Business Trainers A New Approach To Coaching

How to make a business profitable without the presence of its owner?

The question is asked every day by entrepreneurs, when looking for solutions to the excess of work and hours that most of them dedicate to their businesses.

"When the owner of a company works 14 or 16 hours a day in it, it is because the business is poorly conceived or is simply assimilated as the owner's job, and not as a productive investment that only requires coordination," says Jackie Nagel, General Director of Small Business Coach Associates for Latin America, who will speak today at the Radisson Teleport Hotel in Bogotá.

The manager assures that modern entrepreneurs must choose between keeping their companies all day, or dedicating a few hours a day to them, to spend more time creating new business opportunities and setting up more companies and services that demand the market.

"The goal is to get to the point where businesses are profitable without their owner," says the Mexican expert.

According to Jackie Nagel, the essence of the model is to teach company owners how to improve competitiveness.

"This will allow an entrepreneur to manage 20 companies at the same time, and in addition to that have room to innovate with new companies and profitable investment opportunities."

Small business coach objective is not to save companies that are in a difficult situation, but to train their owners to free up time and dedicate themselves to looking for new opportunities, or simply spend more time with their family, generating stability and personal satisfaction. According to Juan Guillermo Paul Martinelli, one of the business coaches at the Action firm in Colombia, the training takes at least one year, and can be extended to eight, if necessary.

“In most cases, what has happened is that businessmen ask us to stay with them for more than a year, since we offer the guarantee that our work only ends after 12 months, as long as the two initial goals that we always set ourselves: reduce the working hours of the owners in their companies and increase profits”.

According to the directors of the company, what Small Business Coach Associates does is not a consultancy but rather resembles a university in which the professor lives with the student during the learning period.

Own job

In the opinion of the experts, the problem of most of those who start a small business is that they always think that they must spend a lot of time because that is their job, without realizing that it should not be considered their job, but their business, and therefore it is necessary to promote its growth.

And what are the keys to achieving the goal?

Paul Martinelli explains that there are five tips to keep in mind:

Do not set up a company with the sole criterion that you do not want to have bosses; do not consider your company as the workplace, but as your business; do not distrust the ability of your employees; and make permanent monitoring of the evolution of the company.

In Colombia, traditional coaching is done through the face-to-face accompaniment of the firms that provide the service. For its part, the multinational Action manages a model in which business training can be carried out via teleconferences, telephone and other modern means of communication.

In general, the companies that provide these consulting services work with what is called life coaching.

We have all the questions for the entrepreneurs who require us, because the work must be carried out in accordance with the vision of each client.

"Customer responses to our concerns are key when setting up the strategy to increase the free time of company owners."

Paul Martinelli affirms that small and medium-sized Colombian companies have a great opportunity with the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, but that it is necessary to choose between two paths: allying with their American competitors or openly confronting each other in the bid for the market, in the case of which will be essential to improve competitiveness and define innovative strategies that promote growth in the market.

In his opinion, “the country cannot continue discussing whether the FTA is good or bad, but how we are going to take advantage of the opportunities. However, we must prepare for them.”

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