Guiding Success: The path to a fulfilling career as a business coach
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| Guiding Success: The path to a fulfilling career as a business coach |
A career as a business coach offers not just the opportunity to shape successful businesses but also to empower individuals to reach their full potential.
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the demand for skilled guidance and mentorship is higher than ever. Entrepreneurs and business leaders face countless challenges, from navigating market shifts to optimizing team performance. This is where the role of a business coach becomes indispensable. A career as a business coach offers not just the opportunity to shape successful businesses but also to empower individuals to reach their full potential. This article explores what it takes to become a business coach, the rewards of the profession, and how you can embark on this fulfilling career path.Indiatoday.in spoke to Rajiv Talreja is the founder of Asia's Largest MSME Business Coaching Company - Quantum Leap Learning Solutions and got some amazing inputs on how business coaching can become a successful career.
What essential skills and qualifications are required to succeed as a business coach?
I think the most essential skill and qualification required is that before you become a business coach, you should have built a business. You should have had exposure to building teams. You should have had the exposure to setting up departments for marketing, sales, operations, accounts, and human resources. You should have had exposure to creating something profitable and of value, which I would say is the primary qualification.
There is no real academic qualification required to become a business coach, and apart from practical business experience, the other skills that would be essential would be the skill to train and facilitate learning experiences, and the skill of coaching, which is essentially the capability of asking the right questions which gets the client to reflect, which gets the client to make choices, and which also challenges the client. So it's a combination of coaching skills, training and facilitation skills for the sake of teaching, and practical experience of building a business.
How do you differentiate yourself from other business coaches in a competitive market?
Well, I genuinely believe that in the space of business coaching, while there are so many business coaches, there are very few who have the authenticity, integrity and the capability to deliver value to customers. And essentially these are the people who've had practical experience in building businesses in the past. So I would say that because I come from a background of building businesses myself, and I see myself more as an entrepreneur than a business coach. That I think can be a differentiating factor.
The other reality is that most business coaches are self-employed professionals, which means they are the ones who teach, they are the ones who coach, they are the ones who market, they are the ones who sell. Basically, they do everything for their business coaching practice. But in our case, I think our biggest differentiator is that we built a business coaching company and we are a team of 145 people. We have 65 full-time business coaches on our payroll. We've researched and developed a curriculum which is very, very relevant to micro, small and medium enterprise business owners, which is something that we test with existing clients, handhold them, and only then make it a part of our curriculum and teach it to newer clients.
So I think our differentiator is that we are an organisation, have a team of specialised business coaches who are functional experts, and our content is not something that is taken off the internet or from some textbooks, but it is curated after implementing strategies and systems with businesses, hand holding them and seeing them through with success, then we start teaching it and making it a part of our curriculum. So that's our big competitive advantage.
What challenges do you commonly face when coaching entrepreneurs, and how do you overcome them?
I would say considering we've been doing this for eight years working with micro, small, and medium enterprise business owners today, I wouldn't say we face challenges while coaching entrepreneurs.
But learning from our early stages, one of the things we realized is that when a client is taking up business coaching services, expectation management is very important. So from very early in our journey, we started setting expectations with a client saying "Hey listen, a business coach is not a magic wand. A business coach is not a genie who will just fulfil your whims and fantasies. You need to put in the work, you need to be willing to take action, you need to be willing to be held accountable, and you need to be willing to make mistakes only then the support and the handholding of the coaching will be of value to your business." You cannot hire someone to do your push-ups. The coach is an observer.
The coach is a facilitator. The coach is a guide. The coach is someone who's going to challenge you. The coach is not going to do the work for you. Because we learned very early in our journey, that people come with unrealistic expectations and they think that by having a business coach, the coach will do the work for them. Very early on we set these expectations, and therefore we did not face any challenges with our clients and we were able to attract the right kind of business owners who are willing to take responsibility and ownership for their businesses.
Can you share a success story where your coaching significantly impacted a client's business growth?
Well, I don't know which one to pick. We have more than two thousand success stories of business owners. When I say success story, I mean tangible revenue growth achieved in the business of the entrepreneur through coaching. So we have two thousand plus such stories.
But if I have to pick one or two to narrate one would be Vada Pav business, they came into our coaching ecosystem when they were doing 18 crores per annum and we were able to handhold them, help them scale up their franchisees, take them to over 100+ franchisees, and a revenue of 120 Crores per annum. So, JumboKing would be one story.
The other story that I think is extremely moving for me is Harvi Shah. She's the founder of anonline jewellery store. During the pandemic, everything came to a standstill for her business, and also for her husband, a senior executive in a financial services company, who was laid off from his job without any notice because of the pandemic.
I remember a conversation with Harvi where she was in complete panic, not knowing what is going to be the future of the family and the businessâ€æ we worked with her to re-strategize and come up with a model that would work during the pandemic, and today she runs 3 businesses as a result of that. She has BlingBag, which has grown from strength to strength, even beyond the pandemic, which is into online fashion jewellery. She also set up a digital marketing agency, and she built a business where she helps other women entrepreneurs set up online D2C businesses, which was what we helped her build during the pandemic when everything came to a standstill.
And today, the beauty is that her husband has joined her full-time in the business and he's never found the need to go back and look for a job, and both of them are building their business to new heights, and that's a very fulfilling feeling for me.
What advice would you give to someone aspiring to start a career in business coaching?
So there are three things that we do constantly, to keep evolving our knowledge and our content. Number one, I proactively and personally network with entrepreneurs and founders who've built very, very successful brands and businesses across segments and industries. So, when you have access and exposure to the best, you understand from their view, what's working, and what's not working. So there's a lot of real-time intelligence I bring in from that network I've built, with whom I am constantly asking questions, challenging them on why they are doing what they're doing, having conversations with them about where their industry is headed. So, working with some of the best guys, and peer networking and peer learning through them, is one way of us constantly updating and staying relevant.
The second thing that I consciously do is, I also network with a lot of functional experts. Like say, for example, I proactively spend some time with people who are doing some cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence and machine learningâ€æ I proactively spend time with people who are doing work in the D2C space and building brands. Proactively spend time with marketers. So one is entrepreneurs, the other is functional experts, because I think when we bring in the essence of domain expertise from successful entrepreneurs and functional expertise from functional experts, that's when we are able to constantly be in touch with the pulse of how the ecosystem of business and best practices is evolving.
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