As a business owner, do you know when to seek help? In this video, I will explore what kind of professional services that many entrepreneurs, particularly the widely successful ones, believe to be essential for their own businesses.
In the very early stages of any business, a small business owner would likely try to do everything: marketing, sales, and operations. This is usually a pragmatic choice given the size of the company. However, Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, famously said that entrepreneurs cannot do everything and they don’t know best all of the time. As business owners, ensuring success means that we should ask for help particularly if we want to see our businesses grow. Schultz said:
“You have to invest ahead of the growth curve. You have to hire people who have the skill base and experience beyond the size of the business. (In order to grow, w)e needed the competency well beyond the size of Starbucks.”
As business owners, ensuring success means we should ask for help, particularly if we want to see our business grow. Where should small business owners start? From a practical standpoint, most entrepreneurs would start by hiring the services of an accountant and a lawyer.
Why hire an accountant?
There are many benefits to hiring an accountant. For one, we all need to comply with taxation, and an accountant will certainly help ease the process. Having an accountant on board provides business owners with the peace of mind that a specialist in the field is consistently handling your business’s accounting issues.
More importantly, an accountant is also a partner in growth by providing important business plan support. An competent accountant is someone who has the know-how to assess whether the business has the financial capacity to carry out your growth plan.
Why hire a lawyer?
Lawyers are partners in growth, too. They are essential in helping you structure your business in a way that not only adheres to regulation and maximises taxation exemptions, but also one that lays the groundwork to allow you to carry out your growth and development plans for your business. They are essential in carrying out due diligence work—the kind that will help you from being defrauded and making sure that operations follow regulations. From a practical standpoint, lawyers are helpful in drawing up, reviewing and enforcing contracts with clients, suppliers and landlords.
But while accountants and lawyers are vital to any business, many successful entrepreneurs and business leaders would also advise having another person into your team.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, acknowledged that everybody needs coaching—even him! He says that if top athletes of our time need a coach, then top entrepreneurs need to have a coach, too!
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, also agrees.
Why hire a business coach?
Gates and Schmidt aren’t alone in this belief. Did you know that many famous entrepreneurs, billionaires and successful personalities work with coaches? Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, Tyra Banks, and even Barack Obama have all worked with coaches to advance their businesses and careers.
Business coaches offer valuable service. They can be sounding boards for ideas, and they can provide objective feedback, which does not come easily when you work on the same tasks and in the same environment day-in and day-out. Business coaches also offer a broader network—because they work with other business owners. And because they have been working with different business owners, they have been exposed to different businesses, and they offer unique insights and solutions to problems and issues. Ultimately, as in any coach, a business coach is there to help you perform at the top of your game.
Let’s go back to what Schultz said: he says that if we want to grow our business, then we should surround ourselves and work with people who have the competency that will allow us to expand the business to the size that we want.
If you are interested to know more about what a business has to go through when facing exponential growth, you can download the first chapter of the book, ”$20K to $20 Million in 2 Years” absolutely free here. The chapter talks about the differences between a good and a great business and puts out questions that make you consider how you can turn your business from good to great.
