Out of the Box Advisors
Small Business Coaching
You've Done It!
By getting this far, you’re already taking the first step to improving your peace of mind as well as your small business' chance of success dramatically.
Out of the Box Advisors brings the knowledge and experience your business needs to grow.
We are your go to small business coaching partner with the expertise to help you not only grow your business, but sleep better at night knowing you now have access to some of the best minds in business.
What is a business Coach?
First things first, what is a business coach?
A business coach is simply a person who utilizes their vast experience and business knowledge to assist and guide a business owner in running and growing their business. We act as a resource that you can call upon to solidify uncertainties or utilize our experience so that you can make the best decisions possible.
Out of the Box Advisors takes the time to get to know you and your personal goals to develop a customized strategy that exceeds our client’s lofty expectations.
why should a small business hire a business coach?
Expertise and value to your bottom line are great reasons to hire a business coach. Out of the Box Advisors’ core mission is to lower your stress managing your business and help you sleep better at night.
Achieve your Goals
We help reduce your stress by giving you the confidence to manage your business. You gain this extra boost of morale through knowing you have someone on your team that has been through it all before.
We can guide you through the hoops and hurdles that all of us inevitably encounter as business owners.
As a small business owner you likely find yourself wearing many hats within your business. By hiring a business coach you gain access to a wardrobe full of new hats at your fingertips.
Reduce your Stress
Let’s say you have to wear the Public Relations hat. Your business has been the victim of a malicious false review which you suspect came from a competitor. What do you do? While this certainly doesn’t apply to all business owners, typically we would be angry that someone would do this to our business. Perhaps we respond with some forceful pushback or maybe you’re at a loss of what to even do.
That’s EXACTLY where we come in as a business coach. Not only have we been in your position, but we have learned and experienced the most efficient and productive way to handle the PR Hat.
With your hiring of an Out of the Box Advisors executive coach, you gain that knowledge and experience!
Schedule a Free Consultation
How are we different from other Business Coaches?
We are proud of the work we do, so naturally we could go on and on about our passion for helping small businesses, but let’s take a look at the major points.
We only work with Small, Local Businesses
We don’t work with those large corporations that cause you headache day in and day out. Our entire purpose is to help the Davids of the business world take on the Goliaths.
We only work with businesses with the expectation of a long-term mutually beneficial relationship
We are not the type of consultant to walk through doors, promise you the world in a month, take your hard earned money and then never see them again. We go in from the beginning with the mindset that we want to grow with you year after year.
Our knowledge is derived from successful strategies implemented in the C-suite of multimillion dollar companies
We bring the experiences and knowledge gained from those ‘big businesses’ to benefit the entrepreneur who invests their heart and soul into their small business. You gain the tools that those corporations have, at the local level.
Over 90% of our clients stay on board with us for at least 3 years or more
As a product of our long-term mindset, we often foster years of loyalty from our clients. We actively care about our clients. We know that your business feeds yours and your employee’s families as well as providing you a sense of joy. We want to empower that!
We have experience in every aspect of running a successful business. We have the resources to find a solution to your unique difficulties.
Aside from the occasional industry specific issue, most businesses, big or small, encounter all the same problems. Regardless if it’s Public Relations, Marketing Strategy, Executive Leadership, etc. we have the information your business needs to succeed.
Schedule a Free Consultation
Core Areas We Help Small Businesses Improve
While we can help you with nearly any subject your small business may face, we mainly find ourselves focusing on marketing, business strategy, and operations.
Let’s face it, you’re spending most of your day-to-day running the business or providing the service such that when you lock up for the day you’re either too tired or out of time to put on the other hats.
Marketing
Marketing is an area many small businesses struggle with. Out of the Box Advisors have tried and true strategies we can implement in your business to improve your brand, bring in new leads/patients, increase customer communication, and automate many of the processes associated with nurturing clients and potential clients.
We have experts available to help in nearly every marketing capacity including:
-
Brand development
-
Logo and graphic design
-
Website design and development
-
Email marketing
-
Social media marketing
-
Advertising
-
CRM implementation
-
Sales process improvement
Business Strategy
You would expect that business strategy would be something to have locked down prior to launching a business. However, the real world just doesn’t work like that does it? We typically break the mold with developing your business strategy. A superb example of this would be the Business Plan Fallacy. In that example, we can see that a great marketing strategy will help us implement your improved strategy for long term growth.
Instead of just following the ‘typical,’ we instead focus on custom and intelligently designed strategies that work for you!
As a small sampling of the type of thinking required, see if you can answer the following questions about your business’ strategy.
-
Where is your local company currently going?
-
In your mind, where do you want it to be going?
-
Does your business have a 5-year plan? If yes, what is it?
-
What about you as the business owner, what is your 5-year plan?
Through our business coaching, we constantly throw questions similar to this your way. We want to get your thinking Out of the Box after all!
Operations
The third main strategy we help small businesses with are their operations. When any one person wears too many hats, none of the individual roles are truly executed 100% effectively. How many times have you been meaning to ‘change’ something. What about any type of process improvement reviews; do you even know if there is a better way to do something?
One of the first areas that we typically tackle, as an example, in terms of operations would be establishing a Voice of the Customer policy. Why? Ultimately, providing the services desired by the market at the quality level expected correlates directly to revenues. By deploying a VotC policy, you will essentially have a constant ‘ear to the ground’ about how well your business is performing in the minds of your customers.
Here are some other areas we help small businesses with in terms of operations:
-
We identify bottlenecks that are slowing down your operations
-
We identify inefficiencies and provide solutions
-
We establish a link to your customers - Voice of the Customer
-
We conduct lean six sigma methodologies to reduce loss.
