Business Coaching
A professional coaching service can help you grow your business from where it is currently in to what you’ve always wanted. We work closely with you to understand and review the current state of your business, how you manage it and your personal approach to leadership. Using a combination of our coaching philosophy, proven business review systems and our own ROQUE Model, we help you find direction and support you to achieve your goals. We aim to bring benefits to both your personal and professional life and understand that reaching a balance and harmony in both will allow you to tap further into your true potential.
Is a professional coaching service right for me?
There are a number of reasons you may want to hire a business coach, mentor or adviser. Each can serve many roles in helping you to achieve greater results with your business, your leadership skills and your personal development. Here are a number of common reasons we find businesses turning to our coaching services:
Dis-satisfaction with current business success?
We work with you to help you identify ways to improve both your business internal efficiency and external effectiveness. Together we will critically acknowledge what is currently happening and why. We look at options and possibilities. We test what directions we shoould aim towards. We ensure we put in place what you need, and plan for what are essential for success. We set specific goals which we will monitor until we get those results. And we maintain a review practice so that we are also taking advantage of new opportunities along the way.
In need of an objective perspective?
Even successful business owners talk to coaches,mentors and advisers. They know it is too easy to become lost in the day to day activities of being busy. The support of an outside perspective with keen objectivity and proven experience can help you find the answers you are looking for when it comes to making crucial business decisions.
Cash flow problems?
Even when sales are great, sometimes late customer payments, early supplier payment terms, urgent investment demands, and a whole heap of competing cash urgencies can make you wonder why there is so much pain! Managing your cash flow is a critical success factor for any business – small or large. Good revenue and profitability are put at risk when cash flow control is lost.
Struggling to increase sales, profit and income?
There are a number of reasons why you may find your business is not where you need it to be. Our services aim to review and analyze the data available, look at what information it is presenting, and suggest ways improve. We look at the whole journey of your brand image, your marketing presence and how you sell. We evaluate your opportunity identification, management and engagement of prospects. We suggest ways to develop your customer relationships and leverage them as assets.
An interest in proven business reviews?
Have you considered a SRQ (Strategic Review Quotient) or SWOT Analysis (a 5 way Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats/Risk) of your business? A business coach can help you get the most out of conducting a review using these proven systems.
Creating a Business Case and Business Plan?
Many people confuse the difference between a business case and a business plan. Very simply, a Business Case is about what you want to invest by way of time and money with your product and service, and what you want to have as a result of doing it! A Business Plan is the strategic and tactical plan of activities you need to undertake in order to make the business case happen. You may be considering the benefits of creating a Business Case and Business Plan. Having an experienced professional advisor will help you get the best benefits out of such an exercise and give direction on ways to achieve those end goals.
If you are serious about owning and running a successful business, research now proves that having a business coach, mentor, adviser, trusted friend etc is a critical success factor. As the saying goes: If you think the cost of professional help is a lot, compare that to the cost of failure. At QuestUnique, we plan your success with our costs factored in. If you are not getting the benefit, get some better alternative!
Getting Started
In the beginning of our Business Coaching Sessions we create a profile of the business owner. We cover a range of topics which provides clarity of the dream, vision and mission for the business. This is useful for a new business as well as existing and pre-established set ups. While we also focus on specific goals you may be seeking to achieve we commonly discuss a number of topics such as the following:
What is the business about?
We discuss the heart of your business. What is it’s purpose, the why and the context, any history and those “big, hairy, audacious” goals!
What is its target niche?
Does your business focus on a specific audience? Have you seen an opening in the market looking to be filled? What research have you done or are intending to do to secure your position with a value adding differentiator?
Do you have quality assurance?
Do you have strategies in place to ensure replication, sustainability and quality are in place for your target market?
Clarity of Range and Reach?
Do you understand the Range and Reach of your product and customer set? Are there plans for this to evolve?
How are you choosing to go-to-market?
Do you have a marketing strategy and plan? How do you reach your audience? Have you investigated different options and the potential they have to give you a competitive advantage? Do you measure the return or benefit of the plans you implement?
Do you have a strategy?
A business and its owners needs a sound foundation in order to be sustainable. Just a good product or service is a positive starting point. Your value proposition must be matched with all aspects from that to give confidence to your target market.
Are you taking full advantage of opportunities?
Do you consciously explore identifying resources within all your business connections?
Success Metrics?
Do you keep a track of your business success? Do you have metrics or KPIs you use to gauge the health of your business?
Meet your Business Coach, Mentor and Adviser
Joseph D’Souza is a qualified coach with many years of experience helping small businesses. His clients span different industries. Joseph is an experienced large business professional and executive. He has also previously started and run two small businesses including this third and current Questunique coaching business now in its sixteenth year. Joseph is also professionally accredited with a number of tools to support successful coaching outcomes.
As coaching sessions progress Joseph acts equally as a Business Mentor, Advisor, Consultant and a trusted friend you can turn to regarding your business decisions.
You can learn more about our coaching philosophy by clicking here.
