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The Broker/Coaching Solution

The Business Broker’s Guide to a Consistent, Month-by-Month, Add-On Revenue Stream from Coaching

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The Broker/Coaching Solution:

The Business Broker’s Guide to a Consistent, Month-by-Month Add-on

Revenue Stream from Coaching



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Dear Business Broker,

What if I told you that, as a business broker, you are leaving at least $10,000 (and possibly a lot more) on the table each month?

Meet Alan Melton. Alan is a successful business broker in South Carolina. But like a lot of business brokers, he was stuck in a feast or famine cycle.

You know the feeling. As a business broker, you get paid when a deal is done--regardless of how much time and energy you put in. In getting a client’s business ready to sell, all your efforts to increase their value are simply part of the job until the ‘big check’ arrives. That means some of your biggest deals leave you waiting on a paycheck for months at a time. AND sometimes, after all that work, the sale falls through and you have to start again from square one. And life can get even more miserable for business brokers if anything goes wrong with the economy.

Do you remember the global financial crisis that began in late 2008? That was a horrible time for business brokers.

Like most everyone else, all of Alan’s broker deals dried up for the first few years of the economic downturn. But rather than giving up, he pivoted. He decided to focus his energy on business coaching.

Alan realized he could add business coaching to his line-up of products and services quite easily. After all, business coaches and business brokers share a common goal—to increase the value of their clients’ businesses in their respective markets.


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So, in addition to his standard business brokerage services, he offered business coaching. He quickly found that he was able to earn more than enough money to get him through those lean years as a business broker.

In fact, he now generates more than $100,000 in annual revenue from coaching, in addition to his brokerage fees. And this is revenue that comes in consistently — reliably — on a month-by-month basis.

In fact, the single most important difference between business coaches and business brokers is this fact: business coaches (at least the ones who know what they’re doing!) get paid each and every month by their clients, not just when a deal closes.

I got to know Alan as he was making this pivot.

He came to our firm, Coaches’ Coach, for guidance on how to make his pivot successfully. Over the past couple years, I’ve had the privilege of being Alan’s business coach.

As we were reflecting on his success recently, we realized: other business brokers would benefit from doing exactly what Alan has done. And, that’s why you’re reading this ebook.

Here’s what Alan had to say about his experience:

“I’ve been working with Eric Dombach at Coaches’ Coach for the past couple years and his system has added many new features, tools and templates to our brokerage. We had a brokerage lead that turned into a coaching client. The total process took 2 years from listing to selling. In the first year we had no inquiries to buy the business but they had agreed to do business coaching for one year. During that first year we added $100,000 profit to their bottom line. After that we were able to sell it. My average billing



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rate has increased significantly and we’re better focused on lead generation and closing new business. Eric is an outstanding coach and motivator with deep knowledge of the business coaching profession. Investing in Eric’s system has been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. I just wish I had done it earlier!”

-- Alan Meltonhttp://www.empirecarolina.com/http://www.smallbusinesscoach.org/

We believe that you can do this too!

Why?

Because business brokers already possess many of the necessary skills and qualities to be successful business coaches! With a bit of training you could add on business coaching services and start increasing your monthly revenue and profits.

Don’t get me wrong. My purpose is not to get you to change careers. You don’t have to. I would never take someone away from a business they love. My goal is simply to provide you with recurring monthly income to carry you along between those big checks.

If an additional $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 (or more!) a month is something you could use in your life, keep reading! The stability and increased income you long for is right around the corner. We’re about to show you how.

Best regards for a growing monthly income,

Eric DombachFounder, the Coaches’ Coach

http://www.empirecarolina.com/%0D

http://www.smallbusinesscoach.org/


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Table of Contents

Introduction: Who is the Coaches’ Coach? 7

Chapter One 12The Little-Known Secret to Business Broker Success: It’s All About the Coaching

Chapter Two 18The Basics of Coaching for Brokers (Coaching is NOT Consulting!)

Chapter Three 205 Steps to Freedom: Taking Clients from Start-Up to Sale

Chapter Four 22Transforming Businesses: the 21 Silver Bullets

Chapter 5: 29The 7 Links to Freedom: Building Your 6-Figure Coaching Practice

Chapter Six 32Your Next Steps

About the Author 35



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Introduction: Who is the Coaches’ Coach?My professional life began simply enough. In 1993, I was hired as an associate pastor in a small church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I loved my work and had a real passion for it. The people were like family to me. To this day, I look back with great fondness on the incredible experiences and friendships I made as I served our close-knit congregation and made a difference in the city where we lived and worked.

But as much as I loved what I was doing, there was a problem: I felt like there was more in store for me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a family man and my faith is the bedrock of my life. I have a beautiful, supportive wife and four incredible children, but after several years in full-time church ministry, I realized that the most my wonderful congregation could provide for my family was $30,000 a year. As our family grew and the children got older it became more difficult to support my family. Torn between my call to help, teach, and lead and the need to provide for my family I began to wonder if perhaps there was something else I should do.

Then in 2000, after struggling to make ends meet for seven years as a pastor, I picked up Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

It literally changed my life. I realized that even with all the good I was doing as a pastor, my low personal income limited more than just my lifestyle: it limited my circle of influence. If I could just grow my personal wealth, I thought, I’ll be able to do even MORE good in the community--and the world at large (not to mention relieve some of the pressure on my wife and family.)

