People like Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield and authors like Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill must have benefited from the massive rise in Internet searches for their name.

And the increase business guru searches is evident from a table Paul Simister published in 2008. I  created a similar table in  a post for business coaches, business mentors and the like in 2009 and now I’ve updated it for 2010.

The most interesting thing to see is the massive increase in searches for many of the gurus, business coaches or business management consultants.

The table below is based on that created by Paul but has increased to show a few more online business coaches for 2010 as well.

Business Management Consultants and “Gurus”

Last time I did think of adding Richard Branson (60,500 searches in 2009, 110,000 in 2010) but excluded him as he wasn’t offering advice to other companies.

And again Tony Robbins is a winner in the searches for his name. Although he’s equal winner with Robert Kiyosaki.

One point to note that I didn’t include other searches that included the name and some other word. So Brian Tracy would have had many more searches, as would Tony Robbins and Richard Branson.

Dead Business Guru Searches

Interestingly enough there are dead people with more searches than most of the experts and gurus we’ve looked at here. For example:

	Search Count Sept 2010	Search Count April 2009	Search Count July 2008
Dale Carnegie	90,500	6,600	N/A
Napoleon Hill	49,500	8,100	N/A
Jim Rohn	33,100	N/A	N/A

Key Business Consultant Related Searches

If you look at the searches made for generic business phrases  then there are many more than for each business consultant or guru we listed earlier.

The only thing to bear in mind with some of the broader terms, like “coach” or “coaching” is that they often refer to sports coaches, or something that doesn’t relate to business.

	Search Content Sept 2010	Search Count April 2009	Search Count July 2008
Business coaching	74,000	14,800	N/A
Business Coach	135,000	N/A	N/A
Business consultant	135,000	40,500	N/A
Sales coaching	14,800	1,900	N/A
Personal coach	33,100	N/A	N/A
coach	7,480,000	1,830,000	N/A
coaching	0	550,000	N/A
Life coaching	165,000	N/A	N/A
business coaching	74,000	12,100	N/A
Executive coaching	74,000	12,100	N/A
coaching and mentoring	27,100	8,100	N/A
executive coach	33,100	5,400	N/A
leadership training	135,000	14,800	N/A
Management coaching	18,100	N/A	N/A
management training	450,000	90,500	N/A
it training	165,000	49,500	N/A
training	24,900,000	9,140,000	N/A
Leadership development	165,000	N/A	N/A
sales training	246,000	40,500	N/A

The conclusions I drew in 2009 were that people were more interested in finding someone who could give them specific advice or help. Regardless of whether they were well know gurus.

Looking at these figures in 2010 it’s evident that there are a lot of people searching for business consultants and gurus by name. However, the numbers searching for generic key phrases is still massively bigger than those searching by name.

So yet again I wonder of people are looking for specific advice from people who can do the business but don’t cost huge wads of cash

Some people say it’s expensive, others that a coach doesn’t really help them because “they could have done it for themselves.”

To answer the first point a coaching organisation has issued a coaching press release where they noted the massive ROI with coaching:

International consulting firm of Booz Allen & Hamilton undertook a coaching program for some of its senior members. Separately, they engaged another consulting firm to study the effectiveness of their internal coaching program. The independent results showed an astonishing 689% return on the coaching investment. This study indicates that a coaching program is not a cost to the business, but in fact, a rather lucrative investment.

Secondly, if as claimed a business could have done what the coach has got them to do themselves…

Why didn’t they!?

And as I’ve said before coaching more than pays for itself. I have coaching and I really believe it’s the one factor that can turn any business round from a loss or make a profitable one more money.

Creative Credits aims to help Manchester SME businesses get creative input from other businesses registered on the Creative Credits gallery on their web site.

The way it works is as follows:

Creative Credits As A User

Initially eligible users register on the Creative Credits site. There is a deadline after which no more companies can register.

Then there is a lottery and a certain number of companies is awarded “Creative Credits.” What that means is that NESTA (the organisation funding this) will pay £4,000 of a £5,000 creative bill if the user uses one of the companies registered on the creative credits database.

What NESTA say on their web site is:

We’re inviting Manchester-based small businesses from all sectors to apply for ‘Creative Credits’ worth £4,000. These can be used to purchase services from a local creative firm. All we ask is an investment of at least £1,000 and we’ll top it up with £4,000.

The first wave of registrations has finished and the next wave will be February 2010. So remember to register.

Creative Credits As A Supplier

A web design agency, marketing coach, PR company, graphic designer or other sort of creative company registers on the Creative Credits site as a supplier of those services.