Coaching Strategy
At QuestUnique we have a small business coaching strategy that focuses on more than just running a business. We use a combination of consultations, review systems, analytical tools and coaching methodologies. These different approaches combined give a platform for developing your business and your leadership skills in managing it.
Private Consultation
The core of our coaching services. We work with you personally in a one-on-one capacity on a variety of topics. As appropriate, sessions can include fellow business partners. Additional services can be provided to facilitate team discussions with key employees.
Focus on the Individual
As a Business Owner, you ARE your business! We believe that a strong focus on you, the individual, and not just the business owner is vital to success.
Focus on the Business
When you run a business, the time you invest most is IN the business. You are doing what you intended the business should be about. However, working ON the business is also a Critical Success Factor. This is where you take a birds eye view, ideally with a trusted independent perspective to ask review type questions on all aspects of the business. Do this regularly!
SWOT Analysis
No business can survive without an effective analysis of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and strengths or threats AND taking the actions called for. If you only did a couple of things to improve your business, a SWOT analysis should be one of them. Read more.
The ROQUE Coaching Methodology
Our own methodology for finding answers to a range of business questions and challenges. Read more.
Strategic Review Quotient
A deep review of your business featuring a number of metrics to follow with subsequent reviews. Read more.
The ROQUE Model
A coaching instrument and self reflection tool based on the principles of The ROQUE Coaching Methodology. Read more.
SMART Goals
Everyone knows about goals! Do they? Everyone knows about SMART goals! Do they practice this? Be the one who BECOMES their goal rather than the ones who HAVE goals! A slight BIG difference the QuestUnique way.
Strategic Review SRQ Rationale
When the Apollo space craft was sent to the moon, the dream, vision, mission, and specific supporting goals were all in sync. Such is the nature of circumstances yet often overlooked by the casual observer. There is immense diligence required of the management of the journey. From atmospheric disturbance, through gravitational pulls, fuel optimization and physical logistics it was necessary for the space craft to go off course in order to be steered to the destination. This happened about a hundred thousand times! Momentum, speed and directional correction was calculated and made in direct proportion to the feedback collected from the instrumentation both on the craft and at mission control. Some of this was automatic yet the success was in the main due to the manual interventions.
When a business is launched, like the Apollo space mission, business direction is predetermined by the owners and managers directing the intended strategic outcomes. The key measures everyone will be familiar with are the sales volumes, the gross margins and sometimes (though not often enough) the net profits after expenses. For some, the road traveled is only reflected upon at Business Activity Statement time or financial year end. Others receive a ‘friendly’ or not so friendly letter from the bank!
Business Coaching with SRQ
From small business solopreneurs all the way up to medium sized wholesale and manufacturing businesses it is important you have a plan, a strategy on how to execute that plan and metrics to determine how it is succeeding.
A proactive way to capture strategic information in addition to every day Key Performance Indicators, is to maintain a discipline of regular strategic reviews of the business. Once a year is not good enough. Once a quarter is good yet nothing will add business ‘steering’ value better than a series of planned, disciplined mini monthly reviews. Additional quarterly exercises can then reflect and offer decision support to emerging trends.
The Strategic Review Quotient (SRQ) instrument is designed to promote a proactive, strategic management habit to ensure businesses as whole or key divisions or departments are on track to achieve. The end mission may be an annual performance or a two to three years horizon of a particular strategic initiative.
SRQ7
SEVEN fundamental conversation starter questions:
- This business has clear Vision, Mission and Purpose statements.
- The Market positioning or niche is identified and targeted.
- Key business strategies for ‘going to market’ are operationalized.
- Business Plan, Revenues and Budgets EIS plus SWOT analysis are being used.
- Key business processes and systems are documented and followed.
- There is an inventory of pre-arranged resources.
- All the key deliverables for the business are catalogued.
SRQ70
A structured process for a general Strategic Review and quarterly agenda.
- The process includes documenting a score against seventy key questions in each of the SRQ seven categories.
- The output is a two page report graphically illustrating the strategic review status check of the business.
- A strategic Quotient value rates the business on the following scale:
- 7. Highly Sustainable
6. All KPI’s are consistent to plan
5. Internally Efficient & Externally Effective.
4. Operational and In-Development.
3. Critical Success Factors Optimized.
2. Business Start-Up attributes.
1. Business Concept Status
SRQ700
Intended for a business’s initial strategic planning and annual review.
This process is a deep dive into the business using a check list of SEVEN HUNDRED questions in each of the SRQ seven key categories.
All SRQ options are deliberately intended for a facilitated service. The objective outputs are discussed, debated and tested for independent congruency of facts in the context of intended directions or outcomes.
Ready to begin your
journey with a coach?
Engaging with business owners using his range of mentoring skills has been a life long passion for Joseph D’Souza and his team of associates. They aim to not only see you achieve goals in your business but to find a true balance with your personal life as well.
Get in contact with us today for a consultation to learn more about how our business coaching services could improve both your professional and personal life and bring your business to new levels. Book a one off introductory 2 hours session to explore without ongoing obligation. Feel free to compare!