So I began to look around at other options.

Now, before I go any further, I want to make one thing clear: I have tremendous respect for those who sacrifice money and time to work in service-oriented fields. We need pastors, teachers, social workers, counselors, firefighters, soldiers, and law enforcement officers--desperately. I don’t want to take ANYTHING away from them. I’m still one of them. I wouldn’t be who I am today without the influence of people just like them.


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But I had another path.

Something (or someone) was calling to me...telling me to pursue additional opportunities. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s to NEVER ignore those signals.

My search took me high and low. I considered real estate, network marketing, internet businesses, and retail. Then I stumbled upon an incredible niche I’d never even heard of before: business coaching. As soon as I heard about it, I knew it was for me. I loved the idea of working with business owners and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and improve their quality of life for their employees and families. It fit perfectly with my zeal for business and my “pastoral” gifts.

Even though I had very little professional or entrepreneurial experience, I knew I had a lot to offer. I was good at leadership development, training, communication, team building, and personal consulting. I started off like so many entrepreneurs: with a web search. I looked up business consulting franchises and that led me to one of the world’s largest business coaching franchise systems. Just six months later I was a new franchisee.

I contributed $9,000--my last and ONLY bit of money--to a pool of start-up capital with a business partner and off we went.

My poor wife. We went from almost nothing coming in to ACTUALLY nothing. Because I was a miserable failure. I mean, TERRIBLE.

Again, like most entrepreneurs, I came to the horrible realization that I would quickly go broke if I didn’t start selling--and FAST. If you’re a fellow entrepreneur, I’m sure you know the feeling.

And of course, my biggest challenge was generating enough sales leads.

I mean, I had NO business network in my community, NO clout, and very little cash to invest in marketing. To this day, I still marvel at it all.



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A pastor starting a business to coach business owners?

What on earth was I thinking?

I invested relentlessly in my own improvement. I read everything business-related I could find (and everything else; you’d be surprised how knowledge of politics and science can help you run your business more effectively). I found mentors and experts who would give me advice and guidance. And I reminded myself everyday that even though I had a lot to learn, the very things that were holding me back were the same things that could propel me to success.

I kept digging into the coaching world and armed with the right mindset, I began to proactively pursue sales and marketing efforts. Through a tremendous process of trial and error I discovered that marketing success is a combination of perseverance and vigilant self-observation and record keeping. Slowly, month by month, I began to see what tactics were working and which ones weren’t. During that time I prayed like crazy for new clients, crying out to God for help. But I didn’t just pray. I poured my heart, soul, and cash into growing my business. Back then, in the early 2000s, the franchise I was in made new coaches escrow $5,000 into a designated account to invest in marketing to get the business started. It was all the money I had left in the world, and I put it to work. And finally, in September of 2001, I broke through. I landed my first client!

Or so I thought.

In the middle of our initial consultation, the client’s accountant stormed in with fire blazing in his eyes. He began interrogating me about my background and competence as a business coach. He was obviously protecting his domain, and he came down on me--hard. It was a humiliating moment.

I wanted to fight back, but the truth was, I had no professional track record. No experience, very little formal training, no success stories to speak of. Heck, I couldn’t even point to my own success in business--because, up to that point, I had nothing on my resume but a bunch of experience running a “not for profit” organization--not exactly the kind of experience a business owner would be looking for!


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Needless to say, five minutes later I was out on the street, my head in my hands. The next day, the client called me on the phone, demanding a full refund, and threatening to sue me if I didn’t comply. As painful as it was, I gave him his money back. I couldn’t see any other option. That was one of the most discouraging moments of my entire life. I’d put in thousands of dollars, MONTHS of effort, hours of struggle and strife, just to be kicked out on my butt, humiliated. This was the lowest of the lows. It was the closest I ever came to throwing in the towel. It’s a moment I try very hard not to think about--even to this day. But I realized I had a huge decision to make. I could retreat with my tail between my legs, shell-shocked and angry…or I could suck it up, pick myself up, dust myself off, and try again.

Since you’re reading this ebook right now, I think you can guess what I picked.

That decision to stick with it was a major turning point for me. It infused me with a sense of focus and resolve I’d never experienced before. And less than a month later, I closed four sales in a row and banked my first $10,000 month. I was on my way to building a $1 million business coaching firm.

By 2004, we were generating more than $1 million USD in business coaching revenue at a 23% operating profit, and average annual growth rate of 140% per year. Along the way, I developed and executed a regional marketing strategy, implemented a CRM system and sales process, developed a proprietary service-delivery methodology, and recruited local executive leadership talent to service clients. In 2005, I sold the firm to 4 of my employees for $1 million U.S. dollars, generating a return on capital of more than 800%.

After selling my firm, I founded the Coaches’ Coach so I could share my hard-earned knowledge and success with others. Since then, I’ve trained more than 1,300 independent and franchise business coaches in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Australasian markets. Coaches’ Coach now serves thousands of business coaches globally. I’ve mentored franchise executives from 8 franchise systems and industry associations and published hundreds of industry articles, white papers, and books, including the Amazon category best-seller The Million Dollar Business Coaching Firm.



