Geoff Knox is the founder of Better Business Academy, with a wealth of business experience ranging from corporate management to entrepreneurship to business coaching.
Geoff has owned 14 businesses across 11 different industries over the past 36 years and in the past 17 years has also personally coached hundreds of business owners and entrepreneurs and is NZ’s only business coach trainer, making him one of the most experienced business coaches in New Zealand.
With a passion for business and a strong focus on strategic business coaching and personal mentoring, Geoff stands out from the growing crowd of business coaches who target owners of start-ups and new ventures. Geoff’s entrepreneurial journey is unique and includes developing seven of his businesses to the point where they worked well under management without him.
Better Business Academy offers coaching, leadership training and workshops for growth-focused businesses and is currently developing online courses to support even more business owners around the world. In 2019, Geoff led a research project that pinpointed what it takes to get to the next level in business and is now writing a book on what the research revealed. It will be published in late 2021.
What is Better Business Academy all about?
Better Business Academy exists to help business owners and entrepreneurs realise their potential in business.
Our coaching clients are typically established business owners and entrepreneurs who want to work with another more experienced business owner who understands the entrepreneurial context well and has been successful in it.
Our services include leadership training, strategic business coaching and mentoring, mastermind programmes and a number of business workshops. We also offer tools for better business.
All of our services have been specifically designed for growth-focused business owners from a strong base of business experience and professional training as a coach, mentor, recruiter, sales manager and business trainer.
We are currently in the process of turning our in-person business workshops, courses and programmes into online courses in order to reach and impact more business owners and entrepreneurs around the world.
Tell us a little bit about your personal background – how you ended up in this career?
I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and learned the value of money and hard work from a young age.
My first job on leaving school was as a Banker. At age 19 I was appointed Officer in Charge of a new suburban bank satellite branch where I was responsible for 3 employees and the day-to-day retail banking operations and service.
After four years with the bank, I was offered a self-employment opportunity in financial services with a large multinational insurance company. I accepted that role and it was a very successful move both from a financial and a learning perspective. I learned a great deal about direct sales, entrepreneurship, marketing and management.
I sold that business four years later and was appointed Associate Agency Manager at that branch of the insurance company. The focus of my role was to recruit, train and retain high performing self-employed salespeople. That was a fabulous experience and learning opportunity and I was able to grow the team from 20 to 33 agents inside 3 years. A company-wide restructure resulted in my position being disestablished a few months before my four-year anniversary.
Since that time, I have held two more corporate management roles and have built another 13 businesses in 10 different industry sectors. Funnily enough, my last two corporate roles also ended in redundancy due to a company restructure. After four corporate roles and three redundancies I concluded corporate life was not for me.
I was grateful to have learned a great deal during those first 13 years of my career. I also invested in various external training programmes. The most pivotal for me were in the field of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) where I am now a NLP Master Practitioner and being trained as a Coach and Coach Trainer by CoachU (USA). Both of these disciplines aligned well with my interest in high performance, motivation and change and when combined with my business experience have enabled me to add unique value and gain a competitive advantage in my field.
In 2003, I decided to delegate the operational management of my businesses to others and shifted my focus to a purely strategic (Director) role in order to pursue my interest in being a strategic business coach and personal mentor for other growth focussed business owners and entrepreneurs who wanted to be better and achieve more.
Since then I have had the privilege of holding more than 7000+ coaching sessions and led hundreds of business strategy workshops. I feel lucky that I found a way to combine my passion for coaching and working with high performers with my experience growing entrepreneurial businesses.
In 2012 I decided to sell my other business interests to focus my time on growing and developing business owners and entrepreneurs through my coaching, mentoring, training and mastermind programmes. I still do that today.
What was the biggest problem you encountered starting up and how did you overcome it?
The main problem I had in the start-up phase of my coaching business was finding the right business model.
The business model I was told to use by my Coach Trainers was not a sensible commercial model in my view. In fact, I believed it would have undermined my potential and put my future as a professional coach at risk. I wanted to add maximum value for my clients, be paid well, and be considered one of the top in my field in my country.
The four aspects of the suggested business model that I didn’t agree with were:
- Promoting free sessions
- A short 3-month coaching term
- A 1-hour session time
- Charging an hourly rate
I didn’t promote free coaching sessions or charge an hourly rate (and never have), instead charging a fee for the three-month coaching term and the monthly fees were/are payable monthly in advance.
