We hired a business coach once. During a time when we were completely overwhelmed. I cried almost every day.
The contributing factors?
- We had a great team, but we were still doing too much ourselves.
- Our processes weren’t documented. Worse yet, our vision wasn’t documented.
- We didn’t even know if we wanted to keep doing this. Could one of us get out and the other stay? (If you don’t know me, I’ve run a software product company w/my spouse for 18+ yrs)
All this building pressure meant our marriage was feeling the strain. And at the time, our teen/preteen kids needed us in new ways.
So we reached out to a friend. And that friend suggested we needed help from a coach. A neutral someone with CEO-level experience to guide some big conversations.
Looking back, it was both the biggest waste of money and one of the best decisions we ever made.
Because honestly the coach himself didn’t do much.
We spent the first two+ months paying thousands to explain our business to someone who:
- didn’t understand open source.
- didn’t understand running a product in WordPress.
- didn’t understand working with your spouse
- didn’t have experience leading a remote team
- (and from my view of things) lacked the feminine perspective of being a working mother.
But why I say this was one of our best decisions is because of what they did do: they held space.
A coach creates a reason for you to sit down, talk, and be accountable.
For us, paying someone to force those conversations was all we needed. If this is true for other people, your coach literally be anyone: a friend, a mentor, even a stuffed animal you sit with and reflect with once a week.
So to anyone thinking about hiring a business coach, my gut says what you probably need is accountability and space to think.
You need to make a commitment (financial or emotional) that hurts enough to make you actually show up for it.
Maybe that’s by spending a small fortune on a coach. Maybe that’s a peer accountability partner feeling the same strain. Maybe that’s just grit and determination and refusing to ignore the junk drawer of your mind once a week until the dust settles.