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So that’s how the Coaches’ Coach began. I’m just an everyday entrepreneur who learned some tremendously successful techniques through hard work and decided to share that information with others.

Now, as a business broker you could be anywhere on your path to success. Maybe you’re a broker with a robust client base and network of referrals. Maybe you’re new to the brokerage world and still figuring out what your next steps are. Or maybe you’re where I was in the early 2000s: a little bit lost but highly motivated and ready to do what it takes to get your business profitable.

In the following pages of this book you’ll find a few of our most tried and true techniques for coaching success. These are tips that won’t just benefit you in a coaching role but also as a business broker. My hope is that you’ll read the book with a pencil and paper nearby so you can jot down ideas and questions and applications.

The truth is, no matter where you are in your process you are closer today than you were yesterday to success. The mere fact that you’ve sought out expert information means you’re closer. And by implementing just a few of the strategies I’m about to show you, your breakthrough could literally be just a few pages away.


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Chapter One

The Little-Known Secret to Business Broker Success: It’s All About the Coaching!

The Facts About Business Brokerage

Did you know that by some estimates more than 90% of all people looking to buy a business NEVER complete the transaction? Of those who do attempt to buy, 50% of all deals fall through during the due diligence stage. At the end of the day, only about 1 out of 6 prospects ever really goes through to give you that big check. And only 10% of people even use a business broker when the time comes to buy or sell a business.1

The above statistics point to an interesting fact: being a business broker means you have to do more than just find someone to sign their name on a dotted line. You’ve got to guide and mentor them through the process, deftly maneuvering around any bumps in the process. If you want to be a broker who gets the sale signed, sealed, and delivered, you’ve also got to coach your clients through the process. Only the best brokers get deals done.

So, what makes a great broker? What qualities do you need to make sure you’re someone any business owner can look to for guidance?

Some of the characteristics of the best business brokers are:

● Social acuity● Trustworthiness● Market savvy● Knowledge● Organization● Decisiveness● Ability to motivate others● Strong work ethic● Courage

1 For more information see: http://www.diomo.com/industry-statistics-that-every-buyer-needs-to-know.html



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These traits remind me of one of my favorite movies, Remember the Titans, based on the true story of high school football coach Herman Boone who was given the unenviable and seemingly impossible task of successfully integrating a football team in the deep South during the 1970s-- without losing a game. Oh, and by the way, Boone was himself a black man in a very white city. Boone is played by Denzel Washington and is at times fierce and at other times frightened by the enormity of his task. However, despite the antagonism of his community and coworkers, he leads his team to victory against the odds. They win all their games and gain something even more important in the process: they learn how to come together as a team and put their differences behind them.

How was Coach Boone able to do this? Well, besides the magic of Hollywood, there were a few important personal qualities that made him great: he was smart in how he navigated the social issues of his day; he was a coach the kids could trust; he knew how to sell them on the hard work they were expected to put in; he was knowledgeable, organized, decisive, motivating, hardworking, and courageous. Does that list sound familiar?

Yep, a great broker and a great coach actually have a lot in common.

If you’re the kind of broker who gets deals done (or the kind of broker ready to start landing more deals and getting more of them done quickly) you’re the kind of broker who already coaches your clients. Some Facts About Business Coaching

A recent study reported that between 21% and 40% of Fortune 500 companies now use coaching. Those companies reported an average of 5.7 times ROI. They also stated that they saw improvements in productivity, quality, organizational strength, customer service, and cost reductions.2 That is why business coaching is an industry that is on the rise.

A great coach is someone who can step in with fresh eyes and help the business owner see what they lack and how to take advantage of opportunities for growth. And the number one metric by which clients judge a coach is the bottom line. Are they making not only more money, but so much more that continuing to pay their coach each month is easy to do? In other words, if the coaching isn’t 2 For more information see: http://exec.actioncoach.com/industry-statistics.php


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substantially increasing profitability for the client then the coaching isn’t working.That increase in profitability happens when the coach brings a few skills to the table. Just like the business broker, the coach must be able to interact with clients in such a way that they use their knowledge to motivate hard work. They need to show their clients that the coach can be trusted to guide them through difficult situations.

At the end of the day, great business coaching looks a lot like great business brokerage.

Converting Broker Leads to Coaching Clients

Think about these two scenarios as a business broker.

Scenario one: You’ve got a ‘serious’ client. This is the owner who says “I want out.” She welcomes your plan to sell. She knows she has to get the business ‘in shape’ to sell. She knows this may result in some expense but that she will eventually reap the benefits. She’s willing to get the job done.

These dream clients are the reason you got into the brokerage business in the first place. Fairly often, these sales happen within a reasonable time frame and encounter only a few small bumps. They take some real effort, but at the end both you and your client are happy with the results. Scenario two: you’ve got your so-called ‘tire-kicker’ prospect. This is the business owner who may have heard you speak, responded to a postcard, or simply has ‘had it up to here’ with their business. But the business will be difficult to sell until the business owner does significant work getting it ready. This is the category of owners, who, while they may know there’s more to selling a business than putting a classified ad in the local paper, remain ignorant of what it takes to get even close to the price they think their business is worth. You know you can help them but you also know it is going to take months of work to get the job done. Because the client thinks that your help in getting ready for sale is all part of the fee you get when the business actually sells, both you and he are in for some extra turbulence. Given all that, why would you want to position your professional services as part



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of the fee that comes at the end? Because it’s the industry standards, right? Not so fast. What you need to do is both see and sell yourself in a different or new vision to the business owner. But how is that accomplished? Enter the Broker/Coaching Solution!

