65. Comparison: Business Coach vs Business Advisor vs Business Mentor vs Business Consultant
Comparison: Business Coach vs Business Advisor vs Business Mentor vs Business Consultant [Everything Business Consulting EP 65]
Full transcript:
David: Welcome to Everything Business Consulting, a podcast dedicated to business consultants success it's for those of you who already are business consultant and you want to improve your skills, are an accountant and want to offer consulting services, or you may be an ex corporate who wants to get out of the rat race and become a self-employed business consultant. Or you may have owned a business before and you now want to use the skills that you've learned to help others in business.
[00:00:32] I'm David Thexton
[00:00:34] Julius: and I'm Julius Bloem.
[00:00:36] David: Everything Business Consulting is brought to you by ConsultX, a global business consulting company that has everything you require to become a successful business consultant or offer consulting services in your existing professional firm. If you'd like to find out more visit consultx.com.
[00:00:57] Julius: So today we're going to talk about the differences between a business coach, business mentor, a business advisor, and a business consultant, because let's be honest, these things kind of have a blurred line between them and they can be a little bit hard to understand. Now, David, are you ready to dive into the differences.
[00:01:19]David: Yeah, got my togs on.
[00:01:19] Julius: We're going to start by looking at the differences and the similarities between a business coach, a business mentor, a business advisor, and a business consultant. And then we're going to add a little bit at the end about a ConsultX Business Consultant, which we refer to as a Business Success Partner. Now, David, you have called yourself a business consultant for a while, and you've also done a few other things with business coaching. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background?
[00:01:51] David: Well, when I left school, I was a printer. I then went into the radio industry, selling radio advertising.
[00:01:57] And then I started a fruit juice company, a which I owned for 20 years and built it up to a hundred million dollar company, sold it to Coca Cola. And during that time as a business owner, those 20 years. I ran a breakfast group with a whole lot of friends, about seven or eight friends.
[00:02:18] And it was every second Tuesday, and we talked about business and I seemed that I was the first to go into business out of all my friends. And they came in quite a few years later, they went overseas and did their overseas, overseas experience, and that sort of stuff. And, I was a quite a few years ahead of them. So I knew kind of about business consulting. Way, way back in those days,
[00:02:43] Julius: Was it business consulting you were doing to them?
[00:02:46] David: It wasn't anything.
[00:02:47] Julius: It was just business advice or what was the discussion?
[00:02:50] David: It was just that it was mentoring really, but, it didn't have a name. It was just, we had a group of people we got together and we talked about business and, so I suppose it was mentoring really. So, yeah, I knew about that and I knew about a lot of the problems other people were having, with their businesses.
[00:03:08] And I certainly knew the problems I was having with mine. And, yeah, so, when I sold this hundred million dollar business to Coca Cola, I moved to Australia with my family and I decided that apart from doing a bit of motor racing for the first couple of years after that, I decided I was really interested in business consulting.
[00:03:29] But I didn't exactly, totally know what it was all about, and I didn't know how to do it. I knew what the words meant. I had a bit of an idea, but I looked all around the world to try and find a system, that I could buy or buy into or subscribe to or whatever, become a part off.
[00:03:53] And the only one that I could initially, find was a company that was in England and, worst thing to find out was that, they'd had a training, induction, about three weeks before in Melbourne. And I was in the Gold Coast, which is near Brisbane.
[00:04:10] Julius: Just down the road almost.
[00:04:12] David: I know I've missed them.
[00:04:12] It was about an hours plane flight. I'd missed them. And the next one was in Spain.
[00:04:17] So,
[00:04:18] Julius: On the other side of the world.
[00:04:19]David: I know, within three weeks time. So, I was so keen to become a part of that organization to do their training. I went to Spain and they beat the living daylights out of us. It was very, very good. However, it was a different sort of business consulting.
