FirstStep Coaching

“I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and 34th President of the United States

All businesses must follow the same general path to success.

• Know how the business fits into the vision of your life.
• Define a target market and ideal customer.
• Develop a strategy to serve your ideal customers.
• Design the tactics, goals, and objectives to determine whether your strategy is working.
• Collect data on customers, products, and money.
• Determine whether your business is successfully executing its strategy.

Unfortunately, turning data into the information we need for our decisions is very difficult.  We receive data too late to make our decisions.  The data often looks at the past instead of leading us into the future.  Data is often focused on financial numbers and not the operations-focused information that drives our financial numbers.  We often receive too much detail on the wrong things and cannot use our information to anticipate what will happen.

I use a five-step process to improve your business’ decision-making process.  This process is designed to identify the key drivers of your success and design a planning system to measure how your actual results compared to what you expected to happen in your business.  When you are able to measure your expected results against what really happened, you can improve how you make future decisions and focus your effort on what is truly driving your performance.

The FirstStep coaching process is:

• Define your business’ strategy and key objectives to achieve for success
• Identify the information you are currently using for making decisions
• Determine the information you need for your decisions and how to best obtain it
• Develop a planning system to identify goals and measure actual results against the expected results of your goals
• Monitor, review, and update your planning to account for what is really occurring in your business

The FirstStep Concepts coaching model helps you transform the details of your business into information for smarter business decision making.  My decision coaching will help you answer the following four questions about your business operations.

• What happened?
• What was the impact?
• Why did it happen?
• What can our business do to improve in the future?

The FirstStep coaching model will help your business in a variety of business situations, including but not limited to:

• Determining if a business idea is viable
• Planning a start-up operation
• Analyzing a new product or market opportunity
• Identifying turnaround opportunities
• Hiring additional employees or independent contractors
• Securing additional funding
• Acquiring or selling a business
• Improving an employee’s ability to make smarter business and financial decisions
• Improving your finance department’s ability to better understand business operations