Business Coaches And Consultants Need Training Too!

Well, they can surely use off the shelf business leadership training content if they want to add another valuable service to their clients.

As a business coach or a consultant one of your best weapons is asking questions. To be a successful consultant you must dive deep into your clients organization and ask questions the verify answers to really analyze their situation. This will allow you to come up solutions and help you in advising your client on how to plan and execute to address opportunity areas. So what are the reoccurring opportunity areas that you see time and time again? Answer: Employee training, growth and development, leadership and business training, and many “training related” areas I’m sure.

I know because I have had many business coaches and consultants (especially small business consultants) come to me for guidance in that area. It’s a common opportunity area for small businesses. Most small businesses focus more on operations and revenue than they do on their employee’s growth and development. What they sometimes fail to realize is that the employee is more of an asset to invest in they understand. Soft skills or interpersonal communication skills is absolutely one of the most important traits of a customer focused business. If your employees do not receive training in this area of person-to-person contact then they are destined to have shortcomings.

Now most consultants and coaches just advise their clients to invest in some career training or soft skills courses. They may refer their clients to a few colleagues of theirs (like my colleagues do for my firm) and then move on to their next client or follow up with that client with questions about how the plan is going and if they took the training advise. What if you as a coach or consultant had your own business leadership or career training programs to offer? Don’t worry about developing a training program from scratch for every client. You would have to grow a complete training staff to do that anyway. Why not invest in some off the shelf courseware to offer your clients?

What is off the shelf courseware? This is a training program in a box really. It may be one topic or many or a cluster of topics that fall into your clients opportunity areas of employee training and development. Imagine handing you’re client a course that’s ready to go and that they could use to facilitate the soft skills training or business leadership training needs of their organization with just a few edits or customization so that it appears to be their own training product/program. Off the shelf career or business leadership or soft skills training courseware should be a must have for every business consultant or business coach out there. Instead of just advising a client to get that done because it’s needed and an area for them to improve their business – why not give them what they ask for and you advise them to do as well?

Where is the selling point for the client? There need not be one really. You can give the training to them. You could sell it as an additional product as well, but for the client they get a training program that didn’t have to spend months or years to develop. They can customize it and brand it to their company and facilitate internal training so they take ownership in growing leaders from within. The client doesn’t have to figure it out or spend thousands on seminars, workshops and travel/entertainment expense for their employees. It is really a “no brainer” for consultants and coaches to have off the shelf courseware in their back pocket and as an added benefit for their clients. It’s amazing how many consultants out there who spend more time referring this task or outsourcing it so that others can capitalize on the training opportunity area. Training content or courseware for consultants just makes sense.

Where is the benefit for you the consultant or coach? Well – your clients’ benefit above should the most important. Also, you can purchase training content from some training providers restriction free. It’s called re-usability training. Some organizations focus solely on developing business leadership and soft skills training programs that anyone can use as courseware to re-brand, edit, sell or customize any way they like.

In summary: business coaches and consultants do need training too. They need it not just for them to grow and develop, but they need courseware to add value to their service offerings and enhance their clients’ experience.