You’re a business owner with a couple dozen employees, a competing
company nipping at your heels and a husband and kids. You love
your work but it’s lonely at the top.
Who can you turn to for advice?
Set a phone date with a business coach.
“I am a sanity check for clients,” said Bill Pinkerton of The VV Group in West Bloomfield. “I keep them on track.”
For $350 a month, he offers three 40-minute phone sessions for
entrepreneurs struggling for personal and professional success.
Pinkerton pokes and prods, he keeps track of a client’s agenda
and, most important, he holds each client accountable for achieving
the goals he or she has set.
One of his clients, Lesley Delgado, has started her temporary
placement service in 1992, but ever since she had procrastinatied
in writing 30-day training manuals for three important company
jobs.
The result was inadequate employee training.
After only three months of Pinkerton’s coaching, Delgado had the
training manuals written and bound, and her employees were getting
the training they needed.
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“I hadn’t been held accountable for such a long time that I got
kind of cocky,” said Delgado, owner of Staff Pro America in Southfield, which has 150 Clerical workers.
“Bill forces me to be as real as I possibly can. He calls me on
the carpet. No one else can do that, not even my husband when
it comes to my business.”
The goal of a business coach is to help clients discover for themselves
what their blind spots are so they can function more effectively,
Pinkerton said. He advises clients on issues ranging from expanding
products to negotiating foreign markets and handling employee
conflicts, to making more time available for home and family life.
In contrast, a business consultant typically advises companies
on a project-by-project basis.
“How would you like to have a partner without giving up 50 percent
of your business? That's what a business coach is,” Pinkerton
said.
Pinkerton, 56, a former entrepreneur and AT&T executive, began
as a business coach in 1996. He has 18 clients throughout the
United States, including a president of a Seattle telecommunications
company, an owner of a Detroit-area public relations firm and
the head of a Detroit-area nonprofit agency.
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He is one of about two dozen business coaches in metropolitan
Detroit and among perhaps 2,000 in the nation, according to organizers
for the New Mexico-based International Coach Federation, which
is developing industry standards for the new, and as yet unregulated,
profession.
Federation president Jeff Raim drew distinctions between business
coaching and traditional psychotherapy, which offers clients hourly
sessions with social workers or psychologists.
“Therapy clients are people who are having trouble managing to
get through life,” Raim said.
“Coaching clients don’t have trouble surviving life - they want
to get more out of it”
Sometimes branded “New Age” or “touchy-feely,” business coaches
tout concrete results as proof of their effectiveness.
Doron York, a business coach at the Birmingham office of the New
York-based VSA Consulting Group, charges $200 to $500 an hour
for his coaching. He recently coached managers at a Detroit-area
mortgage company for six months.
The result: Loan officers increased the number of loans processed
from five to 12 a month. The company’s total revenue rose 46 percent.
“The results that people achieve in their businesses far exceeds
what business coaches charge,” said York, who coaches top executives
in the automotive industry.
“We are talking break-throughs that end up being worth millions
of dollars.”
Free Press business writer Nancy Costello can be reached at
-313-223-4651.
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How many clients have you coached?