Every emerging business should have a business coach to survive

Tale Alimi Global is a business development and business coaching company. My speciality is in helping people to grow, to get to the next level – to the place where you have sufficient cash flow. If you have been in business for years and you don’t have the right processes, structure that will actually help you become an industry leader, then you are the kind of people we want to help. My goal is to help businesses up-level. Up-level is to really create sustainable businesses in Nigeria. If you go back decades, you will find the number of business that have stayed sustainable are very few. My vision is to create the top 50 businesses that will become the sustainable champions for the next decades. The other day I was driving down to work and I saw a business that I used to know some years back; the owner died and the businesses has become a caricature.

By sustainable I mean the right structure, the right processes. People are holding their businesses too tight and they don’t really know that this is how a business is supposed to be. A business is really a separate legal entity, separate from the person. Business owners have to see it that way in order for it to transcend them. There is a strategic planning that it takes to build a sustainable business. And the way we do that in Tale Alimi Global is to create a program around it. I have a very diverse career experience that helps to bring rich experiences to the table for the businesses.

As a business coach you guide people along the journey. In Nigeria we are used to business training where you go to a forum and somebody teaches you and you go back and implement. The concept of coaching should be a concept of guiding people to achieve a certain goal – where you are bringing it out of them and not telling them what to do. In consulting, you get a brief, you execute it but that’s different from coaching. What we have done is to adapt our solutions to the local environment; hence we have created a program that mix training with coaching to make it more acceptable to our environment. I have two main programs; accelerate and up-level. Accelerate is for business owners who have been in business for a few years, and maybe they have found cash but they haven’t been able to establish it so that it will continue after them, they don’t have any processes in their business. It is either they are doing it out of passion and out of a need, but they haven’t created the right foundation to ensure that it grows. Accelerate program is to help them put the right systems and structures and strategies so they can grow.

When they have done that successfully, most of the times they have a sense of relief “my business can now grow from here,” but the relief are often short-lived because the next level requires that you have the right management, the right individuals, and the right team. It is a about a long term strategic planning. That is why up-level was created. You need a team of other leaders to grow the business to the next level. No man is an island, you don’t know it all. You need people to do evaluation, to help you and guide you. A lot of the businesses don’t seek help at the right time.

Business owners need a business coach. I think they should actually begin to seek that and not remain in an isolated position until it’s too late. Sometimes all you need is clarity. I have clients who are not in any of my programs but they come to me for one-on-one business coaching and I realize that after our sessions all they needed was clarity, they just needed to know how to move to the next level. Sometimes you are too close to it you can’t see it, you need someone who can tell you this is what you need to do; this is the direction that you need to go.

We have various methods. There is something call the GROW model ‘Goals’, ‘Reality’, ‘Opportunity’ and ‘Way forward’ which we use sometimes. Other times we utilize normal business tools. For instance, in one of my programmes, Accelerate, we do a personal SWOT analysis on the owner and the business. It is very important. It helps them have a clear view of their strength, their weakness, opportunities and threats. We also do market analysis which helps to evaluate the industry to see whether if it is a profitable industry, the barrier of entry is it high or low and will you make good margin from the industry. These are tools that we use based on what their problems are. I had a client who wanted to expand her business and was not sure how to go about it. We did an evaluation and discovered she was in a saturated industry and she didn’t realize that. The reason it was saturated was because the barrier of entry was low, anybody can come into the industry. We also found out that the industry was also very lucrative. Thus we have to come up with a strategy based on how she will thrive in the industry.

She couldn’t have sat down on her own and know what to do. Some people will go to a consultant and a consultant will do a research for them, but as a coach I take the people through a process. I don’t just do an analysis and a report and tell them this is what to do. We go through a process where the client is actually involved. As a coach we go on the journey with the client and we agree together that this actually is what you should do and you are more willing to do it. We achieve more result in terms of implementation because the people seem like we came up with the results together so I want to do it.

There are two ways, the first is because of the dynamics in coaching many of my clients learn to coach themselves because they come to a level where anytime they have to make a decision they ask themselves “What is my GROW model?”. That is the reality. Beyond learning to coach themselves, at certain points of the business, in times of expansion for instance they come back again. When they come, they say “when I met you the first time, I was here. I have gotten here and because I’ve gotten here I want to go to another level.” It is not that you are solely dependent on a coach but at various times you will have different needs. I have a client that comes back every quarter to do a quarterly evaluation.

I think it is still new. People do different things and they specialize in various areas. My own specialty is for real businesses and they are diverse. I am more about emerging entrepreneurs that want to grow. In terms of who is doing what I am doing the way I am doing, not many people. Not many people are into guiding businesses to grow. There are a lot of opportunities in the industry. My goal is to create more business coaches.