In both scenarios, instead of presenting yourself as a realtor of sorts for business sales, what if you presented yourself as a coach to guide them through the process of preparing and selling their business? As a broker you charge a fee that is paid like a commission at the time of sale. With the first scenario that isn’t so bad; the client is reliable enough that you know you’ll get paid. However, as the statistics at the beginning of this chapter showed us, most deals don’t work out that way. Most of them are more like the second scenario. In the second scenario it is absolutely necessary that the client view you as a coach first and a broker second, paying you for guidance month-by-month as they move through the arduous process of getting their business ready to sell. This not only ensures you get paid for all the work you put in, it also provides another layer of motivation for the business owner to do their part in getting the sale done. You’re already doing the work; you might as well get paid for it!

Connecting a business brokerage prospect to business coaching usually involves these 3 stages.

First, you must break the bad news that the business is not going to sell for the price they’ve been hoping for, if at all. This may involve convincing them with financial data and analysis. Second, you must convince the owner to hang on for a bit longer in an effort to improve the profitability of their business. Third, you must give the owner the confidence that things can change in the business, if they retain you as their business coach!

Our rule thumb is that if the business has less than $100,000 in free cash flow, there will not be enough inquiries to get the business sold. Therefore, the business owner should retain you as their business coach in order to develop a minimum of $100,000 in free cash flow. The goal is to both work at selling the business while working simultaneously on improving the profits of the business through business coaching.


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You can see how quickly this opens the door for more clients. If you choose, you can specialize your coaching (so to speak) to focus on companies getting ready to sell but, as you well know, most of the things you do to get a company ready to sell are best practices they should be following well before they choose to sell. Which leads to another way to fold business coaching services into your current business…

Converting Coaching Clients to Broker Leads

This strategy is the opposite of the scenarios we just explored. This time, instead of working with business owners who want to sell and folding coaching into the package, you can work with business owners who want to improve through coaching, and fold brokerage into the package!

Here’s how it works: as part of the work you do with business coaching clients, you’ll help them define their goals and objectives for the business. This includes creating an exit strategy—helping the business owner get to a place where they play a much more ‘hands-off’ role in the business.

Some clients want to retain ownership of the business, while turning day-to-day operations over to a manager. But for many clients, the exit strategy will include—you guessed it!—the goal to eventually sell the business.

When that happens, you’ll be the obvious choice to broker the sale, as their trusted coach and advisor who has helped them get their business into that position.

And even in the instances when your coaching clients choose not to sell, you’ll still benefit from the ongoing, consistent revenue from your coaching practice.

Whether you approach it from the coaching side or the broker side, it’s easy to see how business coaching and business brokerage are extremely complementary offerings. Adding coaching to your list of services is literally a no-brainer.



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Chapter Two

The Basics of Coaching for Brokers (Coaching is NOT Consulting!)

What is Business Coaching?

Business coaching is a relatively new industry. Whereas business brokerage has been around for as many as 250 years or more, coaching is a newer field that has developed over the last 30-40 years.

Coaching is a unique practice. It’s not some form of business psychotherapy and it’s definitely not consulting. Coaching is what it sounds like. Just as Coach Boone didn’t go on the field and play (like consultants do) or sit them down and talk about how their home lives are creating issues within the team (like a therapist would do), he coached them. He taught them skills and called plays—but ultimately it was up to the players themselves to get the job done.

This is exactly what great business coaching looks like. As a coach, you come in and teach your client new practices and methods. You guide them in implementing them. You hold them accountable and keep them motivated. But at the end of the day, it’s up to them to find ways to make change happen.

Consulting vs. Coaching This point is important enough that I want to drive it home again: you are NOT a consultant. Many coaches fall into the trap of trying to be both coach and consultant to the business owners they serve. This can get very costly very quickly.

The core distinction is that as a business coach, you get paid for providing value, not deliverables. The distinction might seem fine, but it’s actually quite important. As a coach, your clients pay you because you provide them the insight, tools, and motivation they need to be successful. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you—it could be 5-10 minutes—but if your clients experience an increase in revenue that is more than what they’re paying you, you’ve added value to their business and they’ll continue to pay you.


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That’s why business coaches can easily command effective billable rates of $500+/hour—that’s an hourly rate any doctor or attorney would salivate over.

As a consultant, on the other hand, you do the work for them. You get paid for output, not input. There will be times that your coaching clients will ask you to help them with implementation—don’t do it. Even if you charge decent hourly rates, you’ll set a precedent where the value you provide isn’t the most important consideration in the equation. You’ll muddy the waters and undermine your authority as a coach.

That’s because coaches are equals and consultants are subordinates.

Think about it: a business consultant takes assignments from the client, while the coach issues assignments to the client.