[00:04:36] It was what they call, the Americans called, hunter kill, where it was all about, projects and assignments. So these projects and assignments had a finite end into them. So it might be three months. It might be four months, six months possibly, but whatever it was, it ended. And then it ended in the exchange of a report or an assignment.
[00:04:59] Called the deliverable, which was handed over and an invoice, and they paid you, and that was how it was all done. So that was what I was initially trained as, and I actually went out when I back in the Gold Coast, back in Australia and I started talking to people and I joined a few organizations and things like that, and I was just immersed in it.
[00:05:21] It was like, I'd jumped into a swimming pool, full of prospects, you know. And, in the first year, I discovered that the project and the assignment method, it didn't work because you were in, you were out, you gave the report over, which is typically a business plan with a whole lot of tasks that are joined onto a task to be done.
[00:05:48] I found that it didn't work. After the first year I went back to my clients and I said, how's the implementation of the business plan going? And seven out of nine had done nothing. And the other two got lost in it. So I knew after 12 months that it didn't work. So that traditional business consulting.
[00:06:07] And, I decided it was the second year that I thought I need to be the implementation guy, but during all of that, I got also got a bit of immersed in action coach, which is a coaching organization,
[00:06:20] Julius: Business coaching,
[00:06:22] David: coaching, what? I don't know that that they call it business coaching, do they? But they do now.
[00:06:27] They didn't, then it was just action coach. So they coaching anybody. I got involved with them and I tried to, well, they tried to get me to join them and I didn't like what they did. I thought there was a lot of stuff in this thing and I ended up, seeing this guy every month in Brisbane, I'd drive down there and shout at him lunch and everything.
[00:06:47] And then after about four or five, six months, he rang me and he said, I want you to consult, to us, in specifically Western Australia where they had 28 action coaches over there.
[00:07:00] Julius: So you were consulting to a coaching firm.
[00:07:04] David: Yes, yes.
[00:07:06] Julius: Kind of comical thing.
[00:07:07] David: Yes. Yeah, is a bit, is a bit, yeah, yeah. But, I had a more of a business approach to it and they didn't, and that was the reason why I never joined them as a, as an action coach, because I didn't believe that they did the things that needed to be done to a business to make it better. Now, whether that's changed today in 2021, I don't know. This was back in about 2016.
[00:07:31]Earlier than that, earlier than that 2006, not 16, six to seven, somewhere in there. Anyway, so I understood what coaches, what did, and I'd always known from those early days that, it wasn't what a business owner wanted. There's some elements, but it was only like about 30 or 40%.
[00:07:54] Julius: David, that sounds like a good point in this podcast to start to discuss exactly what a business coach is and how they work. So do you want to start off by telling us what is a business coach?
[00:08:08] David: A business coach, is essentially quite similar to a sports coaches as well, where they help to clarify the vision of the business and how it fits in with their personal goals.
[00:08:20] So business coaching is a process used to take a business from where it is today, to where the owner wants it to be.
[00:08:29] Julius: Okay. And how does it work in terms of actually doing things and the actual relationships?
[00:08:37] David: Well it focuses on the future. And, it really is where the coach asks a lot of questions from the business owner or the business manager about where they want to be and in the future, and tries to tease the answers out of that person.
[00:08:56] However it doesn't always work perfectly.
[00:09:01] Julius: And why is that?
[00:09:02] David: Well, because the ideas that the owner may have for the business to improve it, maybe wrong.
[00:09:11] Julius: Okay. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like a business coach. It's their job to try and get the answers out of the owner rather than helping to contribute the answers.
[00:09:23] David: Correct. Yeah.
[00:09:25] Julius: And when you say the answers might be wrong, that's because the, the business owner, isn't, isn't an expert in particularly areas of the business they're not trained on, which is as we've discussed in previous podcasts, which is typically the business aspect of it.
[00:09:40] David: Yes. And there's a very good saying which covers that, which is if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. Bad English I know, but that's the problem with coaching is that they tend to use the ideas of the owner or the client and work with those things when quite often they're not the right things.
