Q1 Why did you decide to start a coaching business?
Having held an extensive and successful international business career, I wanted to give back to other business leaders. Coaching seemed to be an obvious choice to me.
I co-founded my own business in 2009 when I was in my early 40’s and I learned a great deal from this experience, both what to do, and more importantly, how to learn from my mistakes and do it better. One of the key drivers behind me starting out on my own was feeling that I had missed out on a great opportunity to take on an existing business when I was in my mid 20’s. I simply didn’t have the self-confidence or self-belief to take the business on at the time, despite the encouragement that I received from both the customers and the team behind it.
In between, I worked for some amazing businesses all around the world and I was fortunate to work with some incredible people, both women and men. I guess I found my confidence this way.
Fast forward to today, and I work with inspiring women, men and couples of all ages within my coaching business. I have ambitious young clients in their 20’s and I can relate to their feelings as they are setting out on their entrepreneurial careers. I also have clients in their 50’s and 60’s who are approaching retirement and are looking to get the most out of their remaining time and achieve the maximum business valuation before they exit. I love the fact that I get to work with individuals at different stages of their businesses and help them achieve their goals and dreams. I see it as a real privilege.
During my international business career, I enjoyed leading teams and discovered that I had a natural flair for motivating and inspiring people. As a coach, it’s important for me to be always upbeat and keep my clients motivated. When a client comes into a coaching session, more often than not, they’re really upbeat and positive, but occasionally, they may join a session feeling negative. The diverse experience that I have accumulated over the years allows me to be consistently strong and positive for my clients to get the most out of them.
I am not sure I understood the importance of things like this when I went into coaching originally. However, I now know that it’s these abilities that separate an average coach from an excellent one.
~Business Game Changer Special Promotion~
Q2: How does your business differentiate itself from other coaching businesses?
First and foremost, as a coach your clients buy into you personally. I bring a wealth of different experiences to my clients ranging from many years delivering results through my leadership roles with some of the world’s best organisations. I have started my own business from scratch. Today, I am running my own business with an amazing team (currently all women), so my experience is current, operating in the same challenging economic environment that my clients are experiencing too.
I am very fortunate to run a practice within the world’s number 1 business coaching firm, ActionCOACH. I benefit from being part of a global organisation that has supported 10,000’s of business owners around the world with the growth of their businesses since the early 1990’s. I have the privilege of being focused within my local business community and being part of a network of more than 1,000 international coaches. We have a tried and much tested business growth system that we call 6 Steps.
I have also qualified as an Executive Coach at Henley Business School, where I learned how to be a professional coach before starting my ActionCOACH practise. This training provided me with the confidence to coach anyone on any topic through the GROW model.
As a coach, your purpose is to facilitate your client’s thinking so that they solve their problems for themselves. For my clients I can coach them and at the appropriate times combine this with being a mentor because of my business experience. I am educator to my clients on good business practice.
Right from the very first coaching session, I also introduce my clients to mindset awareness and start supporting them to focus on the behaviours that drive powerful thinking.
I believe it is combining all these elements together that benefits my clients and differentiates my coaching business.
Q3: What are the most common problems faced by women starting or running their own business and how can these problems be overcome?
I believe that the three most common problems faced by women running their own businesses relate to time, team, and money, some key solutions for these include:
Time: Not enough hours in the day for running your business and all your other responsibilities including time with family and friends.
- Start from the beginning of your journey with a mindset that ‘I invest my time’, as opposed to ‘I just spend time’. To achieve this, you must value your time and meter where you invest your time.
- Plan all 7 days of the week covering your business and personal life. From a business perspective you must schedule time for working ON your business, not simply 100% working IN your business, reacting to the urgent/important issues and activities.
- Know your worth, put a monetary value on your own time (i.e., have an hourly rate). Any activity that falls below this hourly rate can be delegated or outsourced, allowing you to focus on the activities that require your skill level or allow you to schedule time for investing in your growth so that you can grow your company.
Team. When you start recruiting, attracting the right people, then getting them to perform as you desire and then retaining them in the medium to long-term.
- Key to this is defining your company culture, what your values are and what they are not. The rules of the game for being accepted into your team.
- Create an inspiring vision that will allow you to attract the best people. Interview them based on your vision and culture along with the responsibilities for the job and being clear on the experience that you want them to have. This will maximise your chances of recruiting the right people.
- Lead your team to perform and invest in their development and progression. Provide them with the incentives that reward the performance that you want and for living your values with you.
Money. Not generating enough sales and/or profit and/or running out of cash.
- You absolutely must master knowing your numbers, your Profit & Loss (P&L), Balance Sheet and your cashflow. You should know your daily, weekly, and monthly breakeven points, i.e., how much sales you need to generate before you have covered all your costs.
- I like my clients to define how much profit they want to make too, so they not only know their breakeven, but also their profit breakeven. This way they will know if they have achieved their profit requirement for the day as well as knowing that they have their costs covered.
- You must know your margins on all your products/services. Most businesses fail because they run out of cash, so you must plan your cashflow weekly as well as for the month, the quarter and for the year ahead.
- Key to good cashflow management is invoicing as quickly as you can, collecting payment on these invoices as soon as you can along with paying your suppliers to the most extended payment terms that you can achieve with them.
Q4: What are the key elements of a successful business?
You must be unique. Differentiate yourself from your competitors. To achieve this, you need to be clear about and define your niche. This will allow you to compete on the value that you bring your customers and not simply force you into competing solely on price. You must be targeted rather than trying to appeal to a broad market.
