Business Coaching FAQ

Our coaching is designed for small business owners, typically with 1 to 25 employees, who have been trading for at least a year. You might be a sole trader who wants to hire for the first time, or a company director with a team of fifteen who feels stuck at the same revenue level. We work across industries: trades, professional services, retail, hospitality, creative agencies, and e-commerce.

If you are pre-revenue and still validating your idea, we are probably not the right fit. We work best with people who already have customers and want to make the business more profitable or more manageable.

A standard engagement runs 12 weeks. That is long enough to make real structural changes, but short enough to stay focused. Some clients do a single cycle and move on. Others continue for two or three cycles, especially during periods of rapid growth or significant change like opening a second location or launching a new product line.

The diagnostic is a 90-minute video call at the start of every engagement. Before the call, we ask you to send us your last 12 months of management accounts (or bookkeeping reports), a list of your current services or products with rough pricing, and a description of how you spend a typical week.

During the call, we go through those documents together. We look for patterns: which revenue streams earn the most per hour, where costs have crept up without you noticing, and what tasks are eating your time without generating income. By the end, we draft an initial action plan with three to five priorities for the first month.

Yes, but nothing onerous. We send you a short pre-engagement questionnaire that takes about 30 minutes to fill in. It asks about your revenue, your team structure, your biggest frustration, and what you would change if you had a magic wand. We also need access to your profit and loss report and, ideally, your balance sheet. If you use Xero, QuickBooks, or FreeAgent, you can share read-only access directly.

Almost all sessions happen over video call (Zoom or Google Meet, your choice). We find this works well because it saves travel time and makes scheduling easier. If you are based in central Scotland and prefer face-to-face for the diagnostic or a quarterly review, we can arrange that for an additional travel fee.

We have coached owners in construction, accounting, physiotherapy, graphic design, e-commerce, catering, and software development, among others. The common thread is not the industry but the stage: businesses doing between £80,000 and £2 million in annual revenue, with an owner who is still heavily involved in daily operations and wants to change that.

A consultant typically comes in, analyses your problem, writes a report, and leaves. You are then responsible for implementing everything on your own. We stay with you through implementation. Each fortnight we check what got done, troubleshoot what did not, and adjust the plan. Think of it as having a knowledgeable co-pilot who is invested in your progress over the full 12 weeks.

All plans include email support with a 24-hour response time on business days. The Growth and Scale plans also include ad-hoc calls you can book within 48 hours for urgent matters. If a key employee hands in their notice on a Tuesday, you do not have to wait until your next scheduled session to talk it through.

If it helps, absolutely. On the Growth and Scale plans, we can join a call with your accountant to discuss tax planning or cash flow forecasting. We can also sit in on a team meeting if you want a second pair of eyes on how your staff communicate and prioritise. We just need your permission beforehand.