Hiring a business coach? When times are lean, and people are predicting an economic downturn?
Yes.
Discover several reasons why investing in business coaching during lean times or an economic slowdown can pay off in the long run. The key is to build resilience because it’s the resilient companies that rebound faster.
Ready to take the plunge? Keep an open mind as you wonder about your company’s long-term success.
The business landscape continues to be volatile. First, it was a world-stopping pandemic. Then inflation. Then geopolitics. Now, it’s come to economists predicting a slowdown amid fears of layoffs and people buying less-expensive cuts of meat at big-box stores.
Changing economic times, which companies cannot predict entirely, is why companies must build resilience to overcome unexpected challenges and economic downturns. You’ll have better adaptability, anticipation, and faster response times to challenges and new opportunities. Being proactive can make a difference between success and failure.
How do you build resilience? Identify strengths and weaknesses, clarify goals, and develop strategies. But it’s more than that. Sometimes, you need a new way of thinking with a different perspective.
Business coaches bring fresh insights and perspectives to your boardroom. By examining your operations and culture, we’ll give you guiding principles and provide guidance on how to address them.
How is your organizational culture? Do you find out employees are frustrated when their feelings or concerns go unheard? Business coaches will partner with you to help your team create a culture that supports the company's and your employees’ goals.
Believe it or not, business coaching can actually help you in a downturn.
One of the ways business coaching helps companies during a downturn is by providing a fresh perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of running a business, especially when things get tough.
During an economic downturn, companies need to adapt their business strategies to stay afloat and help them make critical decisions. The stress and uncertainty of the situation can cloud judgment, leading to costly mistakes.
But it all starts with a plan. One of our fundamentals is High-Involvement Planning™, the heart of which helps you forecast forward using your company’s past behavior and your customers’ behavior.
Rather than making decisions in a stuffy boardroom with five managers, this forecasting process involves everyone, especially those executing your best-laid plans. You might find that people need better tools, a more relaxed work atmosphere, or simply being appreciated to make your business a place where people want to give their all to 40 hours a week.
New training and new ideas can shake things up at a company. Rather than having the same-old people lead training, your employees will see new faces and concepts.
On-site training could teach your teams how to have more effective (and, gasp, fun) huddles or use minigames to make staff meetings run differently. Business coaches could also illustrate the effectiveness of having mentoring buddies where tried-and-true cagey veterans partner with a new hire well-versed in TikTok and emoji usage in an environment where partners learn from each other.
As a business owner, you understand the importance of leading your business down the right path for overall success. And every decision you make during an economic downturn is magnified because budgets are tighter.
An expert business coach will guide you through challenging situations, provide you with valuable insights, and offer you support to make the correct choices for your company.
During a downturn, it can be hard to know what moves to make and which ones to avoid. However, with a business coach by your side, you can make better decisions by offering guidance based on their expertise and experience, giving you more confidence in your decision-making abilities. Even better, a business coach gives you a holistic plan to make your business better for long-term growth.
It’s easy for businesses to be set adrift in the swirling seas of economic uncertainty, even with a plan in place. But there are many sides and arguments about why or why not the economy is heading to a downturn. The labor market is hot (despite a skills gap)! But interest rates are slowing growth!
Setting goals and creating a plan is vital for the success of any business. During an economic downturn, it can be challenging to set and achieve goals because your dreadnought of a ship sees the mother of all tidal waves on the horizon. A business coach can help you develop realistic and achievable goals for your business, along with a solid plan to achieve them, while steering your ship in the right direction.
As a business owner, your communication and leadership skills play a critical role in the success of your company. A business coach can help you identify areas for improvement and provide you with the tools and resources to become a more effective communicator and leader.
In fact, that’s what the Great Game is all about. Empowering your employees with the right communication, company structure, and attitude that leads to better profitability (not revenue, we said profits).
Economic downturns can lead to a crisis. They can also lead to opportunities.
How about something radically different?
Open-book management is a big part of the Great Game. The goal is to be open with employees about the financial inner workings of the business. It actually fosters trust among your workers because they feel like you trust them. It’s like a coach on a football team. He trusts his quarterback to make the right call and the right decisions on the field. Otherwise, the quarterback won’t give it his all to win the game.
We know economic hard times can make it difficult to be upfront about the company’s finances, but it’s part of an effective employee retention strategy that lowers your attrition rate and keeps valuable workers on your team.
Start your resilience training now, and make your company ready for whatever economic conundrums may or may not happen in the future. You can’t stop all of the financial forces that affect your business, but you can learn how best to handle them before they happen.
Whatever’s holding you back from getting there, our business coaches can identify it and offer solutions fast.
Schedule your first coaching call today.