A coach typically provides services over the phone or Skype—a very efficient means of communication, where you both stay location-neutral. Business consulting usually takes place on site of the owner’s business.

A business coach, in order to achieve the greatest ROI of any professional adviser, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the owner looking at the business on an enterprise-wide basis as an extra pair of eyes and ears. In consulting, the client is always in a ‘director’ capacity--telling you what to do.

Think of yourself and position yourself as a true coach. Both you and your clients will reap the benefits in your bank accounts.



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Chapter Three

5 Steps to Freedom: Taking Clients from Start-Up to Sale

Now it’s time to get into some of the nitty-gritty of how you’ll help your clients be successful. First, let’s take a look at the big picture.

Over the years, I developed my business coaching methodology into a model that we now call the 5 Steps to Freedom. They represent the phases that all successful businesses go through. Once you’ve learned the 5 Steps you can guide your clients through them.

The Steps are pretty simple. They are:

Step 1--Creation: This is the beginning as a start-up in the marketplace. This is where they work hard to develop a viable niche market and create a working prototype of the business model. Sometimes this step can be the most fun as the business owner gets to see so many of their dreams start to take on reality. Step 2--Disorder: This step is often not as fun. This is when the business owner must push through the often bloody battle of becoming cash flow positive by investing and promoting like mad to build brand awareness and acquire customers. It can be unnerving but, when the money starts to come in, it is also highly gratifying!

Step 3--Control: In this step the business owner starts to slow down a little and start thinking more strategically. It is when they can start converting cash flow into profit by monitoring well-chosen performance metrics and fine-tuning the business model. Step 4--Prosperity: Finally, a little bit of comfort and stability for the business owner! In this step they are solidifying a position of dominance in their market niche and optimizing operational efficiency for maximum growth and profitability. Often the owner will encounter day-to-day problems but they are no longer in the survival stage.


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Step 5--Freedom: In this step the business owner is reaping all the benefits of their hard work. They are developing a strong core of leaders and investing in expansion through strategic partnerships or acquisitions. All of which prepares them to step back and take a break while enjoying their profits or take on a new entrepreneurial adventure!

Of course, reaching the freedom step doesn’t happen overnight and some businesses actually never get there—as you’re probably painfully aware, as a business broker who has worked with clients who never quite get the business in sellable shape, despite your best efforts. As a coach, your task is to guide clients through each of the 5 Steps and perhaps also collect a big commission check if their exit strategy is indeed to sell!

But HOW do you make it happen? By helping your clients implement a series of tactical strategies we call the 21 Silver Bullets.



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Chapter Four

Transforming Businesses: the 21 Silver Bullets

The Silver Bullets Overview

If I were a betting man, I would bet the farm that you either know or use a large percentage of the 21 Silver Bullets. As a broker, you not only use them when preparing a business for a sale but you probably use a fair number of them yourself to run your business. So you also know that failing to implement the 21 Silver Bullets can keep business owners awake at night. In the Coaches’ Coach training, we put these Silver Bullets into three main categories. These are the three biggest areas of operation and most businesses could use coaching in all of them. They are: time, team and money. The Silver Bullets are the ‘secret sauce’ that will help you bring your clients through the 5 Steps to Freedom so that they maximize the value out of their businesses. When you help your clients implement the 21 Silver Bullets, you become so valuable that they happily pay you month after month, assuring you the ongoing revenue you crave.

TIME: ● Apprenticeship Plan ● Operations and Training Manual ● Time Management Plan ● Comprehensive Exit Strategy


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TEAM: ● Employee Acquisition Plan ● Psychometric Profiling Process ● Key Performance Indicators Measurement Plan● Lean Manufacturing Program● Performance Incentive Plan● Strategic Plan● Leadership Development Plan● Team Meeting Rhythm● Organizational Plan● Team Building System

MONEY:

● Current Business Plan● Break-Even Plan● Revenue and Profit Plan● Cash Gap Plan● USP and Guarantee● Sales Management System● Tactical Marketing Plan

The First Four Silver Bullets: TIME

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, “Lost time is never found again.” As a business owner you know how true that is. Time is the number one thing most entrepreneurs wish they had more of and the resource that most are not using as wisely as they could. This is why the first four Silver Bullets are all about time. If you can teach clients to manage their time wisely, so many other elements of their businesses will fall into place.

The Silver Bullets are not arranged in any hierarchical order. You can start with any one of them according to your client’s needs. However, for simplicity’s sake we’ll look at them in the order they are listed. First up is an Apprenticeship Plan. Having an apprenticeship plan means that your clients find someone in their business who can handle critical day-to-day operations while the business owner attends to the larger strategic/management needs of the enterprise. One of the biggest reasons businesses fail is because



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of owner burnout. Many, many business owners find they can’t take even one day off because they are the only ones who know how to run things. An Apprenticeship Plan provides much-needed relief to your clients and frees them up to be able to focus on the things that will have the most long-term impact on the business.

