95% of businesses fail within their first five years. A rather jarring global statistic for anyone looking to start any sort of business. However, if at least 10% of those business owners would go into executive or business coaching, the rate of success would be considerably higher.
But why executive or business coaching? Why should more people consider exploring the business coaching industry? Simply put: there are incredible opportunities in this market that many overlook. There are four key aspects to consider when deciding on whether or not you should embark on a business coaching journey.
1. Growth Rate
Business coaching is an industry that is currently experiencing massive growth not only locally but internationally as well. In South Africa alone, the number of registered businesses ranges from 2.3 to 2.5 million, of which only about 1.5% of that are business coaching businesses. From these statistics alone, it is clear that the scope of growth to help businesses succeed is still huge.
2. Higher Business Margins
When going into business or executive coaching, it is not quite the same as running a business in the traditional sense. In this industry, you can run your business with far higher margins than in many other businesses.
Unlike most businesses, you do not have stock to purchase on a regular basis, assets to obtain (other than laptops and computers) or even employ a considerable amount of employees to start your business. That said, your profit margins are already considerably higher than businesses that would require a significant portion of capital to begin.
3. Consulting VS Coaching
Before going into this industry, the distinction between consulting and coaching is of vital importance.
As a consultant, a company may bring you in to share your insight as an expert in a specific area. They would then contact you for the time and value you would add. However, the disadvantage here is that because you have sold your time, you can only take on one client at a time, maybe two at best.
Business coaching, on the other hand, allows you to sell a portion of your time to facilitate future value services to several business owners at a time. Where a consultant would do the work for the client, a business coach would provide skills and resources that would prompt internal growth and success through the business owner’s own efforts.
Given the fact that you only sell some of your time and the client does the majority of the heavy lifting, the number of clients you can take on at any given point could be anywhere from 10 to 30 clients or more. Here, you run a business with a more consistent cash flow, resulting in you running a lower risk business.
4. Running a Leveraged Business
What does a leveraged business mean? There are a few key components to be understood:
- You can leverage the products and services you have on offer to clients across different industries. Business coaching consists of teaching general business principles of success to help businesses grow and succeed in whatever industry they operate in.
- You can run a coaching practice where there is a time leverage. There will be times when you would offer coaching on a one-to-one basis, weekly, fortnightly or even on a monthly basis. On the business education front of coaching, it allows you to group multiple businesses from a number of industries to leverage your time out to all of them simultaneously to give them the same high value and access to incredible material.
In Conclusion:
In a market that has a high failure rate, business coaches work with business owners and entrepreneurs to create Commercial PROFITABLE Enterprises that buy them TIME and FREEDOM to work on that which they have been called to do. Business coaching could make a significant contribution to tackling South Africa’s incredibly high unemployment rate by coaching owners to have more time, better functioning teams, financial success and very importantly strong mindsets required to succeed in business.
