CQuest™ – The Quest for Capacity, Customers and Freedom of Choice
“When I signed up with RCC, I hoped to free up some of my time by empowering my employees to have some autonomy on their tasks. At first, I was hesitant to hire a long-distance coach because I wanted to be physically face-to-face with Rita, but it turned out to be just fine. I saw the results of our work very quickly! Following Rita’s suggestions, my foreman really stepped up and I didn’t have to be involved in a project! It was about letting go, and empowering my employees to take on more. I already knew this and tried this on my own without success. With Rita’s coaching, I knew what to say to my people this time. Then, I brought on a new employee; I had two new employees before this one and neither one worked. With Rita’s guidance, we have onboarded this new person successfully. I am happy about that. I am very enthusiastic about business coaching—and thankful to find Rita. I had interviewed other coaches, but I don’t want them to sugarcoat anything (I can do that on my own!) I want people who are going to help me go forward. Not everyone might need that kind of coaching. Rita was great! She immediately followed up with action items, and kudos, and what I had to think about more. So, before we talked each week I would go to that email. It had it all! I needed to delegate and not take it back. Rita did not let me slide or avoid anything. Every discussion was really meaty.”
—J.H., Louisville, Kentucky
The Business Challenges that Business Coaching Solves
There could be one or a multitude of reasons why you are interested in having a Business Coach or an Accountability Partner. Any one of these business challenges is a reason why small business owners like you hire Rita Coco to help them meet their goals.
Any of these challenges click with you?
- It would be wonderful to get a second opinion from someone who is objective and has your best interest in mind.
- Your employees are great, yet they are not as effective as they should be.
- There are service delivery issues.
- How do you find people who want to work at your company?
- You want to scale your company without making huge mistakes.
- You want to change what you do each day, but you are tied to operations.
- Jobs are not getting done on time and within budget.
- You want to make more, sell more and work less.
- You tried to delegate but then the job quality decreases.
- You’d like to be more strategic; where do you start?
- You want your employees to be autonomous and self-directed.
- You’ve always done sales the same way; are there best practices to learn?
- You need new hires, but if everyone did their job right, you would not need as many.
- Managing your employees is a new experience for you.
These are only a few of the many challenges business owners want to discuss with someone they trust and will hold them accountable to solve with great success.
Even if you check only one – call us! Click to call NOW!
What are your thoughts about coaching?
All of our clients are established business owners and most of them have owned their businesses for over five years. We actually have clients who are winding down their business after 15 or 30 years. These owners are extremely successful: they pay themselves a salary, they make payroll, they produce a great revenue, have great employees, and enjoy repeat business and customer referrals. Yet, many business owners with the same incredible profile as our clients would balk at having a coach, some have never thought of using a coach, and others have not found the right coach and have stopped looking.
Hiring a coach should be a personal, educated, and unprejudiced choice. A business owner decides to invest in a coach as part of investing in his/her company. Another business owner chooses to work through his challenges on his own without advice or help, while another owner enjoys having a coach’s opinion and support. Each decision is a personal preference, hopefully after the business owner has researched the value of coaching. Pre-judging coaching before learning its value could short-change an owner who would otherwise benefit from the partnership.
Now, there are business owners who set goals that can be met at a comfortable pace. They enjoy a nice work-life balance. These business owners are usually not looking for coaching support and that makes sense. These business owners are not our clients.
Our clients set goals that are incredibly stretchy and they know it. Our clients also realize that they don’t know how to go about achieving these stretchy goals in the quickest time possible. Remember one thing: most all business owners can achieve their goals over time and it is those owners who have aggressive timelines that usually (not always) seek support.
Some owners start out at a comfortable pace, and then unknowingly make a business decision that catapults them out of their comfort zone. This happens a lot to business owners who increase sales without building capacity to deliver. Figuratively, their boat capsized and they have to right it quickly. It will take longer for these owners to recover without coaching support. That is simply because coaches already have results of several ways to approach challenges. Owners don’t. Owners have to go through trial and error (reinvent the wheel) to determine how to handle each new situation.
Check your belief system to really be fair to yourself and to your company. If you really believe that coaching is a service that can move things along faster and with less angst, and yet you decide that you do not need this support, then you have made an educated decision. If you believe that coaching is mostly for businesses who are struggling and are unsuccessful, we recommend you research further. This limiting belief could be keeping you from getting value from coaching.
