Hello Samuel Demarais, tell us everything – where exactly are you from?
Samuel Demarais: I originally come from France where I spent the first 10 years of my professional life. After working as a financial auditor for PriceWatherhouseCoopers, I moved to consulting, focusing on strategy, organization, and change management.
I settled in Hong Kong in 2011. I joined international banks (HSBC, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and BNP Paribas) to lead regional programs including the design and implementation of new organizations and the deployment of new systems.
That progressively led me to coaching teams, and to coaching as a career path for myself.
When did you start coaching and mentoring teams and business leaders?
Samuel Demarais: My coaching journey started in 2018. I tried to take things seriously from the start and obtained a coaching certification from the ICF [International Coaching Federation]. I then started to work with team leaders looking to improve their performance, and with executives looking to change or pursue new careers.
Coaching leaders and coaching people who want career advice are two very different things, however, so I progressively moved towards business coaching. I figured this would allow me to make the most of my organizational skills, my business management acumen, and my previous entrepreneurship experiences.
I have also spearheaded mentoring programs for banks. The focus was then on developing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the networks I worked in.
This was an important step for me since I haven’t benefited from any mentoring programs in the early stages of my career. I am convinced that it would have made a difference, and I strongly believe that everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from this sort of relationship. So, here I am.
What got you interested in becoming a business coach?
Samuel Demarais: Like many of us, I heard about coaching a long time ago, but it is only when I hired a coach myself that I understood the full benefits of the exercise.
As a client, I realized that a coach is a sounding board for leaders, an accountability partner who helps you to keep moving after making you come up with clear objectives for yourself, and a strategy to reach them.
I saw the results of that work immediately and felt convinced by the process of my own coaching, really. And since I am extremely sociable and outgoing, the activity felt in total alignment with my passion for pushing people, so I decided to learn how to coach and mentor people.
To me, there is nothing comparable to the feeling I get when my clients reach their goals or even better when they experience an Aha! moment they never saw coming.
I am also very aware of the fact that running a business is very complex, and I am thrilled to be able to use my business experiences to mentor business leaders and share concrete tips and methods when they need them.
Wait, what difference do you make between coaching and mentoring, then?
Samuel Demarais: There is a very thin line between coaching and mentoring, but in the end the difference that line creates in terms of process is huge.
On the one hand, the coaching relationship is typically driven by questioning and reformulating. The coach asks questions, reformulates the answers he (she) gets, and comes up with more questions until the coachee moves on and reaches their goal.
On the other hand, a mentor will go beyond the coaching process to genuinely challenge the client, as a business partner would. The mentor keeps using questions as a tool, but they will also provide methods and ways to move ahead. They will also share feedback and insights and will use his (her) own experience to make the discussions richer.
When I work with entrepreneurs or team leaders, I use a mix of both depending on the situation and their needs. Yet the mentoring relationship is clearly the one I prefer.
How would you explain your day-to-day work as a business coach and business mentor? For that matter, what does your typical client look like?
Samuel Demarais: I work with entrepreneurs, business owners, and team leaders who want to be challenged and think outside the box.
Their businesses and their industries vary, but they face similar issues on a daily basis. They are usually overwhelmed by their workload, and they need some help to either boost their sales or improve the efficiency of their organization.
My contribution to the business also varies in terms of time, but not necessarily in terms of intensity. Some clients want a weekly relationship with their coach, others are happy with two meetings a month.
Often, however, my typical client also introduces me to their top management team and asks me to coach them too. After a few years, the business coach’s involvement in the client’s organization can become rather significant!
What do you think they are looking for when they decide to call you?
Samuel Demarais: Decision makers rarely have sounding boards to share their challenges with, and it can make their daily reality difficult because the weight of decisions is on their shoulders at all times.
When they contact me, my clients therefore look for a business coach who will be able to help them to articulate the opportunities they have in their mind.
Being a business mentor, they also expect me to have the right tools and methodologies to structure their business better.
