- What is Online Business Coaching?
- Benefits of Working with an Online Business Coach
- How to Choose the Right Online Business Coach
- Implementing Online Business Coaching in Your Business
Q: How Does Online Business Coaching Work?
A: Online business coaching typically involves virtual meetings, goal setting, strategic planning, and ongoing support to help clients achieve their business objectives.
There are over 33 million small businesses in the U.S., accounting for 99.9% of all businesses in the country.
After all has been said and done, these businesses aim for one thing: SUCCESS. However, success means something different for every one of them.
Whatever it means, it’s captured in their business goals and objectives. The question now is: how do you ensure you do everything right to meet those goals?
As an entrepreneur or business owner, this question has probably crossed your mind.
Like you, many business owners have thought of that and acknowledged that it’s not something they can do on their own. Some ran through many hurdles before they came to that realization and turned to an online business coach for guidance.
The digital age is rife with uncertainties and rapidly changing business environments, which makes it difficult for small businesses to effectively apply tested and trusted business strategies that worked in the past.
Virtual business coaches help entrepreneurs and small business owners navigate the twists and turns of the modern business landscape while remaining on course to their goals.
You could say that online coaching services are accountability partners and support systems for entrepreneurs, keeping them, and consequently businesses, going even when the tasks ahead seem more tedious than the previous ones.
In turn, the professional business coaching industry has witnessed tremendous growth in the past few years; as of 2023, there were over 77,000 professional business coaching services registered in the U.S.
The industry continues to grow as more business owners and entrepreneurs find the need for and tap into business coaching for entrepreneurs to boost their chances of success.
If you are here, it’s likely that you are considering getting a business coach and would like to know how to navigate the industry. And as you have already guessed, we are here to help!
In this article, we’ll take a comprehensive look at business coaching benefits, how to choose the right coach, and how to implement virtual business coaching in your business.
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What Is Online Business Coaching?
To understand what online business coaching entails, you must first know who a business coach is.
Put simply, a business coach is an individual who is professionally certified to provide entrepreneurs, business owners, business managers, and other interested parties with the mentorship and guidance they need to grow their businesses and achieve success in due time.
Similarly, online business coaching is the process of providing professional guidance and mentorship through digital platforms to help business owners and entrepreneurs achieve their business goals.
Online coaching services provide personalized guidance and advice based on your business needs, helping you navigate through your business concerns confidently.
Typically, online business coaching involves three processes:
- Virtual meetings: This is to establish a relationship with you and acquaint themselves with your business operations. Subsequently, for scheduled catchups, to devise strategies, evaluate progress, and plot the way forward.
- Goal setting: This is done after initial virtual meetings and acquaintance to define a path towards business success.
- Strategic planning: This typically includes milestones and metrics for measuring performance. Here, your coach provides you with proven business growth strategies that have been adapted to meet your business needs.
Types of Coaching
There are various types of remote business mentoring available to entrepreneurs. The most common types are:
Generally, professional business coaching is an ongoing process that lasts as long as the contract permits or the business achieves its set goals.
Your online business coach is fundamentally an auxiliary staff you can run to for support when you need one.
Benefits of Working with an Online Business Coach
Below are some of the many business coaching benefits that await entrepreneurs who employ online coaching services:
Expert Guidance
Business coaches provide personalized expert advice and strategic insights to help businesses navigate challenges and seize opportunities.
Your business coach will take the time to learn the ins and outs of your business, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are distinctive to it.
They weigh these points against practical and effective business growth strategies to determine where or how your business fits in and help you develop a tailored roadmap that structures your business correctly and sets it on the path to success.
One of the best things about expert guidance provided by an online business coach is that it’s never a one-off.
They don’t just give you a plan and a map and release you into the wild; they talk the talk and walk the walk with you—every step of the way.
Accountability and Focus
Coaches help business owners and entrepreneurs maintain focus on business goals and hold clients accountable for their progress.
Your win is also a win for the coach.
However, although your online business coach is willing to hold your hand through the chaos of small business management, they also recognize that they won’t always be there for you. Therefore, you must learn to take full responsibility for your business while being steadily focused and accountable.
Hence, they will challenge, push, and remind you to take bold steps and actions you otherwise wouldn’t have the confidence and courage to take.
A virtual business coach will help you focus on your objectives and push you through your limits to achieve them as long (as they are attainable).
More importantly, they will hold you accountable for all your actions and the consequent progress or failure that comes with them.
