Do I Want a Business Coach?

Everyone needs a coach – Our lives are the story of a Hero’s Journey with deaths, resurrections, seasons, adventure, and victorious celebrations, aka trauma. The common ingredient in every Luke Skywalker is a Yoda, someone who understands our aspirations and shows us how to take the next step. We usually think of coaching as learning the machinery of how to do something like business. We’re prone to focus on the pain of immediate needs and skip the transparency required for hearts and the dreams that flow from inside us. “Show me success but mind your own business!” is a form of self-sabotage because hearts drive the bus.

The American Dream – Businesses start with an entrepreneurial dream nurtured to life by an energetic self-starter. I love these people’s courageous initiative and want to stand with them. There are 33.2 million small businesses in America at a rate above 30,000 startups a year. 90% have less than 20 employees, and 80% have less than 10. The failure rates are:

20% in the first year 6,000 failures in the 1^st year
45% in the first two years 27,000 failures by the 2^nd year
90% in the first 10 years 270,000 total failures over ten years

That’s a lot of broken dreams. The obvious question is, “Why did they fail?” The answer is usually buried somewhere in a different question, “Why did they start?” If a business ship is on the rocks or dead in the water, the place to start is the dream that got the ship off course in the first place.

Coaching has four levels – There is no clear boundary between the spiritual aspects of your heart’s motivation and the practical stewardship of operating a successful business. Our Western appetite to separate the spiritual world from the natural is strictly a temporary miss-conception. We’ve found four essential pieces of that pie and described each to show how they flow together.

You have a purpose – We’re each designed with a purpose that we have to clarify and then intentionally choose. Doing what fits our calling, personality, and talent is a basic ingredient for business. Every entrepreneurial endeavor has enough trials to make anyone quit unless the story has meaning and there is a shot at a happy ending.

Your Business is Important (Mission) – The second key is that your business can be much more than an expression of your ego and fulfillment of your financial needs. Business is really the tool that expresses your purpose and creates compelling value for your customers. Money follows that value, and that’s why it all works. Your business is really a ministry in disguise, part of a larger plan to bless nations and build a Reformation. That context for your mission is part of the motivation for staff to help, and customers to buy. They resonate with your purpose and how it’s expressed through your business in the value you create.

Your Business Culture – Businesses and people with strategic purposes marry spiritual and natural features of their mission to build an attractive culture where staff and customers feel at home sharing the vision. Kingdom Business is a culture of honoring the corporate/CEO mission while connecting the dots to the purpose in individual hearts. People team up with our purpose when it fits what God wrote in their hearts. Caring about what God wrote in people’s hearts is the foundation for a healthy business culture and the definition of a Kingdom leader.

Business Operations – Business failures all lead to one sad fiscal reality. One day we can’t pay the bills. We didn’t see the cash flow going underwater in time to do something about it. Our coaching family has a 20-year history of helping businesses through every imaginable oversight that can go wrong at each stage of growth. We help you find the weak points and provide a path forward to keep the business healthy. That shopping list of specific issues is called the 21 silver bullets. It’s a great starting place to identify the weakest link in any business.

Holistic Coaching – We help businesses transition to the joy and prosperity of a Kingdom business culture by leveraging your unique purpose to ignite your staff and customers. The fun begins when you discover the why God wrote in your heart(s). We marry the cultural and practical side of sound business practices. Cash flow comes from a well-motivated, engaged staff culture and a wisely managed business built on a purpose already written in hearts. We have the resources to help you shift the culture and respond to the challenges.

There are two places to start: