Enlisting A Coach To Boost Your Game

Nation's Business, Dec, 1998 by Dale D. Buss

For a long time, Don Thornhill suspected that she was just too nice. Instead of nurturing large clients that could afford to pay what was necessary to get the job done, the president and owner of TSH Marketing Group, a consulting firm in Austin, Texas, found herself squandering dozens of hours 'doing a lot of work for small companies that just didn't have the budget for what they wanted to do."

That was until Kathie Bolles came along. After meeting Bolles at a networking luncheon this year, Thornhill decided that Bolles and her Austin firm, Coach-Success, could provide Thornhill's business a sort of "therapy"--a type of self-inflicted kick in the pants that would help her eliminate her bad business habits.

For $400 a month, Bolles began having weekly half-hour phone sessions with Thornhill about the latter's management style. Bolles also sent encouragement to Thornhill via frequent electronic-mail messages. Soon, Thornhill says, "I wasn't getting sidetracked" trying to help clients that had inadequate budgets.

"We had a lot of conversations about 'What do you really need to be doing right now?"' recalls Bolles, who also is a registered nurse and a licensed psychotherapist.

The assistance provided by Bolles went beyond pure business advice. Segueing into Thornhill's hectic personal life as well, Bolles recommended that the entrepreneur, wife, and mother hand off some of her nonbusiness obligations. "So I hired a maid and gave management of our rental property to my husband; he's better at it than I am anyway," Thornhill says.

Thornhill and Bolles are part of the quickly growing wave of "coaching" relationships that are helping small-business owners improve their business skills, recalibrate their approaches to management, and, often, totally reboot and rebalance themselves as leaders on the job and in the home and community.

Industry participants estimate that there are more than 5,000 people who label themselves "coaches"; as recently as two years ago, there were about 2,000.

Business coaches can be many things: adviser, motivator, sounding board, and, indeed, therapist. "The relationship evolves over time based on the client's agenda," says Rich Fettke, a small-business coach in Lafayette, Calif.

Although many big-company executives retain coaches, small-business people may be the ones most in need of such help. Jeff Raim, president of the International Coach Federation (ICF), based in Angel Fire, N.M., says: "There's no one for the small-business owner to draw wisdom from in his structure, and getting it all from experience can be very expensive and time-consuming. In that sort of arena a good coach can be very valuable." Raim has owned several businesses and works exclusively with entrepreneurs.

It's easy to be skeptical about coaching. Even many of its practitioners don't seem to know exactly how to define it. Few academics have studied it. The name's allusion to the athletic world evokes images of detached exhortation while on the opposite extreme it may seem touchy-feely and overly personal. And as with any relationship that depends on the dynamics between two people, coaching can go awry.

But a clearer definition of coaching is emerging. It's more than consulting, which generally is a finite arrangement confined to business practices. And it's different from mentoring, which almost always involves someone with a good deal of experience in a position similar to that of the person whom the mentor is advising.

"We're focusing more on the person than on just the job, and on who they are rather than just what they want to accomplish," says John Seiffer, a coach in Bethel, Conn.

Coaching also is becoming more formally professionalized. For example, in September the ICF began distributing new standards to establish a credentialing process for coaches.

Most of those who have received coaching say they benefited from it. In a recent ICF poll of 210 clients, for example, 70 percent said they found their coaching "very valuable" and 28 percent thought it was "valuable."

Thumbnail sketches of five such relationships reveal some of the things that business owners like about coaching:

Richard Westlake And Ron Ernst

Home builder Richard Westlake, co-owner of Hansen & Horn Group Inc. in Indianapolis, appreciates the fact that his coach, Ron Ernst, "forces me to go the extra step or two" when making key decisions.

For example, the 44-year-old Westlake recently was about to hire a vice president of operations for his 35-employee, $20 million company. In the past, he typically would have settled on one of the two candidates that his customary recruiting process came up with.

But Ernst, president of Indianapolis-based Leadership Horizons, "wasn't satisfied with these guys because he'd worked with me and felt that neither of these people really would be compatible with my personality," Westlake says.

"So he had me take a couple of extra weeks, talk to recruiting companies, do some more networking, and even take out a newspaper ad, which I hadn't intended to do. It generated another 25 resumes, and I ended up hiring just the right individual--which I wouldn't have done without Ron."