The role of business in attaining financial freedom
Business is lauded as the only way to attain real financial freedom. While this may sound very absolutist, it is true to a large extent. This is because a salary can only increase linearly and has an upper ceiling on the marginal gains you can generate regardless of how hard you work.
On the other hand, a business allows you to grow your money at a compounded rate. This is to say that a business yields returns that are more directly proportional to the amount of work you put in, something that cannot be said of a salary.
Therefore, it is only logical for someone seeking financial freedom to devote their energy and skills to building and running a business. It may take longer to blow up but once it does, it offers better returns on time, skills, and effort. This time efficiency allows you to make money while also getting enough time to do other things.
However, for you to generate profits and build a business whose revenue will grow exponentially, you require certain special resources. And no, those resources are not financial or material. It’s something more special than that.
You need a business coach to grow your business
What determines success in today’s business world is neither the amount of effort nor the number of hours you put in. While that is important, it is the quality of the information upon which you base your business decisions that makes all the difference.
If you have poor, inaccurate information, you are likely to make equally poor decisions that will undermine your business’s profitability. However, high-quality information enables you to make your business more profitable and give it a competitive advantage over your rivals.
This is why having a business coach is so essential to achieving business success. A business coach provides you with specialized business knowledge and information that can propel your business to profitability. They also have both a circumspect and keen understanding of the individual factors at play in the dynamic of a business. This puts them in a better position to provide effective solutions to your business problems. In summary, a business coach does the following;
Assist businesspeople in identifying opportunities and conceptualizing profitable business ideas
Provides professional business advice to help business people navigate challenges and obstacles
Helps business owners to set ambitious but achievable business goals
Helps in developing creative strategies to consolidate and expand customer base
Suggests useful and actionable ways of increasing the profitability of a business
Helps in the financial, structural, and operational planning of a business
Analyzes and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of an entrepreneur’s business model
Provides answers to complex business questions that require professional insight
Assists entrepreneurs in making appropriate and effective business decisions
Monitors the growth and evaluates the performance of a business
Provides expert guidance to business people as they build and grow their business
Provides leadership, encouragement, and motivation for businesspeople
Connects businesspeople to useful contacts and promotes partnership
Ensures entrepreneurs are accountable for their business’s progress
Finding the right business coach
While all the services provided by a business coach can be very beneficial to your business, this is not to say that all business coaches have the magic wand to turn around your fortunes. Some business coaches for various reasons may just not be the best fit for you. Therefore, you must find the right business coach that suits your unique business needs. The following are some qualities a good business coach should possess;
Training and education; A good business coach needs to have the right academic qualifications to prove that they are trained and certified to provide professional business guidance
Relevant experience; The right business coach should have extensive experience coming up with effective solutions for business problems with a considerable amount of success
Understand your vision; The appropriate business coach for you has to see, understand, and believe in your business vision for you to achieve any meaningful outcome from the engagement.
Great social skills; Coaching requires a lot of personal, face-to-face interaction. Both the coach and the client have to be open to each other and engage closely with each other. Therefore, a business coach needs to possess such social skills as patience, understanding, empathy, and tolerance.
Be an excellent communicator; Because coaching is essentially about conveying information much of which could be deep and complex, the right business coach has to be a good communicator. This aids in the comprehension and execution of the coach’s advice and directions.
Result-oriented; A business coach needs to be focused and committed to helping people become better at commerce. They should always strive to ensure that their efforts have tangible results manifested in the success of their client's business.
Be a great motivator; Because a coach is your closest business companion, they need to genuinely care about your enterprise and do everything to ensure you succeed. This includes motivating and uplifting you whenever you feel bogged down by challenges.
Impeccable business acumen; Just like a preacher of water should also drink water, a business coach needs to be an astute business person. This enables them to understand what clients go through and aids in ensuring they give practical, actionable advice and not just theoretical solutions.
Creative and strategic thinking; This is one of the most important qualities a coach should possess. Without being a creative and strategic thinker, a business coach cannot be able to provide effective solutions that will help ensure the success of the business both now and in the long-term.
The Self Mastery Formula
Just like every arithmetic problem has a formula that can be used to solve it, to achieve business success you require a specific formula too. This is a method through which you as a businessperson can conceptualize, grow and build a profitable business. It enables you to identify opportunities, set goals, and follow through with the implementation of your business ideas. That formula is what I call the Self Mastery formula.
We developed the self-mastery formula after intensive research and extensive experience in the business world. I noticed that certain ways of doing business guaranteed success while some didn’t. This understanding of what works and what doesn’t is what inspired the Self-mastery formula.
The self-mastery formula is a three-pronged approach with the main elements being vision, strategy, and execution;
Vision; This involves the identification of a problem that needs to be solved, the conceptualization of the business solution to the problem, and the visualization of how that idea will be actualized.
Strategy; Here, you the entrepreneur in collaboration with your business coach come up with specific, clear, creative, and actionable steps of how to actualize the business idea that you have conceptualized. This includes production, advertisement, marketing, branding, and the business model to be used.
Execution; All the above steps amount to nothing without execution. This is where you implement all the business strategies that you have come up with to build and grow a profitable business.
These three components are the fundamental determinants of business success. If you strictly follow them in your endeavor to be a successful businessperson, your chances of making it are guaranteed. This is why my primary objective as a business coach is to assist minority businesses to grow using the self-mastery formula.
Why the self-mastery formula is the best option for minority businesses
Minority groups have for a long time been the victims of systemic hate and racism. This social, economic, and political exclusion has led minorities, especially black people, to lag development-wise. The high illiteracy and unemployment levels in the black community are evidence of this.
As black people, we are at a great disadvantage to compete in an economic system that does not favor us. Therefore, we must create our own wealth independently without relying on any external help. The best way of doing this is through black-owned businesses.
Because starting and running our own businesses is the key to our economic freedom, they must turn out successful. This is the reason why as a black business coach, I am at the forefront of assisting minority-owned businesses to streamline their operations, boost productivity and efficiency, and realize economic profits.
This will not only help families in our communities to finance their basic needs and expenses, but we will be able to improve our standards of living and earn ourselves a seat at the table of economic decision-making as well.