I had my first 10 clients in just three months which was great as it meant I had a full coaching book for the 2.5 days I had available for business coaching. My clients were happy however I wasn’t entirely comfortable. I felt the environment I had created with each client having an hour session and me having one client after the other did not enable me to unlock their full potential.
Using my past business and strategy experience I knew that if I asked deeper, more searching questions that would open the door to new possibilities for my clients, but that would require more time with them. I soon came up with a new business model that has worked more successfully for my clients and for me, for the past 15 years now.
Long story short, I switched my main offering from one hour sessions and three month coaching terms (where the natural focus was shorter term goals) to two hour sessions and an annual coaching term which meant I had time to help my clients lift their sights and look to their future, and could ask my clients more challenging questions that forced them to think strategically rather than the previous shorter term tactical or operational focus of sessions.
From then on, any new client I met who had short term goals was offered my 3 month (12 x 1 hour session) business coaching service and those business owners with bigger goals that would take longer than 3 months to achieve would be offered my annual coaching service which involved 2 hour weekly or fortnightly sessions.
Most of my clients transitioned to bigger goals and an annual coaching arrangement once we started to explore what they really wanted from their business and life. That was ideal for me because I prefer working with clients on strategic goals, issues and opportunities and I knew I could add more value and they would realise more of their potential, which is what differentiates me now.
That business model has been well received and has been more effective than the 3 month renewable model ever was. These days my coaching term is still 12 months and is often renewed for a further 12 months, the coaching sessions are 1.5 hours long and my clients can have less or extra sessions without any change in the annual fee (which they pay monthly).
My new business model is better for my clients and has enabled me to earn an attractive coaching income while only having 4-6 client-facing days per month.
What are some of the Dos and Don’ts of being a business/success Coach?
Some of the Do’s:
Get clear on the following:
- The contexts and specialty areas you know and understand from your past experience
- Who can benefit from your experience and why they would want to pay for coaching with you
- Whether you will offer personal coaching, process coaching, performance coaching, or all three.
- What makes you different from other coaches The session structure you will use with your clients to start strong, engage and focus them, and achieve progress
- How you will remain objective and have your client do the thinking, make the decisions and do the work
Use a range of tools to help you add more value and your client to get more clarity as they think things through. Tools will also help them work through their issues and opportunities, make decisions, set goals, flesh out and build plans and help build the motivation and commitment needed to take action. That’s how change happens.
Remember, it’s not about you, it is about the client gaining clarity, making decisions and achieving their goals.
Some of the Don’ts
- Don’t be the same as everyone else. Differentiate yourself and your service on the basis of your positioning, your proposition, promotional angle, place or price, but do not try to be the cheapest in town. It will limit your potential and suggest you are not very good at what you do or are desperate, which suggests the same.
- Don’t try to sell yourself. Far better to focus the first meeting or conversation with the prospective client on helping them clarify where they are now, where they want to be, what is in their way and how they believe coaching could help. Do tell them you would like to work with them and why and explain how you would work with them to help them make more progress. If you do all that well, the sale will nearly make itself. Help them buy.
- If you have high value to offer, a higher price will often position you more strongly. There is no sustainable competitive advantage in price alone. Better to be higher priced than others if you genuinely have more to offer.
- Time does not = value. Don’t charge an hourly rate. Better to charge a fixed fee based on the value being delivered.
- Don’t slip out of coaching and into consulting, advising or being a wise oracle, unless you ask permission first. Focus your attention on managing the coaching process in ways that puts your client in the right state to do the thinking, make the decisions and take action to achieve the desired results.
Be sure to recognise your client’s learning, changes, growth and progress so they see evidence of their progress.
Do you have any other projects or businesses you are working on?
In 2017 I brought all of my IP and business coaching tools, resources, workshops, courses and programmes under the Better Business Academy brand and now, my team and I are in the process of turning all those ‘in-person’ resources into online courses to enable us to share them with a far greater number of business owners.
How do you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
What could be more fun and more rewarding than helping people achieve more of their potential? It’s a privilege.
I genuinely want to make a difference for others and be a positive role model for my six children. I get a buzz when people tell me they are doing better, feeling happier and are more successful. That keeps me motivated.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your career as a coach?