Skill Development
Business coaches help business owners and entrepreneurs develop critical business skills such as leadership, decision-making, and financial management. They will guide you toward developing the essential skills necessary to steer your business to success.
Learning is a continuous process, and the fact that the business landscape is rapidly changing also means that there are new things to learn every day, even in fields where you are exceptionally experienced.
Professional business coaches will assess your skills against those necessary to succeed in your industry. They will point out where you are lacking and encourage you to improve your skills in those areas.
Some will even help you find and point you in the direction of credible resources that will facilitate your skill development.
With the support of your professional business coaching provider, you’d learn and develop resilience and problem-solving skills needed to continually and effectively learn on your own, even when your contract with the coach has ended.
Accessibility and Flexibility
Gone are the days when having a business coach meant waiting forever to finally meet face-to-face with your coach to address problems that should have been sorted out the day they occurred.
Online coaching is a sweet blend of flexibility and accessibility that allows business owners to receive support from anywhere—and at any time, in some cases.
Thanks to the internet, communication platforms, and portable devices, like phones and laptops, you can access your coach from anywhere in the world. More importantly, you can schedule or reschedule your virtual meetings to suit your convenience.
This flexibility enables business coaches to provide timely support to their clients.
How to Choose the Right Coach
There are about 114,000 people employed in the over 77,000 coaching services registered in the U.S.
How do you go about choosing the right business coach from a pool of thousands of certified online business coaches?
Step1: Identify Your Needs
Assess your specific business needs and goals to determine the type of coaching required. What do you need a coach for?
- Do you want to be a better business leader or manager?
- Do you want to be better at selling?
- Do you just need someone to guide you with effective strategies through the rigors of small business management?
Here, you have to evaluate yourself as much as you are evaluating your business.
You should measure your skills and capabilities against your business’s strengths and weaknesses to identify areas you are failing in and how professional business coaching can help you improve in those areas.
You may also want to determine the extent to which you can allow an online business coach to be involved in your business. As much as you need guidance and mentorship, you also want to protect trade secrets unique to your business.
Armed with the knowledge of the type of coaching solution you need, it’s time to explore what the market has to offer.
Step 2: Research and Recommendations
There are over 100,000 business coaches out there, and you can easily bet that most of them won’t be a good fit for your business.
So, how do you know a virtual business coach would benefit you?
Honestly, in most cases, you wouldn’t know until you get involved with them. Some entrepreneurs find out that the online coaching services they subscribed to are not good for them only after they are a few thousand dollars in without any real progress.
To boost your chances at making the right choice, you should:
- Research potential coaches: First, research the industry to find coaches who have experience with your business needs based on the information available on the internet. Then, research each coach further to see what they offer. You can narrow the list of potential entrepreneurial coaching services down to a top 10 or top 5.
- Seek recommendation: With over 33 million businesses across the U.S., chances are that some other entrepreneurs in your industry got ahead through business coaching benefits. Seek their recommendations, either for an excellent coach or where/how to find the best fit for your specific business needs.
- Read reviews: Check what previous clients are saying about virtual coaches that have made your list. Pay attention to what they are saying about the coach’s approach, methodologies, and engagement with their mentees. More importantly, are their methods effective?
Now that you have a list of business coaches who offer remote business mentoring for entrepreneurs in situations like yours, it’s time to do more personal digging.
Step 3: Credentials and Experience
There’s an absolute need for you to check each coach’s credentials, qualifications, and experience in your industry.
Today, there are lots of online courses teaching everyone and anyone to be an online business coach in just a few hours, after which they get a certificate and start their coaching.
Hopefully, you eliminated these inexperienced coaches the step above.
You want to confirm that the coach has solid credentials that you can verify against some global business coaching standards.
It’s not enough to have an online business coach who appears on your screen from time to time to say, “You can do it.”
You need a charismatic, strategic thinker who is experienced in implementing tested business growth strategies and can personalize those strategies to fit your specific business needs.
Consider coaches that are members of or certified by organizations like:
- International Coaching Federation (ICF)
- Professional Business Coaches Alliance (PBCA)
- International Organization for Business Coaching (IOBC)
- Forbes Coaches Council
Focus on organizations that require at least 60 hours of training and 3 years of coaching experience for memberships.
You can go the extra mile to check their educational background; you may be better off with an online business coach who started their career by first obtaining a coaching education from a reputable business school.