Next is the Operations and Training Manual. I am constantly amazed at how many businesses skip this step! An operations and training manual can be one page or a hundred. It can be simple or complex. But it is a MUST HAVE. This document tells everyone involved in the business exactly how the business processes work. Sounds simple, right? Many business owners simply don’t have one or don’t know how to create one. When that happens, they often lose time, energy, and money because everything takes longer and simple mistakes are made as everyone in the company constantly re-invents the wheel. Putting this together initially takes time but will save your clients many frustrating hours down the road.

The third Silver Bullet under Time is a Time Management Plan. Many clients will tell you that they’re “too busy” to reach their goals. In most cases, what they’re really telling you is that they’re inefficient at managing their time. A time management plan will help your clients lock the most important—but frequently non-urgent—tasks into their calendar on a permanent basis. Chief among these tasks is ongoing appointments with themselves to tend to high-level strategy and management issues.

The fourth Silver Bullet under Time is an Exit Strategy. This is where you help the business owner define what the fifth step—freedom—looks like for them. It allows you to help your clients “begin with the end in mind” and create a clear vision for how they’ll be able to step back from, and even sell, the business so that they’re not tied to it on a day-to-day basis (unless they want to be!). As a business broker, you probably already have lots of experience at helping businesses implement this Silver Bullet.


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The Next Ten Silver Bullets: TEAM

Issues surrounding team are where the bulk of day-to-day problems occur for most businesses. A company can have great policies and procedures and fantastic products or services, but if they don’t have a high-performing team none of that will matter. People are the ultimate surprise in business. That’s why nearly half of the Silver Bullets have to do with them.

First up is an Employee Acquisition Program. Many businesses are not strategic about hiring employees, especially small businesses. More often than not they start out with family and friends and then fill in the gaps with whoever else comes along. However, if you want your business to be successful you’ve got to hire strategically. Every person who comes on board needs to be bought in to your mission and vision.

A simple way to do this is through the next Silver Bullet, a Psychometric Profiling Process. This sounds a lot more intense than it actually is. What this means is that a business owner uses proven personality profiling tools to determine the strengths and weaknesses of employees and candidates to make hiring decisions, assign duties, and build teams.

Next up is the Key Performance Indicators Measurements System. KPIs are integral to the success of any business. Most businesses simply look to profitability and the bottom line to measure whether or not they are successful. However, this can only take you so far. You’ve got to delve into what specifically drives your profitability up or down and that’s where Key Performance Indicators come in. Helping your clients define which KPIs they should track can make all the difference for their success.

A Lean Manufacturing Program can go a long way to improving a business’ bottom line. Whether your client provides products or services, they need to have a streamlined process for delivery. Your job as their coach is to help them see where they’ve got some institutional bloat (this often occurs with employee hiring or in employee practices which is why it is included in the team section) and guide them in trimming it down.

Great employees are often intrinsically motivated but even the best employees work better with a Performance Incentive Plan. This is a way to motivate



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employees to their best performance by defining the KPIs that represent success for each role, and offering monetary incentives for reaching them. You can do this for literally every role in the company, from the secretary to sales to service.

Strategic Plans provide a big picture view of the business and help guide the growth process. We recommend a powerful strategic planning tool called the 1-Page Strategic Plan that helps business owners track everything from their big-picture goals to their quarterly objectives.

A business is only as strong as its leaders. Which is why every company, no matter how big, needs a Leadership Development Plan. The best Leadership Development Plans are those that help find the leaders from within the business and grow their skills so that they can take on ever-increasing responsibility. Not only does this improve business operations, it helps retain quality employees, who will feel motivated and challenged by the opportunities within the company.

Did you know that on average most people spend 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings?3 That’s almost an entire work week! Most people view meetings as at worst productivity killers and at best a necessary evil. However, done correctly team meetings can go a long way to building cohesiveness in a company. Hence, the importance of Team Meeting Rhythm planning. Do meetings right and your clients’ businesses will flourish.

Another necessary part of building a strong team is having an Organizational Plan. This is the next level up from the regular old org chart that so many companies use. Instead of just having a flow chart of which employees report where, an organizational plan outlines a seamless, buttoned-up workflow system. It’s a reporting and accountability plan capped off by an organizational chart that makes sense to all the employees and stakeholders of that organization. The Coaches’ Coach has a great model you can use for this.

The final piece of the Team section is the Team Building System. Every team works better when they know each other well enough to trust one another. Trust, however, does not just happen by accident. You have to consciously create it.

3 For more information see: https://www.atlassian.com/time-wasting-at-work-infographic


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The Final Seven Silver Bullets: MONEY

Money is usually the first thing people think of when they think of business success. These seven Silver Bullets not only represent best financial management practices for the day-to-day operation of a business, but they also go a long way toward prepping a business for sale.

Business plans are a wondrous thing, but many business owners forget to update them. A Current Business Plan can make a huge difference. Business plans must effectively and efficiently forecast cash flow, determine working capital requirements, and forecast ability to pay back any debt and give investors (if any) a good rate of return.

A Break-Even Plan is another great tool to help businesses get a handle on their financial picture. Particularly for companies in financial distress, the break-even plan allows clients to cut costs enough to stop financial bleeding while also boosting sales to cover the owner’s salary and minimum number of expenses.

When the company is out of the financial ditch and headed upwards, the next step is the Revenue and Profit Plan. This is where you and your client start working on a month-by-month budget and plan the amount of sales you need, along with reduced expenses, so the owner can start taking a healthy profit.

