Mike McKay
October 13, 2026
Strong Businesses Have Coaches
Running a business means juggling hiring, cash flow, daily operations and long-term planning, usually all in the same week. Most owners handle it by working harder. The ones who grow fastest tend to have help.
Tom Brady worked with a throwing coach well into his forties, years after he’d already won multiple Super Bowls. Bill Campbell coached the leadership teams at Google and Apple, and Eric Schmidt has said the best advice he ever got was to hire a coach. These were people at the top of their game. They kept a coach because they knew they couldn’t see everything from where they were standing.
Business owners rarely do the same. Some think coaching is for companies in trouble. Some assume they can’t afford it. Plenty simply don’t know what a coach would actually do for them. This post covers what a coach can bring to the table.
An Outside View
When you’re in the business every day, daily work takes all your attention. Problems start to look normal. A process that wastes four hours a week stops looking like a problem because it’s always been done that way.
A good coach sees what you’ve stopped noticing. They’ll show you where your time and money are going, which parts of the business are carrying the rest, and where growth is sitting untapped. Most owners already sense something is off. A coach helps put a name and a number on it.
Clear Goals
If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t plan how to get there. At ActionCOACH, we call this Destination Mastery, and it starts with clarity about what the business needs to look like in one year, three years and five.
A coach works with you to set those goals and break them into quarterly and weekly actions. Once a planning system is in place, daily decisions get easier because you can check each one against where you’re headed.
Accountability
Not having a boss is one of the reasons many people start a business. It’s also one of the reasons plans often fail. When nobody is checking, the important work gets pushed behind the urgent work, week after week.
A coach provides outside accountability. You commit to what you’ll get done, and someone follows up. For owners who tend to overthink decisions, this matters even more. Every month spent deliberating has a cost, both in money and in the mental load of carrying an unmade decision around.
New Skills
A growing business demands marketing, finance, sales, leadership and communication. Few owners are strong in all of those areas. A good coach finds the gaps and helps you build the skills you’re missing, starting with whichever one is costing you the most time or money right now.
Mastering Business
You may have spent years mastering your craft, whether that’s plumbing, dog grooming, tree trimming or another trade your customers depend on. Think about how much time it took to get that good. Now ask whether you have that same amount of time, on top of everything you’re already doing, to master the business side on your own.
A coach shortens your learning curve. You get the benefit of what has worked for hundreds of other businesses without learning every lesson the expensive way.
Keeping Good People
Turnover is expensive. Posting the job, interviewing, hiring and training a replacement all cost time and money, and the work suffers while the job is empty.
Businesses that bring their team into coaching tend to keep their best people longer. Employees who see the company investing in them are more engaged, perform better, and are more likely to refer people they know. That makes your next hire easier, too.
Is It Worth It?
A coach brings an outside view, clear goals, accountability and new skills, and helps you get where you want to go faster. It won’t fix everything, and it only works if you do the work between sessions.
If your plan for growth is to keep doing what you’ve been doing and wait for better results, you’ll be having this same conversation with yourself next year.
If you’re ready to find out what a coach would see in your business, send us a message.