Why CQuest Business Coaching is Important to Small Business Owners
Rita Coco Consulting’s Business Coaching is called CQuest. Our coaching serves as a transformational corridor within which our small business owners shift their mindsets from owning a job to owning a company. That makes our business coaching very different from all other business coaches who work with small businesses. We are True Business Ownership coaches and consultants. We are driven to expect and advocate that all small business owners, even solopreneurs, can have the freedom to choose the relationship they want with their business. We coach to ensure that choice happens for our clients.
The purpose of the CQuest Business Coaching Service is to help business owners focus. This is the single most difficult challenge for the individual who wants to own a company rather than a job, and it can rarely be met without specific support. Because the day-to-day challenges and short-term needs continually eclipse any strategy and plan, the owner tends to end up in the same place year after year, even if the company appears to expand (more customers, more employees). The owner realizes that s/he is essentially in the same position: the blood and the heartbeat of the company. CQuest Business Coaching provides 4 crucial elements in an owner’s transition from being an employee to owning a company:
- Focus. Without the strategy and focus that comes with our Business Coaching, everyone–internally and externally–goes off track. Once we have a goal, we’re all supposed to be working towards it. The Business Coaching reports/action items help us see quickly when we are off course.
- Exploration. At no other time is the owner exploring possibilities, consequences, solutions to obtain capacity, customers and freedom to choose simultaneously. Small business owners tend to be reactive, so they rarely uncover the problem, instead they spend resources on the symptoms.
- Revelation. In every Business Coaching session, the owner learns something s/he needs to know about being a business owner, and or about the company s/he runs. This is the “I didn’t know I didn’t know” blind spot area, and it goes both ways. The owner can reveal something s/he wants/fears/needs and the Coach can help.
- Accountability. All owners feel that having someone they need to answer to is a game-changer. For the first time since going to work for themselves, there is another with an owner’s perspective who will look at a bigger picture and who will serve as a sounding board, voice of reason, ask the hard questions, push for results, and even roll up his/her sleeves to pitch in and help. This is NOT on any detail level, but on a “what needs addressing and how do we do it ” level.
The VALUE of the CQuest Business Coaching Service is to reconcile the difference between a business owner laboring a decade or more only to find the primary value of the company is no greater than the founder, vs. building a company that can function profitably with—or without—the owner and can even be transitioned to a new owner or a family member. CQuest Coaching achieves the owner’s long- and short-term goals from either the Endgame or Goal Planning engagements. Each Coaching session is filled with opportunities for the owner to set schedules, discuss issues, challenge limiting beliefs regarding the business, ownership and employees, to air frustrations and to celebrate and acknowledge wins.
Why Choose Rita Coco as Your Business Coach
Rita started coaching corporate seminar presenters in the 1990s. She would build training events, conferences, training, mentoring and coaching programs for vice presidents of product development, sales and marketing departments. She would coach the presenters on motivating audiences, facilitation, speaking techniques and inspiring adult learners. By 2000, she was coaching small business owners on marketing and presenting their services through seminars and workshops, and by 2007 her services morphed into coaching small business owners on having the business they wanted without having to sacrifice their personal lives.
The key to Rita’s coaching success is more than having the competencies of a great coach. Over the last 10 years, she developed a small business owner growth path that extends from start-up to business exit. The growth path has seven critical phases similar to what owners would call their next level of growth. Not only does Rita describe each next level in detail, but she created specific entry and exit conditions which help business owners move through each level. Rita uses the growth path to assess the potential growth required for an owner to reach his/her next level. Rita’s next level growth path is the foundation for directing the coaching sessions and achieving great success with her clients.
In Summary
Sometimes the best summary comes from a third party. Here is a Forbes article on why the business of business coaching is booming. In that you will find why businesses are looking for coaches and the benefits they hope coaching will bring to them and their companies. See why others are interested in how to pick coaches, what they bring to the table, and then make an educated decision if a coach is right for you…
… and if you are looking for a coach that gets you thinking and seeing results quickly
give us a call!
Rita’s tip for thinking out-of-the-box about
Business Coaching
I know this is old advice, but it is good advice. Look at many coaches before you choose. We are all different at what we do and how we do it. Our styles and methods are very different. All coaches can tell in a heartbeat if someone is their client – or not. For instance, there are coaches who enjoy project work and may not work with a client throughout the life of that client’s business. There are other coaches who call on executives, leadership teams, partners, solopreneurs, lawyers, and specific industries. There are coaches who are very successful and keep the relationship with their clients on a professional rather than a personal level. All coaches are very successful when they work with the clients they are supposed to serve. Of course, get recommendations from businesses who have used coaches extensively. It is not always fair to judge a coach based on small project or a coaching engagement that ran for a short time.
If you are curious about our client profiles for coaching, give us a call! If we are not right for you, we may know a coach who is!