How Business Coaching Can Give You a Competitive Edge in Business

09th Jul , 2018

All businesses face competition, so identifying your competition and how you can differentiate yourself from them and maximise your competitive advantage is critical for your business’ success. For your business to succeed and survive, you must have winning strategies to get ahead and stay ahead. One excellent way to devise and implement business growth strategies is to obtain assistance from a business coach.

Competitive Strategy Can Be a Sink or Swim Scenario

All business owners and leaders must know their competitors, and not just guess what competitors are doing. Therefore, you need to initiate your own strategic planning and implement your strategy to move forward and stay ahead of the game.

Being aware of your competitors’ activity is good, but you must also continue to initiate your innovative business thinking and establish what competitive criteria you need to work within and develop your capability to deliver.

At International Business Mentors, our business coaching and mentoring professionals understand that obtaining a competitive advantage is paramount. Our coaches and mentors have practical business experience, including direct experience of successes and pitfalls of running businesses. They also understand the impact of competitor pressure, and how to set strategy to compete better. This makes them well situated to help you with critical thinking so you can seek better competitive edges to perform in business.

Areas That a Business Coach or Mentor Can Help With

There are many areas of business and self-development where a well-matched and experienced business coach or mentor can help you to leverage your business performance.

For example, a mentor or coach from International Business Mentors can help you identify and resolve the critical challenges relevant to your specific industry and specific business situation, and then facilitate your development of new business growth strategies to improve performance. Your business coach or mentor can give you an independent, confidential and fresh view to help you focus anew on your own business performance.

Further areas that a business mentor or coach can facilitate and challenge you in include:

Building a Strategy Around Your Vision

This needs to be orientated towards your growth expectations in your markets, but also considers your competitors’ likely behaviours, your organisational capability, your strength with suppliers, and the ability to service customers with products and services that will deliver the required profitability, returns and cashflow required by the providers of equity and other types of funding.

Causing Disruption in Your Markets

You need to keep abreast of technology advances or surges with relevance to your industry. Players in the market who do not keep up will lose out by being outgunned in delivery, customer attraction and cost structures.

Defining and Refining Your Culture and Vision of the Organisation

This requires a target culture to support your strategy, vision and values, but also to facilitate strong performance of your people in the organisation.

Recruiting and Retaining Talented People

Organisations and people change over time, as does the capability requirements of individuals and the changing demands on your people. These are driven by your organisation’s evolving business growth strategies. Identifying the right people with the right skills, experience and cultural fit is paramount, as is training and development at all critical levels of your organisation.

Building Great Teams

Your business coaching professional will become part of your team. The importance of developing your wider business team will underpin your success with the business.

Managing Individual Performance

Rewarding a job well done and giving strong feedback usually encourages good behaviour. However, managing individuals’ performance requires good broad people skills. Your business coach or mentor will have plenty of experience to add to your thinking in this area.

Improving Required Leadership Style

If your strategy requires an inspirational leadership style, then you will need to get feedback from your business coach or mentor on how to improve your approach so you can fine tune your leadership impact to better deliver on your performance. This may require you to embrace creativity and innovative thinking to get buy-in from the creative side of your people. For example, you will need creative thinking to be strong when you are competing in a fast changing and fluid market place, where innovation in product, service and sales tactics wins the sales or keep the customers loyal to your offerings and services.

In Conclusion

All the above are only some of the components that need to be addressed when tackling your competitive edge. Many aspects of change and improvement in performance can feel difficult for most business owners to tackle, but they can be made much easier when you have a business coach or mentor from International Business Mentors by your side.

We individually match business coaches and mentors with you according to your individual personal and specific needs in terms of experience, skills, background, and that all important personal fit between you and your coach or mentor.

Being business owners or leaders themselves, our business coaching professionals have also grappled with the exciting task of business leadership, performance, and the need to grasp and develop their competitive edge. Our business coaches and mentors are picked to help, support, develop and challenge you, assisting you in gaining that better competitive advantage.

Call International Business Mentors today to discuss your needs.