[00:10:02] Julius: Okay. And how long does a business coach typically work with a client?
[00:10:07] David: It tends to be short term, months rather than years. And that's not enough time to get a good result out of the business.
[00:10:14] Julius: Why is it short term? And is that the intention of it?
[00:10:18] David: They don't have enough, coaches don't have enough of things that they need, resources. They just run out. And the coaching relationship ends up with the coach and the business owner sitting across a table, staring at each other and not talking because they run out of things to say,
[00:10:35] Julius: Okay. And so when a coach starts working with a client and a client agrees to work with them, do they have I guess a fixed term agreement or do they, is it ongoing? What's the intention behind it?
[00:10:47] David: Oh, they're all different, but typically there a monthly fixed fee X dollars a fixed fee. And, it ends up usually getting canceled, by the client.
[00:11:02]Julius: And what's the intention of it.
[00:11:03] David: Intention of what
[00:11:05] Julius: Is it intended to be a very short term thing or a long-term thing?
[00:11:10]David: In the mind of the coach, it's intended to be long-term, but it never works out that way because they run out of things to do, because they don't have the right systems and processes that they need to put into the business.
[00:11:21] Julius: When you say they, you mean the coach.
[00:11:23] David: The coach.
[00:11:24] Julius: Okay.
[00:11:25] David: Yeah.
[00:11:25] Julius: And why is that?
[00:11:27] David: Because they'd never been taught that and it's not part of coaching. Coaching is a very light dusting over the top of a business, really. And, you need to go far deeper to make a success of it.
[00:11:40] Julius: Okay. And quite importantly, does the coach monitor the performance of the business and make sure that it's doing better than what it was previously?
[00:11:48] David: Some do some of them don't, it's not part of coaching generally. You would think that they would, but I'm sure a few of them do. I'm sure. I'm sure they've changed a little bit over the years, but typically no, not to the extent that somebody like we would do in business consulting.
[00:12:05] Julius: Okay, now let's look at a business mentor David, what's a business mentor?
[00:12:10]David: Well, typically they are a retired ex corporate, generally a man, sometimes a woman. But mostly men, they have a lot of business experience, and they provide guidance to business owners, or maybe other business managers, on a probably a monthly basis.
[00:12:29] Julius: Okay. And what do they actually do when they're providing this guidance as a business mentor?
[00:12:37]David: They just talk they're very light. I'm sure a lot of good ideas are transferred across, but no, that's not what the business owner needs. The business owner needs to have somebody to help them to tear the business to pieces and rebuild it.
[00:12:51] And mentors do not do that. And they charge very little or low cost really to do the job, but it's just really a way of then giving back to the business community.
[00:13:03] Julius: So it's quite a hands-off sort of thing. Quite passive. Really?
[00:13:06] David: Yeah.
[00:13:07] Julius: Okay. The next term that we've got to consider and look at today is a business advisor.
[00:13:13] Now, this is probably pretty common in the accountancy field. It's a term that's starting to be used more and more. What exactly is a business advisor?
[00:13:23] David: Well, as you mentioned it's typically used in the accountancy field, cause they call it business advice and that's usually accountants that do it.
[00:13:32] And they see a business, as a business advisor, as an extension to what they do as an accountant and, provide additional services on top of what they normally do, which is just number crunching.
[00:13:46] Julius: Okay. And how does it work?
[00:13:47] David: They provide these additional services and there could be any one of a hundred things. It could be tax advice, it could be advice on trusts and wills and on and on and on, insurance. And, and there's many, many things. It depends on what the accountant is, is good at. They may have additional experience in these areas and they package it up as a service and sell it to the client.
[00:14:11] Julius: So it's business advice, but it's not really specific, unless you find out what the specific offering is.
[00:14:17] David: Yes, that's correct. Yeah.
[00:14:20] Julius: Now business consultant, David, we've already talked a little bit about, what a hunt and kill business consultant is. Do you just want to go into that in a bit more detail? What is a traditional business consultant?
