If you think hiring a business coach is an unnecessary luxury you can’t afford, think again. While it may cost you money now, you cannot put a price on the time and money it will save you in the future. From invaluable insight to honest criticism, a business coach will ensure you get to where you want to be, but expedite the process. “In the entrepreneur community, we understand that the fastest way to get results is to go find people that have been where you are and pay them to help you get to where they’re at,” explains highly-successful entrepreneur Douglas James, who has coached over 1500 business owners and specializes in helping small business land high-ticket clients. “Find someone that’s one or two or even 10 years down the road, pay them for coaching and consulting and use the information to advance your career or entrepreneurship faster.”
They’ve failed so you don’t have to
According to James, it’s not impossible to accomplish anything on your own. “You can have this idea. You can do it alone. You can go through the rat race to try to figure out how it all works,” he says. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. “There’s a lot of people that do that, but it may take them years, thousands of dollars of testing and many challenges and failures.”
James’s solution? Establish your niche and find someone who is already excelling in that area and pay them for coaching. “Pay them to give you the information that they learned along the way so you don’t have to spend years and hundreds of thousand dollars trying to figure it out. You can pay them a lot less than that, cut your time down by years and get the information right.”
They can teach you how to manage a team
It’s one thing to set goals for your business. It’s a completely different thing to create and manage the teams necessary to achieve those goals. According to James, learning how to manage people is a crucial skill most entrepreneurs have to learn. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 20% of small businesses fail within the first year, and that’s largely due to premature scaling and the neglect of workplace culture. From hiring the right people and organizing payroll to creating a healthy working environment, scaling a business is a complex and nuanced process. Hiring a business coach is a great way to avoid those growing pains. “When you’re scaling a business, there are so many things that you learn on the way. One of those things is human resources,” he explains. “Someone that’s further along the way is going to be able to help identify the resources and skills you need to effectively manage a team and give you the tools to scale it.”
Not only will learning effective scaling methods from a business coach increase your growth rate, but it’ll ensure that one day you’ll achieve every entrepreneur’s main objective: freedom. “The best entrepreneurs and business owners I’ve ever seen are the ones able to start something and then eventually be completely hands-off,” explains James. “And the only way to do that is to learn how to scale a team efficiently so that payroll is going out, that the work’s getting done, your team is happy, and you’re making money while you sleep. That’s the end goal.”
They have connections
As the cliche goes, it’s all about who you know. That’s why James recommends picking a mentor whose inner circle resembles one you’d like for yourself. “When people are years down the road, they have a network. They have other entrepreneurs and business owners that they know and are probably doing business with,” he explains. “Your business coach can introduce you to those people. The fastest way for you to invest your money and create other opportunities for yourself is to utilize that network.”
So if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, here’s some free advice: Hire a business coach. The rest you’ll have to pay for (and it’ll be worth every penny).
