Melbourne Business Coachingfor Trades and Services

Is there any advantage to using a local coach in Melbourne over a remote coach via Zoom, Whatsapp etc?

This depends on your style and preferences.

For some of our Melbourne based clients, the local face to face aspect is indispensable. They prefer the richer, more nuanced experience that comes with sit-down, in-person meetings. We’re often able to visit their premises or go out on site with them, we get to know their team.

Coming from the same place, we’re familiar with their local working territories, we may know about their clients and be able to make recommendations based on our local knowledge.

Local clients also enjoy being able to take advantage of our regular training and 90 day planning workshops, which we offer to all clients. These are usually hosted in the Eastern Melbourne suburbs, in or near to our offices in Burwood East.

To others, remote meetings work just fine. We have some clients in Melbourne who might as well be interstate for the number of times we meet in person.

What does business coaching cost?

Typical coaching fees for an established business range from $1,500 per month to $2,500.

At the lower end you might be catching up with a coach once a month and attending periodic seminars on key topics such as financial and business mastery, recruitment, marketing etc.

At the upper end, you’d be meeting with a your coach weekly.

How do you justify your fees?

When you consider costs there are a few things to bear in mind.

• You’re hiring a coach for his or her expertise in helping you grow your business. Many businesses we work with experience substantial growth, even in their fist year. A typical client may be turning over anything from $300K to $3M when they come to us. If you’re turning over $300K and you can find a way to grow turnover by $80K and increase profit margins at the same time, would you pay $30K for it? Of course you would. That kind of growth is easily achievable with our coaching and quite typical.
• Besides financial growth, we’re often able to deliver quality of life improvements too. A key part of what we do is help you systemise your business, which frees up your time. Through our coaching program, many business owners are able to “get their lives back”, freeing up their weekends, finishing work early enough to have quality time with their families.
• Hiring an Action Centre coach is is a bit like taking on a senior board member. This will be someone who develops an intimate knowledge of your business, staff, operations and clients over time and who provides high level direction. Our fees are quite normal for such a role.

How will you help me grow my business?

We work with you to develop excellence in 4 key areas — the main drivers of growth and prosperity for all trade and service businesses.

Financials - growing profit margins, improving cash flow and raising money, if necessary.
Operations - all aspects of management, but in particular the development of systems to improve quality, efficiency and free up time.

Sales and Marketing - to bring you more of the right kind of customers.

Leadership, which encompasses planning, training and building an effective team.

An important part of our philosophy is that these four key areas need to be reasonably well balanced for a business to grow properly.

When we first start working together, it’s likely we’ll find you’re stronger in one or two key areas, with weaknesses in the other areas holding you back.

As a starting point then, we’ll assess your performance in each area and work to bring your weaker areas up to par with your strengths. This approach often leads to quick wins.

Once your business finds a level of balance, stability and predictability, you’ll have the makings a reliable growth engine. One that can withstand the demands of expansion without burning out or consuming all your time. With that, you’ll be well positioned to draw on the same strategies we’ve used to help hundreds of businesses confidently scale to match their owners’ vision. Sustaining their families and growing in value, year after year.

What size businesses do you work with?

We do our best work with established small and mid size businesses employing anywhere from 3 to 25 staff, turning over anywhere between $300K and $10 Million. Businesses in the upper end of that range are usually longstanding clients, who’ve been with us for years and who’ve grown from a much smaller starting point.

Do you come to me or do I come to you?

Over the years we’ve found it better to get clients out of their normal working environment (a type of comfort zone) for coaching sessions.

Creating some distance between their normal environment helps minimise distraction and encourage a more detached, objective perspective.

So more often than not, you’ll come to us. One of the more common exceptions to this might be if we’re coaching multiple team members and time / cost considerations make our coming to you the more practical option.

How often do we meet?

You can choose to see us weekly, fortnightly or monthly, depending on your needs and budget.

Do you offer one on one coaching?

Yes we do.

There’s a growing trend among business coaches to move all clients into course based programs.

Most of our clients, on the other hand, see us one on one.

That said, we compliment our one on one coaching with regular training workshops as well.

Can you coach my team members too?

Absolutely. In some cases, usually clients that have experienced substantial growth over a period of years, we spend more time with team members than we do with the owner.

How do I know you’re any good?

Client results are the only truly objective measure of success for any business coach.

Once you’ve had a discovery call with one of our coaches and been through the next free evaluations step, we’ll encourage you to talk to some of our clients. That way you’ll be able to find out what to expect from people who have first hand experience of our methods and the results they get.

It’s also worth pointing out that we’ve won more awards for client results than any other business coaching firm in the Asia Pacific region over the last 6 years.

All that aside, we back our work with a 90 day money back satisfaction guarantee. All we ask is that you apply yourself to the training provided in that time. If at the end of 90 days you’re not delighted and you feel the coaching is not for your, all you need to do is let us know. We’ll refund your fees and throw in $25 for a pot an parma om us.