Intact and stronger than ever: How coaching helps businesses emerge from 2020

It’s tough times and that’s no secret. In the UK alone, 24% of businesses polled by the government have reported having closed or temporarily paused trading. Of those still active, 93% are reporting a lower turnover than normal.

Our premise isn’t as reductive as stating a single solution, like coaching, to a business landscape that’s uniquely complex and challenging. What, then, are we saying?

There’s a real opportunity to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic with your business stronger than it ever was before. Many companies are turning to the times as an opportunity to evolve and redefine their offerings – and that’s the perfect time to consider business coaching. Here’s why.

It’s a digital opportunity out there

The flipside of premises closing across the country is a surge in attention to the internet and the business it offers. Companies are diving into marketing refreshes, looking to their search engine optimisation and digital marketing strategy in a bid to realign their products and services to markets suddenly shifted in their appetite and availability.

For most, that’s a lot of “oh wow, we should’ve been doing that already”. Websites, the flagships of digital sales, are being reinforced and updated. Budgets are being created and changed and we’re already seeing the results amongst the most proactive to adopt this challenge as an opportunity.

Put simply, that’s a lot of change happening in a short period of time. Whenever a step change like this occurs in a business, it’s an ideal opportunity to benefit from coaching and an outside view looking in. Business coaching apps and mentoring services help to guide a company during any form of evolution, protecting it from risk and making it more likely for it to land on an ideal trajectory towards growth.

The ROI on coaching is spectacular

We all love a green dashboard, and it’s an undeniable fact that business coaching is strongly associated with drastic improvements to a swathe of metrics that matter. A quick Google will show you studies concluding an ROI of as much as 8:1 after investment in executive coaching. Coaching combined with further training initiatives performs similarly well, boosting productivity by an average of 86% in findings published by the Personnel Management Association.

Is that kind of ROI guaranteed for your own company? No. Is it likely? You bet. Even better, modern coaching services have taken to the cloud and come complete with streamlined, digital-based software that works on your smartphone at a price even the most humble SME can afford. Gone are the days of bloated seminars stretching into the tens of thousands of Pounds; coaching in 2020 is lean, direct and affordable.

It boosts metrics that matter

Studies abound on the specifics coaching helps in – and they’re great news. Our aforementioned studies all indicate improvements to facets of business that are important both internally and externally; gains in productivity, organisation strength, customer service and the retention of both talent and customers are all known areas that are made better. The list goes on, stretching to include improvements in teamwork, job satisfaction, conflict resolution and organisational commitment. Platforms like https://chronus.com/software/mentoring-software track coaching progress and status in real time to keep executive leadership in the know on program performance.

It’s a great time to place your business on a path

Uncertainty is one of the hallmarks of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not easy both personally and in business, and it’s easy for us all to feel stymied and unsure about ourselves and our companies in the face of economic uncertainty.

We believe that a salve to this uncertainty is to act decisively. There’s comfort and practicality in identifying a clear plan of action and implementing it, and it’s doubly true in the present times that any plan executed well is a drastic improvement over no plan at all.

And it’s hard to make that kind of plan all by yourself. Sometimes, the catalyst we need is to simply speak to another expert and to see what they say. A fresh pair of eyes and a push in the right direction can be an inch and an email away – and all it can take to start seeing the benefits of that support and guidance is a decision to take action in the face of the unknown.