Then they wait to be approached by businesses who can browse the online gallery to choose a supplier to work with.

It does seem like a very good idea for businesses who would benefit from creative input but who really can’t justify the cost of a campaign yet.

And of course I’m registered as a supplier, see my creative credits gallery

Rachel is remembered as the one of the founding members of BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den.

She’s also remembered for creating, growing and then over-extending her Red Letter Days company that sold extra special and unusual experiences as gifts.

Rachel continues to help other entrepreneurs through her public speaking at events and through mentoring and consultancy.

Like so many entrepreneurs Rachel’s days are never the same twice.

Broadly speaking her days are best summarised as a

1. working at home type day
2. a celeb-entrepreneur day

Working At Home Day

On finally waking up in the morning Rachel’s brain is buzzing with ideas and she often goes to work in her Bakewell study still in her pyjamas.

There she sifts through the piles of emails that she gets about every topic under the sun and including hundreds on the free entrepreneurs profile test that she’s developed and put on her site at www.rachelelnaugh.com. The questions she uses are interesting and the result claims to tell you exactly what type of entrepreneur you are.

Rachel tries to answer a lot of the emails she gets personally, but the sheer volume can make the task highly time consuming. She doesn’t believe in giving an automated response and tries to point her fellow entrepreneurs in the right direction.

During the day Rachel mentors and provides consultancy to businesses across the UK. And having left the team culture of The Red Letter Days company she’s found it quite liberating to handle projects herself without having to get it all done through a team.

She has written a book called “Business Nightmares”, which I may review in due course. It’s a book on lessons learnt from entrepreneurs. Rachel has interviewed a variety of fascinating people to draw these lessons from, including, Jeffrey Archer (author), Emma Harrison (A4e founder) Simon Woodruffe (fellow ex-Dragon and Yo Sushi!) and many others.

The Celeb Entrepreneur Day

Whenever Rachel goes on a public outing she puts on the full costume, make-up and hair of the celeb entrepreneur. She feels the public expects if of her.

When she was at the height of Dragon’s Den fame she had so little time she used to arrive just before a speaking engagement and leave just after.

Now when she goes on a speaking engagement she arrives at the event the night before to attend the breakfast networking the following day.

For about an hour before her talk Rachel loses the ability to speak in coherent sentences because her brain is so fixed on being in front of an audience and what she intends saying. Then afterwards she likes to meet up with people and talk business as she finds what small businesses are doing and going through fascinating.

Unlike when she was with Red Letter Days and Dragon’s Den Rachel now has the time to listen to the other speakers at the conference and learn from them too. Then feeling revitalised from being outside the home office and talking with people face to face she can go home refreshed and ready to face that email inbox!

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We were discussing a combined project with another business I’ve dealt with before.

Both the MD and the managing partner were amazed at how incredibly cheap the other company was offering to provide a product to them. Their concern was that the company must only be dealing with small organisations and therefore didn’t charge “big company” prices.

What’s more their obvious concern was that the company might not be able to deliver or support a big company. Yet they decided to go with them because the price was almost loose change to them and if things went wrong it was only a “test.”

After the meeting I realised that the company in question hadn’t increased their prices in all the time I’d dealt with them – about 5 years.

Suddenly I realised that my prices hadn’t gone up in that time either. 

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I was doing my clients a disservice.

How would they know that I could deal with their issues if I didn’t charge the right price to ensure they felt it was real value for money and not just some cheap tat?

After all I’ve been coaching businesses all over the world for over 5 years full-time now. I’d written for several prestigious magazines, I’ve maintained this blog, in one form or another, for nearly 5 years and I’ve done it all for the same rate.

So as from the 4th July my prices are going up.

What about you? Do you think maybe your market sees you as too cheap? Would your clients actually be ok with you putting your prices up?

The good ones really can make a difference to a business. Often however, it does require that the business take action on what the coach is helping them with. After all ideas with no action is like trying to drink your soup without making it first – impossible!

This post is prompted by one that Paul Simister did in July 2008. And I wondered whether the expert ratings had changed at all. So I used the same Adwords search tool that Paul used and found the following:

Business Expert Searches

I added in a few more people to Paul’s original list, including myself, just to see who else was getting reasonable searches.

I did also consider Richard Branson (60,500 searches) but discounted him as his main aim is to run his businesses rather than give external business advice, coaching or training.

And again, Brian Tracy is well out front of the pack, if you discount Tony Robbins.

However, Tony Robbins helps a massive number of businesses so he really should be added in. Therefore, this year I think there can be no dispute that Tony Robbins wins in the search for the expert with the most searches!

