What’s The Dif­fer­ence Be­tween Coach­ing And Consulting?

Have you con­sid­ered hir­ing a busi­ness coach or con­sul­tant? Get­ting help could be the best thing you’ve ever done to grow your business.

Be care­ful who you hire and where you put your money.

Busi­ness coach­ing is this year’s ma­jor trend in the busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties mar­ket. Every mar­keter and their grand­mas sud­denly feel a call­ing to be­come a busi­ness coach.

Or, to top the non­sense, to teach oth­ers how to be­come a busi­ness coach. Even if they’re clue­less. No skill required!

What I find, when look­ing at their of­fers, is that many don’t even know what ‘coach­ing’ means. They think ex­plain­ing a busi­ness con­cept to you via Skype is busi­ness coaching.

It’s not!

That’s a mis­un­der­stand­ing about the con­tent of coach­ing. That’s also a mis­un­der­stand­ing about the pur­pose of coaching.

Ini­tially coach­ing was pop­u­lar in the do­main of sports.

• A high pro­file ten­nis player would have a per­for­mance coach.
• A high pro­file bas­ket­ball player would have a per­for­mance coach.

Then the idea of ‘per­for­mance coach­ing’ was trans­ferred to business.

Cor­po­ra­tions would hire coaches to ‘op­ti­mize’ per­for­mance of their stressed CEOs. The coach would meet with the CEO in con­fi­den­tial 1:1 meet­ings to dis­cuss ‘per­sonal is­sues’ of the CEO. Some call it couch­ing, in ref­er­ence to a ther­a­pist’s couch.

But the per­for­mance coaches are not the guys to ex­plain a busi­ness strat­egy or crunch the num­bers. Be­cause crunch­ing num­bers and rec­om­mend­ing busi­ness strate­gies is the do­main of McK­in­sey & Co.

And those, you guessed it, are called ‘con­sul­tants.’

Con­clu­sion: all those up­com­ing busi­ness coaches are ac­tu­ally busi­ness con­sul­tants, ex­cept they lack the train­ing and the skill for con­sult­ing. Heck, they don’t even know they’re con­sul­tants. :-)

I’m not split­ting hair about this for the sake of lin­guis­tic perfection.

Coach­ing and con­sult­ing are 2 en­tirely dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions, and re­quire an en­tirely dif­fer­ent skill set and ed­u­ca­tion. That’s why it’s im­por­tant to know the dif­fer­ence be­twen coach­ing and consulting.

• If you need a coach but you get a con­sul­tant, you’re los­ing time and money.
• If you need a con­sul­tant but you get a coach, you’re los­ing time and money.

Look at it this way: You don’t hire an auto me­chanic to fix your pneu­mo­nia, and you don’t hire a physi­cian to fix your car’s brakes.

Coach­ing

Coach­ing is about the per­sonal as­pects, about char­ac­ter, habits, and per­sonal ex­cel­lence. A coach will talk with you about top­ics like:

• Goal set­ting and life planning
• Time man­age­ment and efficiency
• Ac­count­abil­ity
• Work - life bal­ance, and  stress management
• Solv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion problems
• Prepar­ing for im­por­tant meetings
• De­vel­op­ing lead­er­ship skills

Coach­ing can also help over­come self-sab­o­­tage, and ob­sta­cles like pro­cras­ti­na­tion or en­tre­pre­neur­ial ADHD.

A coach­ing session

Coach­ing is a con­fi­den­tial 1:1 re­la­tion­ship be­tween coach and coachee.

The coach will pri­mar­ily use ques­tions to help you set your own goals and find your own solutions.

This is the op­po­site of the con­sul­tan­t’s job, who will give in­put, pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions based on his busi­ness education.

Skills and ed­u­ca­tion of a coach

The ed­u­ca­tion of a coach is fo­cused on psy­chol­ogy and com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

They don’t need a ther­a­peu­tic ed­u­ca­tion (un­less reg­u­lated by law), but will have lots of ed­u­ca­tion in fields like NLP, non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the like.

Even if called busi­ness coaches they don’t nec­es­sar­ily need busi­ness or in­dus­try spe­cific education.

