Philippe Bonnet, what exactly is the purpose of a business coach?
Philippe Bonnet: To get to the heart of the matter, a business coach’s purpose is to help you gear up and scale up when you are doing your best to develop your business, but you have reached a glass ceiling that you cannot break on your own.
Operationally speaking, the business coach brings a very strategic entrepreneurial perspective to the small business owner and allows to address issues related to the facilitation of the business, beyond the daily routines that keep your mind busy with the fuss but make you forget the important.
Pragmatically, the challenge is to use calibrated discussions to push entrepreneurs and business owners to work “on” their business where the ease is otherwise to work “in” the business and keep their nose to the grindstone – not to say the head under the water.
What are the symptoms that make you say that an entrepreneur needs help?
Philippe Bonnet: Typically, we know that an entrepreneur needs help when they are wondering how to take their company to the next level, from a commercial, logistical or human point of view, and they can’t figure out how to do that.
On a much more personal level, the vast majority of entrepreneurs who contact us naturally describe themselves as being overwhelmed and say they don’t know where to turn or what to do next.
They manage the day-to-day and put out fires as they go along, but they totally neglect their business and financial strategy, their positioning and communication strategy, and of course their priority management – I’m not even talking about personal stress management, you get the idea.
Is it that common?
Philippe Bonnet: More than common, it’s classic. Entrepreneurs have a very personal relationship with their company and in fact, they are generally very alone in their entrepreneurial life.
Talking about day-to-day problems with family and friends is not easy, and talking about strategic concerns with teams is often difficult. In the end, the lack of a sounding board often makes decision-making difficult, and that’s where the business coach comes in.
So, business coach equals sounding board.
Philippe Bonnet: Yes, in part, but beyond helping entrepreneurs and business owners to make decisions on a daily basis, the business coach also brings a provocative point of view that clears up blind spots and pushes the client to think outside of their comfort zone, both professionally and personally.
In this sense, the business coach is a strategic and performance coach who is there to help you shift gears when you need to get to whatever comes next.
Your description of the “symptoms” suggests that entrepreneurship is not as obvious as one might think…
Philippe Bonnet: Entrepreneurship is very popular these days, but the reality is often quite different from fantasy.
On the fantasy side, business books like Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek have been promoting the idea that being an entrepreneur is about being free and making easy money. People focus on the dream, but they forget about the work needed to achieve a result and then the reality becomes more painful than expected.
Also, the social contract has changed and companies don’t keep their employees for forty years anymore, so many people start their own businesses as a result. And of course, Covid has made many people realize that a simple computer allows them to have several clients instead of one boss, so the idea of going into business for themselves is attractive.
On the real side, while it’s easy to start a company, having a business that runs and generates growing sales is another matter. Entrepreneurship requires very specific skills but entrepreneurs are rarely trained in entrepreneurship and – due to a lack of basics – make mistakes for several years before they manage to keep the business running in an acceptable way.
In the end, I used to say that anyone who runs a business has two distinct jobs.
The first is technical – design, communication, being an architect, lawyer, or baker, producing in Asia to sell in France or elsewhere.
The second is to manage and develop the technical activity from an entrepreneurial point of view. And contrary to what we think, it is imperative to structure, automate, secure, invest, and digitize – whether you are a baker, a lawyer, or the head of a multinational company.
The question is: why do all these entrepreneurs insist on acting like technicians rather than entrepreneurs when this bad habit costs them the development of their business?
What does the typical entrepreneur you coach actually look like?
Philippe Bonnet: Our entrepreneurs are generally at the head of a company of five to fifty people, and call on us to have a space for reflection outside the daily emergency. Some run several companies between Paris, Hong Kong and Vancouver, all need clarity to manage internationally dispersed teams.
We also work with NGO leaders, for whom ensuring the growth of the model and the increase of revenues is as important as ensuring the stability of the teams.
In all cases, our clients are aware that they are facing a glass wall and have made the decision to move forward rather than stagnate.
Domestic or international, what difference does it make?
Philippe Bonnet: Good question – a company with an international presence will have more advanced needs in terms of creating procedures and automating tasks. It will also have different needs in terms of team management.
In such cases, it is important to work with a business coach who has real international experience, and who is able to put an informed finger on the impact of cultural differences on operations management.
Internationally, it is even more important to learn different working methods, which allow optimizing the organization in a context where the choices are often multiple and confusing. I myself spent several years in Eastern Europe, and eight years in Hong Kong, so I know these issues only too well. In fact, our offices in France and China allow us to manage these issues in a pragmatic way.
