How to Become a Small Business Coach

In the last few years, using a career or small business coach has become a common practice. While personal career coaches focus solely on one person’s professional journey, business coaches take a larger, more holistic approach. Usually, they’re working with company owners and their leadership teams to improve an existing business. When in the thick of doing business, these incredibly smart businesspeople can sometimes lose focus of their priorities. That lack of focus impacts the company, the leaders’ personal lives, and the lives of their employees and families.

What Is a Small Business Coach?

Think of a small business coach as a mentor or guide for small business owners. They can help owners make smaller tweaks or massive overhauls of current organizational structures and processes.

Small business coaches can help get a leadership team’s focus back on track. As unbiased outsiders, they can see pain points that often go unaddressed for years. Small business coaches connect the dots that help owners and their leadership teams achieve their goals.

Business coaches should also have an understanding of how to – well – coach! They must have the know-how to inspire leaders to make changes. Anyone who’s ever had to make business changes knows how hard even minor adjustments are for both owners and employees.

Did you know that small businesses make up 90% of businesses worldwide? While small businesses may not seem to have much impact beyond the local economy, collectively they supply 50% of jobs globally. The Small Business Administration noted 29.6 million businesses in the United States alone (or 99.9% of all American businesses).

All those small businesses experience their own unique trials and tribulations, from start-up to growth to maintenance to sunsetting. A small business coach can help smooth out the rough patches for owners, effectively helping keep the global economy humming. (Superhero capes not included.)

Basically, you could say small business coaches help owners achieve their business goals and live their best lives. 

How Can I Become a Small Business Coach?

Inspired to do meaningful work that makes a huge difference in the lives of business owners in your community? Becoming a small business coach requires a baseline understanding of how small businesses operate and of counseling psychology. If you have an interest in improving process efficiencies and helping people succeed, you could be a great candidate!

The best small business coaches are also entrepreneurially minded, like their clients. In fact, many small business coaches once owned businesses themselves, gaining street cred from having been there, done that. They can draw on their own experiences to inspire their clients to attain their business goals by identifying common struggles.

Small business coaches should be able to apply common concepts to an organization, regardless of the industry. However, some small business coaches choose to specialize in sectors such as female-owned companies or service industries.

Business Coach Certification

A quick google search can quickly retrieve a plethora of places to gain certification. While you don’t need certification to become a coach, you absolutely should know the fundamentals of running a business. You can easily get overwhelmed, especially when each program boasts having “The Best” certification. Honestly, though, the best program is one that you can understand and apply in real-life situations.

Most programs require a minimum number of study hours and mentoring hours before a student receives certification. From there, some programs offer levels of certification after experience. For example, professional, certified, and expert credentials come after increasingly higher levels of hours of coaching and client success.

Anyone who wants to gain small business coach certification should look for programs with proven results. Ideally, training programs should cover ways to improve every aspect of a business to help owners and their employees flourish. Finding bits and pieces of techniques from several different systems can be about as much fun as learning about dense business theories.

So, to truly and effectively help your clients, we recommend finding one complete system that fits pieces together seamlessly. The best programs operate on simple and easy-to-understand systems and practical tools that every owner, regardless of their industry, can utilize.

Business Coach Franchises

Owners of small business coach franchises functionally operate independently but also benefit from the name recognition of parent companies. Franchisees make their own hours, take on as much business as they like, and help companies in their own backyards. Apart from general laws dictating the rules of running a small business franchise, owners can operate relatively freely.

In addition, franchise organizations will typically offer access to networking with other franchise owners and key branding materials. Franchise owners also benefit from cross-referrals from other franchisees for potential clients that fit well with their practice or style.

In franchises, the parent organization benefits from a growing network of successful small business coaches. And the franchise holders build their reputation from the company’s, helping them quickly launch their own practices.

Business Coaches for Entrepreneurs

Occasionally, many entrepreneurs experience trouble with operating their businesses, especially during times of fast growth or painful stagnation. Business coaches who can help entrepreneurs through their growing pains or stuck operations are invaluable. Whether the entrepreneur works as a “solopreneur” or has a warehouse full of employees, they can benefit from expert assistance.

A small business coach can help an entrepreneur see the forest and the trees for their business. Some entrepreneurs need help with start-up exercises like creating business plans or raising finances. Others need help getting out of a rut to reboot their profit growth and launch past a plateau in growth. Business coaches can also help entrepreneurs sell off successful businesses, create succession plans, or kick-start spin-off organizations.

Looking to Become a Business Coach?

A positive career change. More flexibility in owning your own business. A more satisfying career where you can use your expertise to help others. If that sounds good to you, then it’s time to explore becoming an EOS Implementer®. Learn more about the tools and processes that EOS provides its EOS Implementers.