Dead Business Expert Searches

Interestingly enough there are dead people with more searches than most of the experts and gurus we’ve looked at here. For example:

I suspect this is because many of the experts we’ve listed refer to both Napoleon Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich” and Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” as two of the key books any business leader must read.

Business Advice Related Searches

Now compare those figures to these generic keyword searches. And remember these searches are made every month and for subjects that the gurus are famous for:

What does this show?

I wonder if people are as aware of the gurus as people who know them are? After all it’s pretty impossible to “know what you don’t know” isn’t it? Or to paraphrase – “you can’t know who you don’t know.”

The other likelihood is that people don’t want to pay the guru price and would rather have someone else a little less expensive but still great value for money. What do you think?

Campbell is an ex football coach who also ran Intuit (they made money program Quicken).

In Silicon valley Campbell is a legend. He’s had a finger in so many pies and there’s no doubt that he’s had massive impact.  For a more in depth look at Coach’s involvement and background see this Fortune article

And the way he works with and assesses people is very important. As far as he’s concerned a manager who only achieves his financial goals is missing some important elements. Focus on financial goals can lead to short-term thinking. Instead Campbell gives the same weight to following areas:

• performing against expectations
• management skills
• working with peers
• innovating

And yet he specialises in start-ups, for example Google was still growing when he was brought in.  And companies as they grow need focus, discipline and accountability from everyone, right up to the CEO.

When I coach people I find that focus is one thing many people let drift. They have so much to do in a growing organisation. And yet if they sat down for a few minutes and thought it through there’s only one thing at a time that is moving their company forward.

Accountability is not just desirable it’s the most important element of all. Can you imagine the state of the company if a CEO failed to deliver on expectations and nobody held them accountable? People would get upset that their hard work is not being used to best effect by the CEO. A coach means that the CEO is held responsible in delivering results. Just like everyone else should be.

Have you ever felt you weren’t accountable? Where there times when you didn’t do the best you could, or work on the most important job? Without a coach you may not even realise!

The issue is that my coaching client has been competing on the basis of a “better” price for some time.

And of course a better price is a discount on what they provide.

In my opinion discounting can be very bad. For the following reasons:

• It trains your customer to expect a lower price than that advertised
• Doesn’t breed loyal customers, price sensitive ones simply go elsewhere if you put prices up
• You’re losing money on what you could have had if you’d offered something else of value
• You need to make much more sales to cover the money lost by discounting

Let me demonstrate the dangers of price cutting for your business with a table that shows how many more units (as a percentage) you need to sell to earn the same original gross as you had with the previous selling price:

As you can easily see cut your prices by 8% and if you’re on a 10% gross profit and you need to sell 4 times as many units (ie 400%).

Discounting can be good if it hugely increases the numbers coming to buy from your business and to buy in larger volumes so that the net profit of a transaction is larger than for the net profit for non-discounted items.

So looking at the table again if your gross profit was 40% and you cut your price by 8% you need to sell 25% more units for the same gross profit as non-discounted units. So if you sell 50% more units you’re making more money than if you hadn’t discounted.

The only fly in the ointment is that you need to test whether discounting works for your product. You can use the table to see whether the sales you’re making work.

When you’re a new business you do offer price reductions to “bribe” your customers to try you out. You must make that clear to them unless you intend using discounting as a strategic marketing tool.

My Advice: Don’t use discounts to compete with others. In the end it’s likely to end in tears. There’s a better way…

And that way is to add services, products, anything that will add value to what you provide. Package them up and sell them to your customers. That way price comparison becomes almost impossible. So the price war stops dead in its tracks!

In another post I’ll explain exactly what we we did with this client to increase sales without discounting.

Maybe as an executive coach I’m a little biased! Or maybe it’s a result of a little knowledge…

An interesting study was conducted by Metrix Global, a survey company, on behalf of a US Fortune 500 company and the executive coaching company they use to develop their leaders.

The study investigated the benefits and Return on Investment (ROI) of coaching. At the same time they wanted to get the answers to these questions:

1. How did coaching add value to the business and what was the return on investment?
2. How could coaching be best leveraged in the future, especially if coaching was to be expanded to other business regions?

60% of the 30 leaders who responded to the survey company identified specific financial benefits resulting from the coaching.

Further results were:

The study tabulated program costs for all 43 leadership development participants to discover a 529% return on investment produced by the coaching process.

Clients with customer or people responsibilities produced proportionally greater financial benefits. However, there were widespread benefits throughout the group participating in the study.

