The most searched online term for people looking to improve their lifestyles is “Certified Life Coach.” The latter sounds official, and without diminishing the resumes of CLCs, it covers everything but the kitchen sink. Experts in helping people to dress appropriately, improve their social interaction, date successfully, overcome depression, and set long-term life goals with family in mind (just a few examples) fall under the CLC definition. But, of course, with the extreme stress levels everyone faces these days via events like COVID-19, high inflation, and economic volatility, personal coaching is crucial wherever you feel it can impact your life.
Unfortunately, when running a business – arguably one of the most pressurized life challenges – the coaching remedy must be significantly more focused than CLC, as described above. So, if you’re running a company in a competitive marketplace and things aren’t going to plan, read on. An Action Coach (AC) may be just what the doctor ordered.
What is an Action Coach?
Coaching CEOs to run their operations systematically requires an expert understanding of the ins and outs of financial, marketing, HR, production, service, and sales strategies to create a profitable path forward. It involves knowing the metrics (i.e., Key Performance Indicators or KPIs) that leave no doubt if the results emerging are beating or meeting expectations, mediocre, or plain awful. Moreover, business coaching requires a deep appreciation of the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) to help stakeholders steer their ships through calm waters.
For example, did you know that CX is a series of touchpoints (TPs) from end to end that hopefully culminate in the customer buying one’s product or service and coming back for more? And in every customer journey (CJ), it takes only one TP to derail it, with the customer never returning? The TP can be as small as poor client support on live chat, confusing website content, a friend’s negative review, or hard-to-read instructions. And did you know that many companies don’t have a handle on the TPs working in their favor or against them? So, a competent Action Coach can bring TPs under the spotlight as part of their function.
The same goes for understanding employee churn, evidenced by the recent Great Resignation, where voluntary resignations flooded businesses in 2021 and 2022. Unfortunately, EX touchpoints go much further than hiring, firing, salary scales, and job descriptions. Action coaches show how team dysfunction, failure to learn more on the job, lousy boss attitude, and the elephant in the room these days, remote working, negatively impact employee retention. When profits decline or revenue growth stalls, it generally circles back to CX or EX issues because losing loyal customers and long-term staff costs the business community billions every year.
So, in a nutshell, an Action Coach is a life coach that releases stress and creates more time for family (with better quality living) by converting your company from a sluggish monolith dodging obstacles most of the time into a well-oiled machine that runs on organized processes.
Okay, but what does an AC do?
Business coaching is a personal interaction between the AC, CEOs, and their teams. A rapport built on trust, confidence, transparency, and integrity must be in the mix. In addition, speed is of the essence, especially when a business is leaking cash, profits, or both. Professional ACs get to the crux of the matter fast to stop the bleeding, lift morale, and shift focus to the things that matter.
When I began coaching, I immediately noticed that many clients spent 80% of their time on issues with only 20% weighting on results, letting the massive performance drivers that count run out of control. So what do ACs do to right the ship? They develop what is known as an Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS®, that systematically creates the following:
- A clear corporate vision and mission statement
- Slotting the right people into the right positions is the next step. From there:
- Structuring a leadership team under a ceo that can effectively make (a) above a reality.
- Thus ensuring staff retention over the long term
- Identifying defective EX and CX touchpoints through a TP mapping process, followed by:
- Minimizing or erasing them
- Documenting all processes the leadership team agrees is critical to smooth sailing.
- Compiling a list of KPIs to monitor performance.
- ommunicating accountability and responsibility, and, most critically, recognizing the employees meeting expectations.
In short, an Action Coach should deliver an integrated program that empowers the stakeholders to bolster team, vendor, and customer KPIs to impact the bottom line significantly.
How do I know I need an Action Coach?
The quick test is when your business keeps you up at night. Remember, your brainchild is supposed to support and accelerate your lifestyle, not weigh it down. If things are happening in your business that you can’t put your finger on, possibly because your nose is up against the trees instead of above looking at the forest, you need an AC. I’m the latter with a unique value proposition: If I don’t improve your performance, there is no charge. You can’t get a better business coaching mandate than that. Finally, where companies’ primary obstruction is a shortage of capital, I can find it for you and, in cases, invest myself. So, connect with me, Clay Lutrell, the Action Coach streets ahead of the herd for a free, no-obligation conversation.
