(reading time 3 mins)

To use the old phrase, “I eat my own cooking.” What it boils down to is, I believe so much in my product – hiring an ActionCOACH business coach to coach my business – that I have my own ActionCOACH business coach for my business, and I always have done since nearly the start of my ActionCOACH career fourteen years ago.

Someone asked me recently, if I’m an experienced coach myself, and I know how to grow my business, why would I pay for coaching? Well, there are a few reasons:

  • Most importantly, in a word, congruency. Congruency is one of my core values, and what that means to me is that whatever I expect my business owner clients to do in order to grow their business, I need to demonstrate that I’m willing to do the same for myself. I do the reading and learning, I attend the conferences, I write a 90-day plan, I do the marketing, and I do the weekly focus sheets. How can I look a business owner in the eye and tell them they should have a business coach, if I’m a business owner myself and don’t have a business coach?
  • I know some coaches who have a coach that they don’t pay, and instead the two coaches coach each other “for free.” Whilst I understand their logic: trading time for time instead of time for money, thereby saving a few quid, I believe that fundamentally this doesn’t work. There is a risk of “collusion,” when each coach is experiencing the same situation or challenge, and therefore can’t be unreasonable with the other. Instead, they’ll say “Yeah, the same thing is happening to me.” I think it’s important that your coach has full permission to hold you accountable and tell you exactly what they think and you need to hear, which is difficult for them to do if they’re going through the same challenge as you.
  • I hire only the very top ActionCOACH business coaches for my business. They must consistently rank in the top 10 coaches in the world. (And obviously, they must be hire ranked than myself.) The best coaches in the world will not coach you for free, so you must pay!
  • By paying for a top coach, I get all the same benefits that coaching affords any other business coaching client: the learning, accountability, an outsider’s perspective, an “unreasonable but compassionate friend” (the definition of a great coach), and a vastly increased likelihood that I’m going to actually DO THE WORK, since I’m paying for it after all. Most importantly, my business grows as a direct result of having a coach.
  • Coaching ends up being free anyway. Like I tell any prospective client who is considering me to be their coach, my first remit is to “find my fee” by ensuring that my client gets a return on investment in coaching as soon as possible, effectively rendering coaching free. The coaches I have worked with always make me more money than they cost.
  • My coach keeps me out of my comfort zone. It can be too easy for me just to coast along and have a “comfortable” life and business. Refer to point #1 above: I don’t ever allow my clients to coast or be comfortable. I push them to strive to always grow and improve, and therefore in order to be congruent, I must always be doing the same.

So there you have it. If you are considering hiring a business coach and are interviewing some candidates, one question you may want to ask them is, “Do you yourself have a coach that you pay for?” I believe it says a lot about that person as a coach.

For more information about business coaching, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly at andrewgoldberg@actioncoach.com.