Entrepreneurship can be a very lonely sport. Your friends don’t understand your life, neither does your family, nor do your employees. No one other than other entrepreneurs can understand the shoes you’re in—the pressure you face daily, on top of the pressure to succeed in the long term. It’s all on you, every second of every day. Not only taking the action but figuring out which action is the right one to take.
It can be draining. This article in Inc. Magazine outlined it perfectly:
“It’s like a man riding a lion. People think, ‘This guy’s brave.’ And he’s thinking, ‘How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?”
The thing is, no matter how good of an entrepreneur you are, you need a coach to help you see things that the day-to-day battles create too much fog for you to see.
When we think of people like Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, and the like, we remember that they are the best at what they do, but we forget that despite their greatness, they all have a coach.
That is because a coach is looking from the outside in. They can analyze your situation, learn the way you work, understand your capabilities, and help you harness your potential so that you not only know your limits but also your full potential.
That said, let’s dissect a few things an entrepreneur life coach can help you with.
Vision
A good entrepreneur life coach can help you crystallize your vision. Typically, they start by getting to know what an ideal outcome for the entrepreneurial journey is to you, what your values are, and what you want to become in the process. Many of us know this innately, but the hard part is making it concrete and then sticking to it. So many of us take on things daily that don’t align with our vision for our life and don’t even realize that we are taking away from our goals rather than nurturing them.
Focus
A good life coach can help an entrepreneur stay focused on the long-term vision, not letting shiny opportunities distract them from the core mission. Once a vision is identified, it’s going to be super important for you to stay on track. The weekly check-ins can help establish that.
In addition to focusing on the long-term vision, a good life coach can help you with strategies on how to focus on the day-to-day. How to do things like prioritize tasks, manage your time and energy, as well as properly estimate how much you can get done in a day and what you should be doing.
Support & Accountability
Like a mentor, a life coach can be that support system entrepreneurs need when things get hard. The thing is, with entrepreneurship, things are usually hard, and most entrepreneurs have no one to lean on, no one that understands what they are going through, and no one to talk through the emotions with. A therapist can be that for you, but if it’s not someone that has been through the battles you’re fighting, it’ll be harder for them to empathize with you.
On the flip side, it’s not all just soft, cushy support; it’s also about holding you accountable to your goals. Knowing you have someone who knows what you want and when you said you will do the things that get you there is something that keeps you motivated to stay on track and get things done. If you happen to have the habit of procrastination, as most of us do, then a good coach can help you conquer it by holding you accountable.
Business Consulting
Part of the reason you want an entrepreneur life coach rather than just a therapist is because an entrepreneur life coach also understands business. They will be able to help you through more than motivation. They will also be able to give you strategic advice on how to manage and scale your business.
This includes things like helping you with marketing and sales, identifying which channels you should tackle, how to get an ROI within those channels, and setting up a sales process that is efficient and high-converting.
On top of that, a good entrepreneur coach can help you manage the hardest part of entrepreneurship, which is managing people and their emotions while having to manage yourself. You want an entrepreneurship coach who knows business and can help navigate the complicated waters of scaling that are unique to each industry.
Skills Training
Part of the benefit you get is having a personal mentor that will help you not only sharpen the tools you already have but add to your toolkit. You’ll be working with someone who can take decades of their experience as an entrepreneur and someone that has worked with entrepreneurs and help you absorb all of that knowledge to improve as a marketer, salesperson, manager, and entrepreneur.
Think about when you read a book and walk away with at least one thing that changes how you do things from that point forward.
When you work with a good coach, that is a feeling you will have after every meeting.
So What’s in a Good Coach?
Here is what to look for in a good coach:
Experience
You want a coach who has been or is an entrepreneur themselves. Many coaches are taught in their “certification programs” that they don’t have to have done it to teach it. I vehemently disagree. You can’t teach business if you haven’t done it. I’ve hired many employees who have read a lot of books on business and realized the hard way that many of those things don’t apply in the real world. Not only that, you want someone that understands the mental and emotional toll of having all that pressure on you. If you’ve never been in it, you just can’t understand it.
Availability
You don’t want coaches that just offer courses and digital materials. While those things are nice additions, you want someone who can talk directly to your problems, not just provide some vague advice.
More than Motivation
You need someone who can do more than be your cheerleader. You need someone who understands human behavior and how to help you acquire the skills, character traits, and mindset to be a successful entrepreneur.
Work With Coach Shah
If you’re looking for an entrepreneur coach who has been there, done that, and is still doing it, then you want to work with Shah Day.
Shah has been an entrepreneur for 15 years, having built and sold one business, and built an agency that has helped market many multi-million dollar companies. He knows what it takes to scale. He also has experience scaling multiple startups to over a million in revenue within a venture fund, working closely with entrepreneurs and their teams to make it happen.
Prior to that, he spent a decade boxing and coaching, which gives him unique insights into discipline, motivation, and overcoming the weaknesses of the human mind.
To get an idea of how he thinks, you can read his authored books such as Help Your Self, The Happy Sales System, and Breaking the Profit Plateau.
If you’re ready to get a coach that can help you elevate your game, get started here.
