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Business coaching for growth, with Paul Avins
Twice awarded Global Award Winning Coach with Action Coach, Oxford-based business coach, Paul Avins, has a wealth of experience and knowledge in sales, sales management, marketing, personal development, training and business management, business coaching, and as a motivational speaker.
In part 1 of our interview with Paul, we asked him just how business coaching can help to make a success of your business.
Read part 2 of the interview: Essential business advice for SMEs
Read part 3 of the interview: Digital marketing strategy, Twitter, video and other things that confuse businesses
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What do you do and who do you do it for?
Paul Avins: I’m a professional business coach, author and speaker. Owner and founder of the networking group The Oxford Wealth Club. I help business owners of various sizes to take their business - expand it, grow it, develop it and push it forward to take it to the next level.
I work with about 60 businesses at any one time, and am coaching a dozen other clients on a one-to-one basis. There’s a wide range of people that I work with - I’ve worked across 79 different industries, but I tend to work with businesses who have been operating for at least a couple of years, with varying turnover from £100,000 up to £30,000,000.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Why do you choose to work with already established companies rather than start-ups?
Paul Avins: My expertise is in taking a model and growing it very quickly. Start-ups require a very different strategy and I chose to work with businesses that already have assets of people and products, and have already proved a concept because they’re selling something and making a profit. I can then go in and show them how to grow their business really fast.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): There are lots of people claiming to be experienced coaches (whether it be sales gurus and growth experts) - what makes you different?
Paul Avins: What makes me different is that I come from a background of business growth - I built five of my own companies before I became a coach. I’ve been involved with personal development and business training for nearly 20 years in terms of training myself. So I bring a huge range of experience, strategies, skills and knowledge to the table. There isn’t much that I haven’t seen or come across before when I meet a business owner - there’s usually been an example of the problem before so I can start immediately solving the problem straight away.
I study all the time - I read a couple of books a week. I’m always learning and going on courses and building my knowledge - I’m constantly upgrading my skills so I can add more value to my clients because the world of business is always changing.
Everything that I teach is real - it’s real world applications, it’s current, which is why I wrote the book Business SOS, because it is full of current strategies which are helping businesses deal with the recession and the global downturn. It’s current, practical, you can apply it. It’s generated around 100 million of extra sales and profit for clients of mine - so it’s stuff that works.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Who do you work with – the business owner or employees?
Paul Avins: Primarily I work with the business owner because I’m coaching them to drive change through their business. Depending on the size of the business though I will get involved at board level, and I will occasionally get involved with training sales teams.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Who can benefit most from business coaching, and what do they get from the process?
Paul Avins: People who benefit from it most are those who have a passion and a hunger to want to go out and make a difference in the world with their business. If you want to do that and you are prepared to be held accountable for it, then you’re going to benefit from it.
Business coaching gives people focus, clarity, and they get somebody to bounce ideas off and talk to. One of the challenges of a business owner is being too close to the coal face, you don’t often see the obvious. As a business coach I can ask questions that pull the business owner back far enough to be able to see a different way of doing things. What they get from the process is usually greater sales, greater profits but also greater confidence. They get passion back, they get a sense of being in control of their own destiny. Everyone gets something different from the process, some get a depth of knowledge around marketing, and some people just get great personal growth about how to manage people and skills.
I just had a client who, for the first time in 5 years felt excited about his future and where he could go with his business, he had clarity and a plan and he knew what he wanted to do and he knew he could do it. You can’t put a price on that.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Are the greatest benefits personal or business related?
Paul Avins: A business is a reflection of the business owner. If the business owner has issues with money, then the business will have issues with money. If you change the business owner’s mindset and beliefs about what’s possible then the business will change as a direct result. Is not really a question about the greatest benefits, if you become a better business person, you will run a better business.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What’s the first thing people ask you?
Paul Avins: Apart from how much do you cost, people usually say can you help me with this particular problem? And I will say let’s sit down and talk about the problem - business coaching isn’t right for everybody.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Have you always been a coach? What made you go down this route?
Paul Avins: I’ve run my own businesses, I’ve raised venture capital, I’ve sold companies, I’ve built a business up to 15 million in turnover and then we sold it. I’ve also had the other side of the experience of losing a business and losing all of my money and came very close to going bankrupt. I’ve experienced great success but also the failure and challenges of when a business goes wrong, so I can relate to the pain or pressures.
After I’d lost one business and recovered and got back on my feet, I had a passion to go out and teach what I’d experienced. I’d also been involved with personal development through the likes of Tony Robins, who helped me through that difficult period. I was looking for a way to go out and teach that material and make it relevant to business and that’s what drew me to coaching, which at the time - around 2003 - was fairly new to the UK. Nobody knew what a business coach was or why you’d need one.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): What value can you bring to a business, and when is the ideal time for you to get involved?
Paul Avins: I bring different values at different times. The ideal time is either when you’re growing and you’re not sure how to control it, or you’re frustrated because you can’t grow it. My value is usually determined by bottom line return on investment. I won’t work with the client unless I’m comfortable that they’ll be able to get a fairly significant return on investment of working with me.
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