Even in profitable businesses, cash flow isn’t always steady—and cash flow problems can be disastrous for small businesses. That’s where a Cash Gap Plan comes in. This plan will help your client quickly collect outstanding receivables, get their customers to pay on time, and improve their terms with vendors so that their bank account is flush.

Unique Selling Propositions and Guarantees are powerful marketing tools that help a company stand out from the competition. By helping your clients develop a compelling USP and guarantee, they’ll immediately begin to increase sales.

The Sales Management System allows your client to grow a killer sales force. You’ll help clients script their approach, coordinate sales activity with a CRM, measure activity, and tie sales reps’ results to their paychecks.



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The last Silver Bullet is our Tactical Marketing Plan. The Tactical Marketing Plan will help your clients generate more leads, convert more of those leads to customers, and increase revenue per sale through smart, metrics-based marketing strategies.

Of course, each Silver Bullet has a specific system for both training and implementation that you’ll need to provide your clients. Full white-label access to the entire system is available inside the Coaches’ Coach member portal. You can get a FREE 30-day trial to test it out for yourself HERE.

http://members.mycoachescoach.com/30-day-free-trial/


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Chapter 5:

The 7 Links to Freedom: Building Your 6-Figure Coaching Practice

So far, we’ve explored how you, as a business broker, can add business coaching to your offerings and create a complementary, client-centered revenue stream that ensures you get paid—and paid well!—in between your big broker checks.

I hope you’re catching the vision for what’s possible.

There’s one other thing I want to share with you: how you can turn your business coaching practice into a 6-figure enterprise that allows you to work as much (or as little!) as you want to.

A couple years ago, I came across an article from the Harvard Business Review that inspired the development of what I call the Firm Profitability Dependency Chain. This theory says that building a profitable firm is based on 7 essential “links.” As I thought about how I built my original coaching firm, I began to see that anyone can do this if they build each of these links. But like a chain, if any of these links are severed, the whole thing falls apart. In some ways the links are really more like “dependencies” because the weight of each successive link hangs on the one before it.

The best way to understand the links is to work through them backwards. Let’s start with where we all hope to end up.

Link 7: Fantastic Profitability. Obviously, this is our goal. It’s been fascinating to observe the incredible variety of answers I get when I ask the following question of aspiring firm builders: “What do you believe is the single most important driver in firm profitability?” No one ever gives the right answer because it isn’t one most are trained to think of. However, if you want profitability, the number one thing you need is. . .



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Link 6: Low Client Acquisition Cost. The fact is, it’s impossible to build a wonderfully profitable firm capable of delivering completely passive income if your client acquisition costs are out of control! You know this as a broker: making money is all about driving down your marketing and sales costs while simultaneously increasing your client base. The same is true as a business coach. The most common (though not necessarily the easiest) ways to do this are as follows: getting the majority of your clients through referrals and strategic alliances, servicing ever-higher quality (which equals better paying!) clients, and keeping these clients longer and longer. So, what does it take to achieve this? It takes. . .

Link 5: Raving Fans. Over the last decade of business coaching firm-building, I’ve found that until you develop a robust reputation in your community as a genuinely great coach, who delivers substantially MORE value to your clients than your services cost, you’ll never be rewarded by your community with an abundance of revenue that you invest almost no cash to produce.

Obviously, in the early stages of developing your business, you’ll have to invest more money in higher-cost marketing strategies, but this can be reduced over time as you develop an army of raving fans. So how do you do that? You’ve got to deliver…

Link 4: Effective Coaching. Business owners will give you about 3 months to prove the value of coaching. By then, they better have a fatter bank account or it’s game over. So how do you deliver effective coaching? Obviously, you need…

Link 3: High Quality Coaches. When you’re building a firm, you don’t have the time and cash flow to be a mediocre coach or to hire and work with mediocre coaches and wait a couple years for them to become the kind of leaders they need to be to keep great clients. Every respected authority on building great companies agrees that the ability to attract and retain high quality human capital is THE competitive edge in the increasingly knowledge-based economy of the 21st century. You’ve probably seen this in action as a business broker, too. Think about all the other brokers you’ve worked and networked with. Mediocre doesn’t get the job done. The coach industry is the same. So, given that, what’s the single most important requirement for on-boarding and retaining such top-shelf talent? Easy…


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Link 2: Great Recruitment. Trying to recruit a top-gun business coach won’t be easy without cash. You need great cash-flow so you can afford to pay your coaches a compensation package comparable to what they’ll be leaving. AND, just as importantly, there needs to be a big upside. That’s why we’re big believers in revenue percentage splits as a compensation model. It’s the only model that’s ever worked in building coaching firms around the world. Great coaches never have to leave a firm if they can grow their income and eventually buy into the firm they helped build--or even multiply it over and over. But, how do you create enough cash flow to build an amazing team? Well, again, it’s pretty simple, though not easy. It’s...

Link 1: Personal Coaching Success. I don’t believe you’ve really mastered this business to the level required to build a great firm until you’ve hit 6-figures and stayed there for a year or more. What must you do to be a 6-figure coach? You must consistently deliver high value coaching services in your market until your market is willing to reward you with ever more clients, who pay ever more money, for ever-less effort on your part.