More importantly, verify that each coach has tangible experience in your field—or related fields.
Step 4: Compatibility and Communication
As a last stop, try to interact with each of the coaches. Schedule a call with each to learn more about their offers and to determine their accessibility, communication skills, and compatibility with your values and needs.
Business mentorship and guidance works well when there’s good rapport and clear communication between the mentor and the mentee.
Otherwise, the relationship would be a chore, even if your online business coach is doing everything by the book.
For as much as your coach is more a mentor than your friend, you still want to be amicable as you relate with them. After all, you will be stuck with them for a while, sharing some intimate details about your business—and probably yourself.
Implementing Online Business Coaching in Your Business
Now that you have a coach ready to board the ship and steer your business with you, you should prepare to align yourself and the business with online coaching services.
Set Clear Goals
It’s important to set clear, measurable goals for the coaching engagement. Since you have already identified your needs for professional business coaching, assess those needs to define what you need to achieve within reasonable timeframes.
Your virtual business coach will likely provide more insights into how to define and split goals into easily achievable objectives once your sessions start.
Consider using the S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) framework.
This is very important for breaking tasks down into less daunting activities and keeping expectations realistic throughout your business coaching contract.
Regular Sessions
Schedule regular coaching sessions to maintain momentum, boost accountability, and ensure consistent progress.
You shouldn’t limit sessions to once or twice a month. Embrace it as part of your regular, if not daily, business operations. Regular sessions are great for addressing challenges and success as they happen, helping you gain a fresh perspective at every turn.
Regular sessions help your virtual business coach have an in-depth, real-time understanding of your skills and business, empowering them to provide more personalized guidance every step of the way.
On your own part, you learn to be more adaptable, agile, and resilient as you learn to process new information and strategies quickly and implement them across necessary business operations ahead of upcoming sessions.
Tracking Progress
Use tools and metrics to track progress and evaluate the effectiveness of the coaching.
This is where those clear, measurable goals you set earlier come into play. Consider the timeframes and milestones as benchmarks and metrics for conducting assessments to measure progress.
You and your online business coach can use tools like Practice to schedule and track sessions. These tools allow you to track and manage your relationship with your coach.
This makes it easier for you to look at the historical data to measure your progress, given the guidance provided by your coach so far.
- How often do you reach set milestones within given timeframes?
- How effective were the strategies provided by the coach at each level?
- Overall, how has your business or skills improved since contracting the remote business mentoring service?
You can also measure progress by measuring revenue growth, business engagements (since you started entrepreneurial coaching), and employee engagement and performance (especially if you are involved in executive business coaching).
Adapting and Evolving
Always seek feedback from your mentor.
As today’s complex business landscape continues to change, your coach will always map out strategies to help you handle unforeseen situations and think on your feet.
This is helpful for navigating tough business situations, and it could sometimes mean switching directions and taking an improved path to your business goals.
Be flexible and open to adapting strategies based on feedback and changing circumstances.
Wrapping Up: Online Business Coaching
As an entrepreneur, the road to effective and successful business management is often rugged, lonely, and without shade trees to occasionally rest underneath and catch your breath.
Online professional business coaching has proved to be a game changer in this context, helping business owners and entrepreneurs with the business mentorship, guidance, encouragement, confidence, and support they need when they need it the most.
To get the most out of business coaching benefits, you should take the time to understand what online business coaching entails and find out what type of coaching would be valuable to you.
Understandably, there are many online business coaches out there, and it could be difficult choosing the right one.
Do your due diligence by first identifying your needs, then research the industry and seek recommendations for a virtual business coach based on your needs. Also, evaluate the experience and credentials of potential business coaches, as well as their communication skills and compatibility with your values and needs.
Lastly, create measures for setting clear goals, booking regular sessions, tracking progress, and readily adapting strategies throughout your relationship with your coach—and even beyond—to ensure success.
Further Reading:
- How AI is Transforming Small Businesses: Key Benefits and Future Trends
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
As you look forward to the growth that comes with business success, you should also prepare to efficiently and sufficiently cater for potential clients across the U.S. and globe.
Virtual office solutions easily come to mind. Helping you establish instant business presence and credibility in local markets while also serving as an avenue for facilitating and implementing/testing new strategies from your business mentorship sessions in real-time, across target markets.
Contact us to learn more about how our virtual office solutions can help you achieve your business goals effortlessly.
