Brian Wilkinson had 2 decades and great success as a facilitator, mentor and coach in large shareholder action sports organizations as an NLP practitioner helping inspire, inject self- belief and empower clients and people before deciding to branch out in his own business, BW Proficient Solutions. According to Wilkinson, many business owners face challenges finding a structure or framework for their business. They may or may not have automation and systems in place and if they do many are not proactive in initiating and managing them.
Wilkinson says: “I like to coach with what I call ‘just go with your genes’ – they should find some things they are really genius at and do more of that. If there are aspects of the business where they are not strong, they can delegate or outsource these tasks. Many small business owners are by nature micro managers and micro owners, which is something they need to come to terms with and let go of.”
Recently the US Small Business Administration ran a series of events addressing this issue, titled “Discovering and Using Your Strengths as a Business Owner.” The interactive workshop revealed how some people seem to effortlessly glide through the business day, and even when challenges arise, they handle them with professionalism and skill. Their business seems to run well, make money, and deliver great service and according to the SBA, the secret is they have discovered their strengths and how to use them so they and their business thrive.
Wilkinson goes on to say: “For business owners mindset is a big challenge. Being able to put themselves out in the cloud to see opportunities which many think they are not big enough for. There is often a lot of apprehension about change and learning new skills and techniques and about new business concepts. These can all be a challenge for them.” Working with an outside expert can help. The assistance needs to be focused, purposeful and about action. There needs to be agreement, intention and commitment from all parties to be able to achieve results. Just like any top tennis player who has a coach, there are vast amounts of intention that goes into all the variations of a winning shot. Dozens of decisions and techniques impact one shot as well as mental strength, advice and strategies. It is unlikely the player could achieve all this on their own.
As Wilkinson advises: “We need to find the purpose as to why we would work together. We look at where they are striving to be or what they want to achieve and then we would install KPIs to measure that. We then look at result in advance, down the line so we can reverse engineer how we are going to get there. For example, automation; how can we build it once so that it would free them up and then we test and measure and alter and refine the results until we get the desired outcome. It is clear many business owners would do significantly better if they were to engage outside help. Many are reluctant to do so as they struggle to quantify the value of a mentor, coaching or consulting, or they may know others who tried it with less than satisfactory results. However, using the sporting analogy, the chances of a top player being successful without outside help seems remote. If they have come to accept coaching as a necessary success lever, business owners would be wise to follow their footsteps. For more information see Brian Wilkinson on LinkedIn.