Of course, they are usually also looking for an accountability partner to push them, like a personal trainer at the gym. That’s how the biggest progress is made!
In practical terms, how do you challenge your customers?
Samuel Demarais: I challenge my customers the Impactified way. I start by reviewing the performance of their business through the sophisticated Impactified SWOT analysis. This helps me (and the client) identify blind spots and untapped business opportunities. But it also helps me evaluate if their strategy is adequate to reach their goals.
I also use the Impactified toolbox to work on specific objectives. For instance, boosting their turnover, increasing their margins, making their teams more efficient, or saving time for themselves. You’d be surprised to see that an entrepreneur can easily shave two days of work every week with a bit of method. That’s three months off per year!
When it comes to specific topics like hedging their currencies exposure or reviewing their legal documentation, for example, I can introduce them to specialized professionals in the network.
Is the SWOT a real thing, then?
Samuel Demarais: Yes, very real. I know that SWOTs are classic tools that sound convoluted to many people, especially because the typical method isn’t really efficient and creates no actionable value.
The SWOT analysis method we use at Impactified, however, was designed by entrepreneurs and business leaders to produce a 360-degree overview of a business organization. Big picture, sales organization, automation, resistance to stress, leadership and acceleration potential, we cover the whole spectrum to show you where to act next.
After we unfold the results of the SWOT, we then plan tasks according to their priorities.
We can start for example by looking at their sales structure. Do they have a clear view of their prospects and their conversion rate? In this case, we would look at which levers to use to increase their KPI (better pitch or sales team training for example).
Then, we can look at their turnover. I would challenge them on their average basket size and discuss options to grow it.
Alternatively, we can also review the efficiency of their organization. Do they need to implement a mid-management or automate further their processes to be more scalable?
The idea is really to go step by step, one tool at a time.
Out of curiosity, what do you enjoy the most with this kind of client?
Samuel Demarais: I love working with entrepreneurs and business owners. The decision process is fast, and you can see the immediate impacts on the business of the actions.
Reading you, it looks that being a business mentor is a fulfilling exercise!
Samuel Demarais: Indeed, helping others to be at their best is my purpose. There is nothing like what I feel when a client reaches objectives that he wouldn’t have reached otherwise.
How do you juggle between discussion, questioning, and action-taking in your activity as a business coach and mentor?
Samuel Demarais: A pure coaching approach is focused on questioning. The limit of coaching is that you may think it is too slow or you are not going where you want to go. Mentoring on the other hand gives me the possibility to share feedback and best practices.
I take advantage of both approaches to define well-formed goals and action plans to reach them
Can you give a rough estimate of how much time business coaching takes?
Samuel Demarais: Business coaching is a long-term relationship. We can start by focusing on a priority topic and stop there but usually, the quality of the outcomes fuels the client to continue working together and address holistically his challenges.
To give you some numbers, we work with our clients for at least a year, but the reality is that most collaborations last beyond three to four years due to the sounding board effect I mentioned earlier.
This doesn’t mean that it takes years to get results! Results come rapidly, and that makes people want to keep working with us as a sort of shadow right arm they otherwise don’t have at their disposal.
How do you work with teams?
Samuel Demarais: We usually work with teams when the client finds that the benefits he sees for himself need to be scaled in the organization. We then have two ways of doing things.
One, we coach the managers to make them work on their performance, and on the performance of their team. Which by the way is a great way to build leaders around you, rather than simple managers.
And two, we facilitate a lot of workshops that take place over an afternoon, a day, two days… That’s really efficient to build a vision and a message, come up with goals and KPIs, identify a client profile and build the related offering, or if you want to build a process for people to work with. That’s also very efficient in terms of team building, needless to say.
Any final thoughts to share?
Samuel Demarais: We usually don’t think we need a coach until we hire one. Why do you think that most successful leaders work with coaches? We are not objective in our thoughts and it’s very easy to procrastinate and focus on the tasks we like instead of those that need to be done. If you really want your business to thrive, don’t lose more time and contact me.