[00:14:31] David: Well traditionally they do what's called hunt and kill, as we mentioned earlier. And that is to go out, find somebody who is a business owner who has problems and come up with solutions for them, put those solutions into a report, which is called an assignment or a project. And then it's, it's also called a deliverable because you deliver it to the owner of the business, but that's where the relationship ends, under traditional business consultant.
[00:15:00] I never liked the word. And when I started 16 years ago and I started going out and talking to business owners, I got a lot of, well, not a lot. I got some backlash from business owners about oh, I had a business consultant once, and what they were talking about was a business coach, they were talking about a mentor. They were talking about an advisor and account advisor, business advisor, all of these things, and they're all lumping them into business consultant. So there's this big fluffy understanding of business consultant out in the marketplace. And, some of it was negative because, they were being tainted by it by the wrong sort of advisor.
[00:15:44] Julius: Okay. And does a business consultant, I know that they can do different things and they're with a business over different time periods, so they typically monitor performance?
[00:15:51] David: Some do some don't. I can't speak for all of them, because as I said, that they range from it's a big fuzzy, blurry description of what could be a coach.
[00:16:02] It could be a half a coach and half a mentor and all these sorts of things, but typically not a few do obviously they do.
[00:16:10] Julius: Okay, then we want to discuss David, what is a ConsultX Business Consultant?
[00:16:17] David: Well, after working for a few years and training lots and lots of consultants around the world, and having many, many discussions on this, we all, I mean, all the consultants, we all decided, that business consultant was not the right term for what we did.
[00:16:36] And that it was, we were using a term which was misunderstood by business owners. And it caused potential confusion. So after probably about three or four months of every training session we had, which had about 10 to 12 consultants, we'd have a discussion about this. And we brought it down a funnel and we decided that what we did was not business consulting.
[00:17:01] We decided that we were Business Success Partners. We work with businesses, we were concerned with delivering success to the owner and we work with them like a partner. And we found that, and this is hundreds of our people, it wasn't just a one person decision. That was the best description that we could possibly have in what we do, which is puts it totally different to coaching, to mentoring, to advising and things like that. And it very adequately describes our relationship.
[00:17:38] Julius: Okay. And what is it that a business success partner does then?
[00:17:43] David: We work with the business owner, and that it might not be a business owner. It might be, it could be a public company. As I mentioned in an earlier podcast, they're very difficult to work with, but mostly we work with business owners.
[00:17:55] We work with the business owner, and our main concern is their success. Because if we can help make them personally become successful through their business, then everything else flows downstream to all the employees, to the value of the company, to a whole lot of things. So success is whatever the owner of the business deems it to be, but typically it's got a financial kind of a tone to it and we work with them like a partner.
[00:18:27] And look, we don't own any shares in the business. We don't have any investment in the business, but we that's what we act like. We act like we are a shareholder helping him or her work towards what their goals are. So we become a Business Success Partner. And, even today, many, many years after we came up with that description, I can't think of a better one.
[00:18:52] Julius: And how do you bring a business owner success?
[00:18:57]David: By working with them on their business, by starting off an hour early. Early meetings with client acquisition meetings by finding out where their businesses was, what its state is now, where it's been, what its problems are, what the challenges are by finding out where they want to be personally, them and their family by finding out how that all works together by finding out how the business integrates with the personal, because it's the business that delivers the money to the family, to the personal, by finding out all of those things. And then helping them unravel this really complex, group of items or topics or parts of their business and helping to put them into a logical sequential sense, that makes sense to everybody that we can start working on, which will drive them from where they are today, to where they want to be in five years time where their goal is. So that's how we do it, which is very different to everybody else. And it's long-term. You can't turn a business round in three or six months, because if you try too fast, it'll fall over, and run out of cash.
[00:20:09] So what you have to do, it has to be very carefully done over a long period of time. Say five years. And it's amazing what you can do in that period of time, like you could turn somebody from having a business, that's not worth very much, not very profitable to making them a multi-multi millionaire.
