Small businesses create jobs, provide essential services and keep money moving through local communities.

Behind every one of those businesses is an owner making decisions about customers, cash flow, employees, marketing, operations and growth.

The quality of those decisions matters.

The connection between business coaching and job creation starts with helping owners build stronger, more capable businesses.

Business coaching gives owners time and space to think about what is happening in their business, understand what is creating their current results and decide what they want to do next.

Stronger Business Owners Build Stronger Businesses

A growing business creates new challenges.

The owner who once did everything may now need to delegate.

As the business grows, a business with a few customers may need a reliable marketing and sales system.

Hiring the first employee brings new responsibilities around communication, leadership, training and expectations.

With growth also comes more transactions, more decisions and more opportunities for things to fall through the cracks.

A business coach helps the owner work through these challenges and build the systems needed to support the next stage of the business.

Over time, the owner becomes a stronger decision maker and a more capable leader.

Better Systems Create Capacity

Every business has systems.

There is a way customers find the business, the team completes the work, employees are hired, invoices go out and problems get handled.

Those systems affect the owner’s ability to grow.

When everything depends on one person, capacity is limited. As responsibilities become clearer and reliable systems are put in place, the business can begin to support more customers, more work and more employees.

This is one of the reasons systems thinking is central to the Systems Business Coach® methodology.

Through coaching, the owner can see how the different parts of the business work together and where a change could make the greatest difference.

Business Coaching Supports Job Creation

Hiring becomes possible when a business has enough stability, demand and confidence to add another person.

For example, a coach may help an owner think through questions such as:

What work needs to be done?

How much can the business afford?

Which role would create the greatest capacity?

How will that person be trained?

Which systems need to be in place before they arrive?

How will the owner know the person is succeeding in the role?

The owner makes the decisions. Through the coaching conversation, they can think those decisions through and determine what happens next.

One stronger business may create one new job.

Across a community, those jobs add up. Hundreds of stronger small businesses can have a significant economic impact.

A Coach Approach in Economic Development

Economic development professionals work every day with people building businesses.

A coach approach gives advisors another way to support those entrepreneurs.

Listening carefully, asking good questions and helping an owner work through their own decisions builds capability that stays with the owner long after the conversation ends.

When advisors combine those coaching skills with systems thinking, appreciative inquiry and practical small business knowledge, they can help owners work through issues affecting the whole business.

That is good for the entrepreneur.

It also supports the people they employ.

Together, stronger businesses and stronger teams contribute to the communities those businesses serve.

Investing in the People Who Build Our Economies

Economic development happens one business at a time.

When we strengthen the people running those businesses, we strengthen their ability to lead, grow, hire and contribute to their communities.

For this reason, investing in the coaching skills of economic development professionals matters.

Want to bring a coach approachto your economic development team?

Small Business Coach Training helps business advisors and economic development professionals develop practical coaching skills they can use immediately with the entrepreneurs they serve.