Schedule a Free Consultation
Who we work with
If you consider yourself a small business owner, then chances are you’re the type of clients for which we love to create growth. That mindset is our only ‘real’ requirement for becoming an Out of the Box Advisors client.
However, if you’re looking for more of a data driven idea of who we work with, we typically work with small businesses with less than 50 employees or so. It’s a critical part of our process to work directly with the owner to be most effective in transforming a business.
We do not have any limitations on how many locations or areas that a client operates within. In fact, we hope that we expand your current geographical or impactful footprint!
This is by far not an exhaustive list, but here are a few of the top industries we love working with:
Home Service businesses
Home services businesses are some of our very favorite clients to work with. These types of small business owners are blue collar, hard-working, and experts in their craft. You’re likely an excellent tradesperson or service provider, but either your day-to-day activities providing your services take up too much of your day to tackle business focused items or maybe those areas just aren’t your forte. This is where a business advisor comes in handy!
Some example of home service businesses includes:
HVAC - Air Conditioning services
The AC services industry is packed with competition. With such a full market, you must be constantly working on your business’ marketing or improving your operations in order to stay one step ahead. If you’re operating in this space, you know that the “big” players have a significant financial advantage. We help you compete with those big players which leads to you eventually being the biggest player on the field.
Pest Control Services
Regulations, routing, service effectiveness…. As a small pest control operator with a few technicians working with you, you know that these tasks soak up your time, but are critically important. How are you handling that workload? Are you able to manage it so that it works at your current capacity? What about growing to add the next technician or three? With one of our advisors we can provide you all the guidance to achieve those goals!
Electricians
Much like the HVAC industry, it would seem that there’s a competitor around every corner. Is the solo electrician working out of his home or service truck beating you on your bids? If so, what are you doing to research your pricing or bidding strategies? This is a great example of how hiring a business coach can help you win more projects or service calls.
Medical - Mental Health Providers
Let’s start with this question:
Does your office manager hold the success of your practice in their hands like a baby bird? Unfortunately, this is both an extremely common item as well as terrifying.
Medical professionals have extensive training within their fields of study, but often have minimal or no business management experience. When this happens it is highly common for them to hire a business-office manager that has the basic knowhow to operate the business. While this choice makes logical sense, especially early on in your practice, it is extremely risky. What happens if there is an office dynamic issue or the person is poached by your competitor?
When you have a business advisor on your team you mitigate this risk by empowering you as the business owner to hold the keys to their business instead of delegating that power to an employee.
Retail or E-commerce shops
Retail businesses are simultaneously the easiest and most complex businesses to operate.
On one hand, you have a product that you wish to sell and a location (or website) in order to sell them. From a marketing standpoint it all comes down to foot traffic or website visits. As long as you can manage that you’ll likely succeed at sales assuming you have a product with a positive value proposition.
On the other hand, you have all the logistics of inventory management, fulfillment, shipping expenses, product photos, etc. etc. etc…. There are a lot of balls that must be juggled in order to ensure that your cash flows remain consistent along with maintaining profitability.
We have the knowledge and experience needed to both maximize your operations and profits. With a business coach on your team, you’ll always have a resource to help you dig through the business intelligence data that will ultimately lead to a bigger bottom line.
Schedule a Free Consultation
What's our process
While working with small businesses over the years, we have built a finely tuned process that has a maximum impact on improving their bottom line.
Here is a general outline of what to expect with our process:
Initial Meeting
We meet with the business owner(s) and work with them on identifying their top 3 priorities from their perspective. In addition, through our own analysis, we also identify 3 of the small business’ biggest ticket items that are either hurting their business or could create growth.
1.
Prioritization and planning
We work with you to prioritize these top issues and create a unique plan with specific tasks required to be completed by the business owner. We include deadline goals or expectations and help all within the business realize why these changes need to be implemented.
2.
Accountability monitoring
We then monitor progress made by the business owner and guide them to make sure the necessary tasks are completed to the highest quality.
3.
Quantify and qualify
We monitor the client’s key performance indicators (KPIs) as tasks continue to be completed. This helps quantify your business in terms of success both in tandem with your projects and independent of them.
4.
Continual re-evaluation
Throughout our process it is highly common for us to uncover previously unknown items. Whenever one of these items becomes available we repeat step 2 as needed.
5.
Schedule a Free Consultation
What's A typical Client's experience
Similar to life, every business has different needs, goals, and desires. We custom tailor YOUR business' experience and coaching solutions specific those unique goals.
Before working with us
Many clients we tend to work with are highly stressed and full of frustration towards aspects of their business.
Before working with our business coaches clients tend to find themselves “in over their head.” Tasks that are essential to complete to be successful aren’t given the proper attention they deserve.
Many of our clients are extremely knowledgeable in their respective fields, but lack confidence to execute essential business operations to grow their business.
Perhaps you feel that even while your business is growing, it isn’t at the rate you expected it to.
While working with us
While working with us, our clients start to relax, and their stress levels are lowered. They become confident in our plan and it improves their outlook for their business.
Business owners will have an expert on hand around the clock to answer any questions or discuss subjects they may be having reservations about.
Our custom plan will be created, and we will guide our clients to accomplishing tasks necessary to advance our goals and strategies.
after working with us
Work with us and feel the zen!
Our clients are relaxed, confident, and rapidly growing their businesses. In addition, they have developed a relationship with their go-to business coach that can help them out at any time in the future.
Hire a Top ranked Small Business Coach to help create growth
Out of the Box Advisors was recently ranked 12th nationally as a Top Small Business Consultancy. We have the knowledge, experience, and most importantly the results!
If you find yourself feeling stressed and maybe a bit less confident about your business, contact us today.
We’d love to get to know you and find the best solutions to grow your business.
It all starts with
a Free consultation
Our recent articles