Only a small percentage of Coaches make it long term. Coaching alone won’t make you an attractive full-time income, you need to add something else. It may be workshops, courses, programmes, keynote talks or consulting in a field of expertise. You need to be business-minded to build a coaching business.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to gain new clients?
When I started out in coaching I too was looking for the magic formula for how to attract coaching clients, yet after 17 years as a well-paid Coach I don’t think there is a magic marketing bullet that works for everyone.
Having said that, here are five ways I have found beneficial to gain new clients:
Select well
- Birds of a feather flock together. The right people will refer the right people – without you asking. All top coaches select the right players to work with because that is crucial to build your reputation. I work with business owners who want change, are open-minded, coachable, and ready to do the thinking, make decisions and commit to action.
Launch well
- You can’t sell a secret. When you start your coaching business, be sure to start by launching. At least tell your circle of friends, past colleagues, centres of influence, key suppliers and supporters.
Coach well
- I believe the strength of your business comes down to the quality of your coaching and the outcomes it brings your clients. If they achieve positive change beyond their expectations, they will stay with you longer and refer their friends more often.
Innovate well
- Creating and launching new value in the form of keynote talks, webinars, workshops, courses and programmes can also be a successful way to keep your name out there, especially when the promise of the value on offer talks to the pain or pleasure points of your target market.
Share success stories
- Sharing your client success stories can also be a good support strategy, but put the focus on their success, not yours. Ask them if they would be happy to help other people who are in the same or a similar situation to where they were before they invested in coaching with you. Most people will happily agree. Ask them to think back to how they were feeling then, compared to now and point out that seeing someone else’s success story gives people hope that they can make changes and get to a better place too.
Those are the five strategies that have worked for me over time and they suit an introvert well.
When is the ideal time for a new entrepreneur to hire a business coach?
The reality is, most start-ups fail and a Coach cannot afford to risk having a number of their clients fail.
In the early days of business, a new entrepreneur could benefit from a Coach, but they usually want guidance, direction and advice as they are making decisions. That is the role of a Mentor, Advisor or Consultant, not a Coach.
I don’t believe a new entrepreneur should invest in a business Coach until they have built momentum, have a number of paying customers and surplus profit to pay the coaching fees.
Far better for them to hold onto their money to cover their personal income in the early stages or put it into marketing. Better to start investing in a Coach once they are further along , more established and ready to take themselves, their team (if they have one) and their business to a whole new level.
What are some of the reasons you would refuse or stop working with a client?
The only way a Coach wins is when their clients is winning from the coaching relationship.
I only work with clients who I believe are coachable, committed to doing the work and able to afford my fees.
I will end the coaching relationship if:
- The coaching term comes to an end and it makes sense for my client to step out on their own again
- A client doesn’t pay their account without cause or explanation especially when the client has raved about the value they are getting from coaching. Some people seem to like to avoid paying for value.
- A pattern develops where a client verbally commits to action, but doesn’t take the action. In that case I explain that they are obviously happier than they realised and I can’t take their money any longer. No change means no value and no value means no fee. My reputation relies on me doing that too.
- A client starts to show signs that they feel they need the Coach to make quality decisions. That is not the role of the Coach and I do not wish to perpetuate that myth. I prefer them to know they are good to go.
What is your definition of success?
I define success as being our best, living our values and enjoying the journey in business and life.
Our business values are:
- Authenticity – being real and reliable
- Success – achieving our goals and enjoying the journey
- Impact – making a difference
- Growth – being better, achieving more
What are three things most clients have in common?
My clients:
- Are typically experienced, business owners and entrepreneurs.
- Are growth-focused, prepared to invest, and keen to learn.
- Want to realize their potential personally and in their business.
What’s your best piece of advice for people who are just starting their coaching business?
Be strategic from the outset. Get serious and be business-like even if it is a personal coaching service you are offering. When you get serious, people will take you and your business seriously. Set out to be the best you can be.
If you want a solid income, sustainable and satisfying business, build a coaching business, not a coaching practice.
What is your favourite quote?
“If you force open a cocoon in a bid to rush the growth process, all you succeed in doing is damaging its wings”.
How can readers get in touch with you?
Readers are welcome to connect with me via my LinkedIn page, our Facebook page or sign up to our email list online at betterbusinessacademy.com
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