their family more than anyone else.
The reason for that is simple.
At times, our role is also to become a life and business coach, which makes sense because taking responsibility, thinking outside your box and implementing a 20/80 logic can be a matter of both personal life and business. For instance, digging into the personal goals of our clients makes sense, but it’s also a fundamental way to adjust (or re-adjust) one’s workload depending on their priorities. Right?
Ultimately, we don’t just help with building efficient businesses that work for our clients, we also help building trusted and supportive environments in which family businesses can grow and strive.
No wonder why we love our jobs!
Have you considered taking online business coaches?
We’ve explored various ways in which a family business coach can create value, but your decision to act towards making a difference is what really matters. At the end of the day, some decide to change, some decide not to change, but the vast majority usually decides not to decide – and therefore stagnate.
Small businesses and larger ones face the same issues here. The key is the ability of the business owner to act.
If you are on the active side of entrepreneurship, we’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Our entrepreneurs’ coaches will be able to help. We’re happy to support you in person (we’re based in France and Hong Kong) with family business coaching and consulting sessions – like family business workshops and one on one business coaching meetings. Even better, if you are open to leveraging technology then our online business coaching methods (via zoom) and our accelerated MBA self coaching programs are everything you need!
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