Business coaching for owners who want a better business, not just a busier one.

A fixed fee agreed in writing before you start, based on which programme and how often you meet — ask on the discovery call and you get a figure, not a range. There is no minimum term dressed up as a twelve-month contract. What we would say honestly is that coaching bought for three months rarely changes anything: the first month is diagnosis, the second is when the uncomfortable actions get set, and the third is when they either happen or do not. Most owners who get value from it stay six to twelve months and then stop.

Neither. It is business coaching — priorities, decisions, pricing, delegation, follow-through and the operating rhythm of the business. Sessions work from your actual numbers and your actual problems, not exercises. That said, running a business is personal, and stress, avoidance and confidence show up in commercial decisions constantly, so those things do come into the room. What you will not get is a motivational framework, a personality profile, or a session that ends with you feeling good and nothing changing.

Advisory works on the numbers; coaching works on the owner and the decisions. Advisory tells you gross margin fell four points and that a 3% price rise recovers it. Coaching is what happens when you know that and still have not sent the letter — because the real obstacle is fear of losing a customer, not a lack of analysis. Buying more reporting when the problem is follow-through is one of the most common ways owners waste money. So is buying accountability when the figures are not visible in the first place.

No. Roughly as many clients come from the opposite direction — profitable, growing, and quietly aware that the business now runs them rather than the other way round. Those engagements tend to be about owner dependency, delegation and building a business that could survive a month without you, which is also what makes it sellable. Where coaching does not help is a business with an immediate solvency problem: that needs cash management, creditor conversations and possibly insolvency advice first, and we will say so rather than book sessions.

Fortnightly or monthly depending on the programme, with pre-work beforehand so the session is spent thinking rather than catching up. A typical hour opens with what got done since last time, and more usefully what did not and why — that is normally where the actual constraint is hiding. Then the substantive issue of the month, worked through to a decision rather than a discussion. It closes with two or three written actions with dates against them. If nothing was actioned three sessions running, we stop and address that rather than continuing.

No, though the emphasis changes considerably. With a team, much of the work is delegation, accountability and stopping every decision from routing through you. Without one, it tends to be pricing, capacity, what to stop doing and whether the first hire is affordable — decisions that are lonelier and far easier to defer indefinitely. Solo owners often get more out of coaching than anyone, precisely because nobody else in their working week ever asks why something has not been done, or expects an answer that stands up to a follow-up question.

Then we stop, and you should expect us to raise it rather than wait for you to. The pattern is visible by session three or four: actions not happening, sessions being moved, the same problem discussed repeatedly without a decision. Sometimes that means the timing is wrong — a business in the middle of a crisis cannot do developmental work. Sometimes it means the fit is wrong, in which case there are plenty of other coaches and we would rather you found one. What we will not do is keep billing a monthly fee for a standing appointment that has stopped producing anything.

Yes, deliberately. The coach can see the management accounts and the accountant knows what the coaching is working on, so a pricing conversation is informed by actual margin rather than a guess, and a hiring decision is checked against the cash forecast before it is committed to. The counterweight worth naming: having both from one firm means one relationship carrying more of your business, and if it goes wrong it goes wrong in more places at once. Plenty of clients take coaching alone or accounting alone, and both are normal.