Guidance, support, accountability: Benefits of a business coach

Speaking with ifa, former adviser and co-founder of The Wealth Network, Dean Holmes, explained that his background in the field lends him the benefit of experience that others may lack when coaching advisers through business challenges.

“I’m a former financial adviser, now business coach. From the perspective of why we’re good as business coaches to financial advisers, we still own financial planning practices. Although not as an adviser, we’re still hands on within financial advice overall,” he said.

“My analogy is that I’m the swim coach that can swim in the water with you, and in front of you, and behind you. That I’ve done all these things before and am still doing them. So I’m not this suggester. My personal hate of coaches overall, is they just become suggestors.

“And so we have this view inside of our business that we’re coaching and execution. Coaching on its own is important, but you need to execute on the ideas as well.

“We’ve got a piece of software that helps us, but we have accountability groups as well, so that we increase the chance that people will execute on the things that we coach them to do.”

Holmes explained that his business has two primary elements to it: partnership and coaching.

“The partnership element is that we share in the equity in the business that we start, but we don’t take a fee, so eventually we get bought out of the equity. It’s a traditional kind of sweat equity model. We partner with the advisers for five years to help them build their business from scratch,” he said.

“We help them accelerate that business and grow faster than what they otherwise could have done on their own. Business owners or advisers can be really competent and excellent financial advisers, but when you come to have to run a business that delivers financial advice, it’s then a different skill set.

“So, we bring that experience and coaching to this younger adviser that wants to grow their own business. We tell them the mistakes that they’re about to make before they make them, and we give them our counsel along the way.

“They get to borrow our systems and processes and experience. In my main financial planning business, those staff will help train staff in your new business. There’s a lot of cross sharing of information that way.”

Coaching for established businesses

In addition to the partnership offering, established advice firms can also access business coaching through The Wealth Network to help them overcome growth challenges and improve their businesses.

“They’ve grown it to a particular point, but they’re hitting all of those growth challenges; they’re too busy, their staff may not be doing the right thing, they want to hire another adviser. They’re growing, but they just have a variety of challenges,” he said.

“The first thing to go into their business is a particular business operating system, which we call the cadence, to get them doing all the right things at the right time.

“The second thing we do is we make sure we’ve got an overall business plan for the businesses. Every business has their own detailed two-page business plan distilled all from a 10-year vision of where they’re going all the way, down to like a three-month goal of the projects they’re working on in the business for the next three months.”

Fox and Hare

Speaking on his own experience starting Fox & Hare Financial Advice back in 2017 in partnership with The Wealth Network, Glen Hare told ifa that beyond the financial aspect, the partnership helped provide essential guidance during the initial stages of his business.

“I think the main thing was just the guidance, being a sounding board, mentoring, trying to avoid mistakes that potentially they made starting their own business,” Hare said.

“It definitely helped give us that level of comfort that we’ve got people that have been through what we’re about to embark on and been successful in doing so. I think there’s value in having that support and that level of backing.”