[00:20:31] Julius: And you've mentioned before that this is quite different to all of the other, the other things we've discussed, a coach, a consultant, an advisor, and a mentor. But it does it have some similarities with them as well?
[00:20:43] David: Only aspects and the similarity is that that as a business success partner, we wear the hat of a business consultant, a coach, a counselor, a mentor, a friend, a confidant, whole lot of hats, probably 10 or 12 hats we wear.
[00:21:02] And we wear them, when we need to wear them. When we need to be, that person we'll change slightly and we'll be that person when we need to.
[00:21:10] Julius: Okay. And can you just give me a bit of an idea what it actually looks like on a day to day or month to month basis being a Business Success Partner and, helping a business owner become successful?
[00:21:22] David: Well, once you've done the business plan, once you've got it signed off, once you are implementing it, your relationship will be around about two meetings a month. Of about probably two hours, two and a half hours, something like that. Twice a month, one meeting as a management meeting, one meeting as a financial measurement meeting, and you'll do that.
[00:21:44] And it's during those meetings, the measurement meeting, the financial meeting, management meeting is where you measure all the key performance indicators on where the business is meant to be at this point in time. And the implementation meeting is where you manage all of the tasks that need to be done over the month, since you last saw them on that meeting on what they need to be done to move the business closer towards what it's five-year vision is.
[00:22:15] Julius: Okay. And so you do measure performance within that then?
[00:22:18] David: Yes, definitely. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
[00:22:21] Julius: Okay, very good. Well, I think that gives me a really good idea what a business success partner is, but also the other ones we've described today, which was a business mentor and a business consultant and a business coach and a business advisor.
[00:22:35] And is there any final words you have for us on this David?
[00:22:40] David: Only that, that our business ConsultX has evolved over, it's probably evolved over gosh, 40 years, which sounds a long time. It's a long time. And what I mean is like, I started learning how to run a business in 1980, 81, 82. I'm not a trained accountant or anything like that.
[00:23:01] I learned how to run a business from the atomic level up. And that was when I started this little tiny beverage company. Every cent, I knew how we made money cent by cent by cent, what were Jewish proverb? How do you make profit one cent at a time? And that really was the case because I learned how to run a business. I started with a little notebook. I would lay five notebook and every Friday night I would calculate down debtors, creditors, stock, cartons boxes, bottles, fruit juice, all the things that we had, labels. And I would add them up on a Friday night. And that was a very primitive stone age way that I was able to measure whether I was in a different position this Friday night than what I was to Friday night before.
[00:23:48] So I was doing essentially, a balance sheet type operation and every Friday night. And if I had more items that Friday night, then the one before then I know that I've made a profit and it sounds really, it's almost embarrassing talking about it, but that's how I started. So once I understood how it worked in the atomic level.
[00:24:09] Then I was able to mechanize that by using some of the early spreadsheets that were available, like Lotus 1, 2, 3, and then eventually in the software programs. So I did learn how, over 40 years. And what I mean is the first 20 years was the juice company, the beverage company, and then the next 20 years was, being a business consultant, working with lots and lots of businesses all over Australia.
[00:24:34]But that's where I lived, when I was a consultant and, learning from them. So, I've kind of done like a 40 year apprenticeship in businesses. And as I've done that, and especially in the last 20 years, last 16 years, I've turned it into a program. The Business Success Program turned it into a program, that people that we can train people to use to be able to work with clients of their own.
[00:25:01] Julius: Well, thank you for sharing your stories with us, David that's a lot of development and knowledge that you've picked up over the years. So I hope that the listeners of this podcast have gained something. Thank you.
[00:25:14] David: Thanks everyone.
[00:25:17] Everything Business Consulting is brought to you by ConsultX. It's a global business consulting company that has everything that you require to become a successful business consultant or to offer consulting services in your existing professional firms.
[00:25:35] If you'd like to find out more, come visit us at consultx.com.