And when this starts to happen, it’s magic!

So HOW do you do it? The Coaches’ Coach system is proven to help everyone from startup to experienced business coaches gain mastery at the core skills and strategies that create coaching success. Armed with the training both for you AND your clients, you’ll be able to make coaching a profitable, consistent source of revenue for you and increase both professional success and personal wealth!



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Chapter Six

Your Next Steps

This book is full of top-notch information that, hopefully, has not only encouraged you to be a great business coach but also will help you, right now, TODAY, to become a better broker.

In this ebook, I taught you a groundbreaking way to add a complementary, consistent revenue stream to your existing business brokerage efforts.

You learned…

∙ Why business brokerage and business coaching are such complementary businesses…

∙ What makes a coach successful and how to position yourself to collect effective billable rates of $500/hour and more…

∙ The Five Steps to Freedom that will help both your coaching and brokerage clients maximize their success (and increase your payday)…

∙ 21 Silver Bullets that move business owners through the Five Steps to Freedom and toward more profits with less work…

∙ The Firm Profitability Dependency Chain that will help you add 6-figures annually to your business through business coaching

The truth is, what I’ve shown you is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds more shortcuts, secrets, little-known tips and tactics I’d love to teach you about HOW to implement these principles for incredible growth and profits.

But an ebook can only get you so far.

So consider this your first glimpse into what could become of your business and life—proof that it really is possible to make more money as a business broker, without long gaps between paychecks.

That’s why I’ve decided to open my vault of business coaching systems, worksheets, ads and processes—so that YOU can add a 6-figure coaching component to your business, like Alan Melton did.


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It’s our Coaches’ Coach Member’s Only Site, and it’s the comprehensive system that provides you absolutely everything you need to generate serious coaching revenue in record time.

And now you have the chance to “try before you buy.”

Maybe you’re on the fence about business coaching. Perhaps you’re not sure if our system is really all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe you doubt your ability to add coaching to your existing brokerage services.

Whatever it is, I think you deserve a real shot.



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Because you took the time to read The Broker-Coach Solution, I’d like to offer you a FREE 30-day trial of the Coaches’ Coach member site. Use that time to go through all the material. Learn everything you can. Really sink your teeth into it.

Decide for yourself whether the system is right for you.

If not, simply cancel your subscription and you’ll never be billed. No questions asked.

If you do decide that adding business coaching services will be a powerful benefit to your business, then we’ll make you one of our new members, complete with all the material, training, and one-on-one help that goes along with it.

So here’s what you do:

1. Click here.2. Follow the instructions on the page. 3. Try the system for yourself and see if it can add value to your life.

Don’t wait to get started. ACT NOW to create more stability and financial freedom in your life.

Head over to the site immediately and start your FREE trial. You’ll be glad you did.

For your success,

Eric DombachPresidentThe Coaches’ Coach





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About the AuthorIn 2001, Eric Dombach founded a business and executive coaching firm that grew to 7 coaching franchise units generating more than $1 million USD in revenue, 23% operating profit, and average annual growth rate of 140% per year, over four years. As part of this enterprise, he developed and executed a regional marketing strategy, implemented an innovative customer relationship management system and sales process, developed a proprietary service-delivery methodology, and recruited local executive leadership talent to service clients.

He sold the firm to 4 of his employees for $1 million U.S. dollars, generating a return on capital of more than 800%.

In 2005, Dombach founded Coaches’ Coach, a leader in the business coaching industry, and has since trained more than 1,300 independent and franchise business coaches in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Australasian markets. Coaches’ Coach now serves thousands of business coaches globally.

He was also an early-adopter of online marketing automation, social media, video, and content publishing strategies. He mentored franchise executives from 8 franchise systems and industry associations. He has published hundreds of industry articles, white papers, and books, including the Amazon category best-seller The Million Dollar Business Coaching Firm.

Dombach was one of just twenty-three Business Coaching Thought Leaders to present at the first annual World Business and Executive Coach Summit, sharing the virtual stage with industry gurus including Brian Tracy, Michael Gerber, Marshall Goldsmith, and Michael Port.



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He is also known for re-engineering the franchise award process and operations of a failing national franchise concept, delivering a 222% increase in franchise sales. He simultaneously drove down the new franchisee failure rate from 57% to 4% within 18 months. He has consulted with numerous business coaching franchise brands, participating in more than $1,500,000 USD of franchise “awards.” In 2011, Dombach co-founded STEAM Online Marketing, a digital marketing agency with 6 U.S. based managers and more than 40 contractors servicing small to mid-sized companies on three continents. As Chief Sales Officer, he delivered $500,000 in sales within the company’s first year. As Chief Financial Officer, he managed this growth with no debt, no outside investment, and a 13% distribution of operating profit to the co-founders in year one. Happily married to Deborah since 1993 and father of 4 amazing kids, Jeremiah, Hannah, Judah, and Josiah, his family is his greatest accomplishment. He is also a voracious reader, recreational athlete, and jazz-fusion guitar junkie.

the broker/coaching solution€¦ · the business broker’s guide to a consistent, month-by-month,...

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