Be great from the start at all the business basics. From goal setting, business planning, your own self-discipline of how you invest your time, being consistent with your delivery and absolutely know your numbers.
Become an expert at marketing. This doesn’t mean that you must do it all yourself, but you need to confidently lead your marketing. If you do not have a marketing background, then often this topic can be very foreign to you. Think of it as simply the skill of communicating with and educating your prospective and existing customers about the benefits that can the achieved from buying your products and/or services. Marketing starts well before the first sale and continues well after the last sale.
You’re in the business of selling. If you decide to go into business, you have to consider yourself to be in the business of selling too. Having a confident mindset about sales, just like marketing is crucial. Many business owners don’t consider themselves to be good at sales. Sales is simply having a purposeful conversation to help people buy your products and services.
Inspire your team. Sell all your employees from the very first one about your vision and your culture, what your values are and what they are not. Ensure the team has a common goal and that you provide the right environment to lead them to achieve your destination with you. Start from the beginning with the goal to make yourself dispensable. This will ensure that you will reach the stage where the business can work without you, providing you with your future freedom. This mindset will force you to become great at the art of delegation.
Have a ‘systems run the business’ mindset. This will enable you to scale the business. With documented workflows and how to manuals comes consistency. You train your team in the system and you first look for fault in the system not your people. Improve the system continuously.
Q5: How should women business owners face the fear of failure?
It is helpful to consider FEAR, as False Expectations Appearing Real. Fear is not real. It is made up in our minds, although some people are naturally more fearful than others. Typically, people (women and men) who have a more reserved nature are more cautious and can have a greater sense of fear. More outgoing people typically are less fearful.
Keeping a positive mindset is crucial and will help with your resilience. A good tip is listen to your self-talk. Are you are having more positive thoughts than negative ones? Even for the more optimistic among us, this needs to be a 3:1 ratio (positive/negative), and even more if you are more naturally fearful.
Fear can be a good thing. It triggers our natural fight or flight response. It drives us to succeed, and it can keep us sharp and on our game. However, too much fear can lead to unhealthy levels of stress, which in turn can cause mental health issues.
There is much talk about comfort zone. If you go into business for yourself, expect to be constantly out of your comfort zone and get comfortable being out of your comfort zone.
The great news is that surrounding your comfort zone is the performance zone. We can all think of those moments and activities that have taken us out of our comfort zone. Having done so and made positive progression then we experience a buzz from knowing that we have stretched ourselves. When you have done this, you have unconsciously stepped into the performance zone, which has then boosted your confidence and stretched your comfort zone. Becoming conscious of stepping out of your comfort zone and spending time in the performance zone leads to high performance.
Having clear long-term, medium- and short-term goals helps us with our fears. All my clients have 90-day plans. At the end of the calendar quarter, it is really helpful to set your goals for the next quarter and plan in detail the activities that will help you build towards your long-term vision. By considering what might hold you back from achieving these goals also helps build your resilience as you are anticipating and planning for the things that might go wrong. The most important goals of all are your daily goals. These keep you focused on the here and now and take your mind off any fear.
When building your team, if you are more naturally fearful, recruit others that are less fearful. This can be understood through using behavioural analysis, such as DISC, in your recruitment. If you are considering a business partner, make sure that you complement each other on your natural levels of fear as well as all the usual considerations about combining your strengths and weaknesses.
Q6: What three pieces of advice would you give to a woman planning to start her own business?
Begin by planning your end destination – what is it that you want to achieve from your business that will support you to achieve what you want out of your life. Be clear about your timeframe (such as 5-10 years). I believe in Dreaming Big. For me, a great test for this is asking yourself the question: Do your dreams for your destination both excite and scare you? If they don’t, then you need bigger dreams! Don’t worry about the process of how you will achieve these dreams. Just focus on what you want to have.
Have total passion for the line of business that you are going to pursue. This will see you through all the high and lows of your business. Your passion must inspire your customers and your team. Be crystal clear about your purpose, your ‘Why’. Why will the world and your customers miss you if you do not start this amazing new business? If you have this, you will be able to articulate your ‘why’ and with it your passion to your target market.
Plan for your worst-case revenue and profit targets (i.e., don’t be over optimistic) for the first 2-3 years. Most business owners overestimate their early performance. The good news is that most underestimate what they can achieve in the longer term. In your business plan, it is better to go on the high end of your ranges on your costs and the lower end on your sales for the early years. This doesn’t mean that you must spend more than you need or be less ambitious about your early sales, it is just to ensure that you go ahead with starting your business and have the financial resources should this more pessimistic view happen in the early years. It will typically take 7 years to build a total start up. The first 2-3 will be the hardest financially.
Then having decided to go into business, just enjoy the journey of building it and living your life using your business as your vehicle to your success.
Bio
Natalie is a certified executive and business coach with first-hand experience as an entrepreneur and business leader, and an in-depth understanding of the challenges they face. In addition to co-founding and running her own technology business, Natalie spent three decades of her career in technology and leadership roles at global companies including The Walt Disney Company, Eversheds LLP and Condé Nast International.
In 2017, Natalie made the decision to apply her wealth of experience in business, digital transformation and team building to support business leaders; applying her skills and learnings to help them to grow and thrive. She earned her Professional Certificate in Coaching and Behavioural Change from Henley Business School and hasn’t looked back.
As Managing Director of ActionCOACH Winchester Basingstoke and Farnborough, Natalie combines her passion for building businesses and communities with her in-depth experience, training and drive for success. Together with her team, she works closely with her clients to provide the skills, techniques, support and accountability they need to achieve their goals and to grow their businesses.