In concrete terms, how does the support of the business coach work?
Philippe Bonnet: The support of a business coach works in a very natural way because we work mainly by using discussion and questions. Whereas consultants enter a company, produce a report, and make recommendations before leaving, we remain on a long-term basis and are present regularly to engage the entrepreneurs when they need to reflect on their current issues.
Discussions take place on a recurring basis to create a positive routine, weekly or twice a month as needed, but we also pick up the phone whenever a need is expressed. The goal of the business coach is to provide a stable framework and constant responsiveness, ultimately.
Beyond the one-on-one sessions, we also do regular workshops. For example, the first sessions with the business coach start with a SWOT analysis of the company’s strengths and weaknesses. When the client needs a more fundamental repositioning, we also use Design Thinking and Blue Ocean Strategy methods to revisit business models and rewrite stories.
The methods are complementary, then…
Philippe Bonnet: Exactly, it all depends on the needs. The business coach is ultimately the strategic right-hand man of the entrepreneur and the manager, so he has to adapt to the evolution of the structure.
The one-on-one sessions help to frame the reflection and facilitate the decision making, and the workshops allow to involve the teams in the dynamics. Often, the logic also helps teams learn to function without the entrepreneur, making the company scalable.
How long does a coaching program usually last?
Philippe Bonnet: We commit to our clients if they are capable of making a long-term commitment, not towards us but towards themselves. In concrete terms, this means that we work for at least one year with our entrepreneurs. It takes at least three months to create new habits, and another three months to start really changing things, and then the routines will fall into place so the follow-up work can begin.
That being said, our clients usually continue the collaboration for two, three, four years, because having a sounding board really helps them on a day-to-day basis and over the long term. We also work regularly with the teams, especially with the mid-management, at the request of the manager, which helps to keep the collaboration going.
The client is free to keep their business coach or not, in the end, but a lasting collaboration is nonetheless a sign of success.
You speak of a Blue Ocean strategy – can you be more specific?
Philippe Bonnet: Blue Ocean Strategies are developed in the series of books of the same name. The idea is to escape the red oceans, which are nothing more or less than bloodbaths due to competition, and swim in blue oceans instead.
Concretely, the objective is to make managers and their teams work on their strategy of differentiation and creation of value innovation, for a redefined clientele. The books do not provide the keys to implementing the strategy, however, so the “how” is complex. This led us to develop workshops to make change accessible, using design thinking techniques borrowed from tech companies.
How does a business coach use SWOT analysis?
Philippe Bonnet: SWOT analysis is a tool that we use a lot, especially before we start coaching a manager. Our role as business coaches implies that we know our entrepreneurs and their company precisely from the start, and this analysis is the best way to put our finger on the holes that weaken the impact of the racket.
Our competitors offer SWOT analyses for more than ten thousand euros and give their conclusions over several sessions. We have developed an automated version of the analysis that allows us to divide the cost and time investment by four. To date, there is no more efficient way to know how your company works, and entrepreneurs love the exercise. Why deprive yourself?
Using a coach (business coach or not) can be difficult for some. How do you see it?
Philippe Bonnet: Indeed, the idea can be complicated for some people because using a coach has long been associated with a feeling of failure and inability to develop oneself. Strangely enough, this idea quickly fades away when we explain that all the successful leaders in Silicon Valley (especially at Google) are followed by a business coach who brings them a different angle of view and a transformed thinking potential. If they are doing it, you would be wrong not to get involved.
Moreover, the business coach profession has existed for more than twenty years and is now part of the collective consciousness. Being accompanied by a business coach also answers a felt need to get out of an increasingly frequent entrepreneurial solitude. In fact, the SWOT analysis exercise often ends with the idea that coaching brings hope and very rich avenues for reflection.
The question is topical – do you work face-to-face or remotely?
Philippe Bonnet: We work face-to-face when we need to facilitate workshops, but for the rest, technology allows us to follow our entrepreneurs wherever they are. Our clients are based in Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Beijing, and Vancouver. Once a trusting relationship is created, communication is seamless and allows everyone to work much more efficiently.
How do you get started?
Philippe Bonnet: There are two solutions, really, depending on your needs and your budget. If your company is growing and you have already reached your glass ceiling, hiring a business coach is usually appropriate. I always suggest starting with a strengths and weaknesses analysis – feel free to get in touch! Then we can see what is needed and can be put in place.
If you are just starting out and want to put all the chances on your side without investing in a business coach, Impactified also offers self-coaching modules that you can use on your own. All you have to do is decide to start somewhere!