Con­sult­ing

Con­sult­ing is not about a per­son, it’s about a busi­ness or organization.

A con­sul­tant will help with the ac­tual plan how to make money and grow your business.

It’s about un­der­stand­ing mar­kets and trends, about know­ing what works now, and what will work 3 years from now.

• An­a­lyz­ing your busi­ness data, for ex­am­ple sales sta­tis­tics, con­ver­sion rates, etc.
• An­a­lyz­ing mar­kets and consumers
• Plan­ning prod­uct funnels
• Cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing strategies

A con­sult­ing session

A con­sult­ing ses­sion is not nec­es­sar­ily a 1:1 meet­ing; team meet­ings are quite com­mon. Ex­cept for a 1 per­son busi­ness, of course.

The con­sul­tant will an­a­lyze the busi­ness and give pre­cise rec­om­men­da­tions what to do.

The larger the busi­ness, the more spe­cial­ized the con­sul­tants will be.

Skills and ed­u­ca­tion of a consultant

The ed­u­ca­tion of a con­sul­tant is fo­cused on busi­ness and mar­ket­ing. Ad­di­tion­ally they need pre­sen­ta­tion skills to present their find­ings and recommendations.

Con­sul­tants are of­ten specialized:

• One might fo­cus on tax spe­cific issues.
• One might fo­cus on Hu­man Re­source topics.
• On might fo­cus on IT topics.
• One might fo­cus on a spe­cific industry.

The Small Busi­ness Coach­Sul­tant Hybrid

In large com­pa­nies you will never find some­one mix­ing the dif­fer­ent jobs of coach­ing and con­sult­ing. That’s be­cause a large busi­ness is so com­plex that it needs highly spe­cial­ized consultants.

One would hardly be con­sid­ered a re­li­able con­sul­tant for ‘over­seas tax avoid­ance for global com­pa­nies ’ when he of­fers to coach you for your mar­riage prob­lems in between.

In small busi­ness the lines get blurry.

Some­one with a founded coach­ing skill may also have learned some mar­ket­ing skills and pro­vide a mix of coach­ing and con­sult­ing to small busi­nesses. Or vice versa, a full time mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant may have added coach­ing skills to his education.

Hir­ing sep­a­rate peo­ple for dif­fer­ent jobs will al­ways give you bet­ter re­sults.

• You’d get a 100% high per­for­mance coach to help you with your goal set­ting and pro­cras­ti­na­tion. Be­cause he spends all his time on coach­ing, he’ll be bet­ter than a part-time coach.
• You’d get a 100% mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant to help you with your next mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Be­cause he spends all his time on mar­ket­ing, he’ll be bet­ter than a part-time marketer.
• You’d get a 100% web tech ex­pert to help you set­ting up your sales sys­tems and web site. Be­cause he spends all his time on web tech, he’ll be bet­ter than a part-time web expert.

That’s the op­ti­mal state in theory.

In re­al­ity there are a num­ber of rea­sons why you might end up hir­ing a CoachSultant.

• You don’t have the bud­get for an army of spe­cial­ized con­sul­tants and coaches.
• You don’t find the right peo­ple. Many small biz con­sul­tants are afraid to specialize.
• The coach­ing part is small and re­lated to the con­sult­ing topic. For ex­am­ple, your mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant might coach you to keep you ac­count­able for im­ple­ment­ing the mar­ket­ing plan.
• You’re al­ready work­ing with some­one you trust, and you rather keep work­ing with the same person.

Let me wrap up this ar­ti­cle with 3 rec­om­men­da­tions for suc­cess with a coach­ing-con­­sult­ing mix:

1. You and your Coach­Sul­tant must be clear about the goal of each ses­sion. To­day, are you work­ing on per­sonal de­vel­op­ment, or on busi­ness strategy?
2. Your Coach­Sul­tant must demon­strate coach­ing skills and busi­ness knowl­edge. If you feel he lacks in one area, get a new one.  In my ex­pe­ri­ence coach­ing skills are lack­ing more of­ten, even with coaches charg­ing 4-fig­ures per session.
3. The coach­ing part is not the place to force some­one else’s ideas on you. The con­sult­ing part is not the place to leave you search­ing for your own answers.