How Coaching Can Be Leveraged

The study was specific to the Fortune 500 company. However, there are lessons we can learn from the surveys recommendations:

• Provide a coaching process so that everyone knows the direction you’re headed
• Prepare clients for coaching and don’t force coaching on anyone.  Anyone who hasn’t been coached doesn’t realise the benefits and needs to see how it works
• Offer clients the ability to select their coaches. It’s important that clients and coach can work together
• Coaching should be strongly supported by the management and top executive.
• Coaches must be informed about the reality of the the company’s business, ethics and culture.
• The coaching relationship must follow its own path. Because, as compared to training, coaching enables the coachee to find what works best for them
• Include measurement within the coaching process. Often tying coaching results to money is a good first approach. Others include perceived improvement in employee and customer satisfaction

Entrepreneur Coaching

“What about coaching entrepreneurs then?” you may ask.

The short answer is it depends. Often entrepreneurs have an idea, or a company they want to grow. The way entrepreneurs work is that they think of ideas, set them going and then cancel quickly if it’s not what they thought. Equally they’ll stay with an idea that looks to everyone else as though it’s run out of steam. Often they find it difficult to talk through ideas, or “hare brained schemes” as their friends and relatives call them.

So it’s very important to pick a coach with a deep understanding of the entrepreneurial mindset. It’s vital that the coach acts as a sounding board and at the same time a devil’s advocate. The coach must be strong enough to ask the difficult questions and to keep the entrepreneur focused on agreed actions. 

The next question is, “how do I find such a coach?”

And obviously my answer is that I’m such a coach, having worked with a mixed bag of entrepreneurial clients from across the world including Scandinavia, the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.

If I’m not your cup of tea – you’ll know whether I am from reading this blog – there are many others around the world. Some of the more forward thinking coaches have blogs that allow their clients to see their thinking.

As the night slipped by Glyn asked me what my business was as he’d explored this blog and web site and was still none the wiser.

I shook my head and admitted that because I like writing about everything I’m interested in my blogs hold a lot of information and yet they don’t really help people see what I do.

I explained that first and foremost I was a business growth coach and my aim is to help businesses grow massively. And I’ve been lucky enough to coach people around the world.  I explained I recruit superstar sales people for one client, for the next I could be advising on writing copy for an advert or direct mail piece and for a third I may be listening to a plan to roll out a countrywide sales campaign.

And, I continued, I also write articles for offline publications, such as a business newspaper called “Good Company.”

Plus, I write this blog and the Manchester Blog.

Uncoachable

Glyn understood and claimed that he was not coachable. He said his wife, Kerry, was also a coach and had tried to coach him and he didn’t think it worked for him.

I can totally see Glyn’s point of view. And it’s the same one I had for a long time. After all who needs a coach when you already know what needs doing, you’re old enough that you’ve worked through, or have got used to, your own issues and you can take action?

The Secret Of Coaching

It’s simply this. We don’t all think the same way when we’re in business or in a career. We all have different attitudes, skills and other baggage that we bring to the job.

And as I began coaching I discovered that was exactly true.  People needed someone who could act as a sounding board, or who held them accountable for results, or could offer a different perspective or ultimately someone who they could talk to confidentially and who wouldn’t judge them.

Who Can Coach You?

It’s unusual for people to use their friends, partners or work mates as sounding boards or confidants. Because often the people we’re closest to think they have our interests at heart. However, when you’re an entrepreneur there’s often things you haven’t straightened out in your own mind and you don’t want your circle to know about yet. And that’s because it may never happen, it may need changing and if you say anything and stuff changes you’ll be labelled a “dreamer” or a “chancer.”

And the great thing about a proper executive coach, is that they work on improving your skills and your business.  They work ON your business because they don’t work in it, so working on it is all they know. They have an objective viewpoint and the good ones are honest in what they say to you. They act with your best interests as you’ve explained them, at all times.

Is Coaching Easy?

Is it easy? To do it properly it’s not. Because an executive coach is probably the one person who stands up to the boss and helps them see the true light of day. The coach doesn’t make the decisions, they help to illuminate the paths to the decisions so the best one is taken.

The great coaches recognise the skills you have and works on improving those. And will help you with improving skills in less able areas too.

Do you think your wife, husband or significant other would be bothered to go through that process? Would you want to go through it with them? Coaching questions can sometimes feel like you’re being criticised if you’re not careful.

So What About Glyn?

Is Glyn really not coachable? My answer is that Kerry can’t coach him for all the reasons I gave before, although I think she’d do a better job than me. Glyn is a friend and moving from  friend to coach is not a step I’ve taken and I don’t want to try it with a good friend, because I suspect the whole relationship would change.

Have you coached anyone who was a friend? What happened?