I WANT TO BE A SUCCESSFUL....
WE RECOMMEND OUR
The Small Business Coaching Diploma has been designed to show you how to guide coaching clients through the early and later various stages peaks and troughs of business.
This Diploma teaches you how to apply your coaching skills within small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs), equipping you with the fundamental skills and tools required to begin your journey as a professional Business Coach.
Passionate about helping businesses survive, thrive or revive? This is the Diploma for you.
Specialise in working with small to medium-sized businesses working with business owners, entrepreneurs, and their teams - From the independent business owner to a business owner with 200 staff thinking about floating on the stock market. These businesses and their people form the backbone of the local economy. You already know them, they run the businesses you pass every day on your high street.
The Small Business Coaching Diploma is designed to help you acquire the necessary coaching skills to work with those who run or work within a small or medium sized business.
The Diploma is comprised of six modules and our professional trainers, all successful Business Coaches, will be guiding you through the programme. As with all of The Coaching Academy coaching courses, your studies will be supported with monthly live online workshops, live training, practice opportunities, mentorship, assessment and life-time support.
The Small Business Coaching Diploma helps you to build a specific bank of tools and strategies for those who own, manage or work within a small business. You will learn how to help deal with subjects such as strategic planning, performance evaluation and KPIs, Customer Focus, Business Growth and Work/Life Balance to name a few. Not to mention how transferable all of the skills and tools you learn will prove to be for you and your business.
You will learn how to...
You will receive an abundance of training materials containing 6 module workbooks bursting with information and thought provoking activities. These will help you lay the foundations of knowledge required to shape your future as an excellent Business Coach.
Each module workbook corresponds with one of our Accelerator Events - live online workshops, which accelerate your learning and development, with the added bonus of meeting and developing your skills with like-minded people.
The Coaching Modules are all stand-alone and can be completed at your own pace, in any order.
If you feel unsure of how to diagnose the issues which face small businesses, all will become clear after completing this module! The Business Diagnostics and Coaching Solutions Accelerator Event provides you with a wealth of business diagnostic tools that will help you and your client to gain a clearer understanding of the business environment in which they are working. It’s like a mini MBA!
The early part of the Business Diagnostics and Coaching Solutions Accelerator Event considers basic diagnostic models such as a SWOT Analysis, while later you will rapidly expand your small business coaching toolkit. You will leave this session feeling at home with a range of “external models” such as PESTLE and Porter’s 5 Forces, as well as internal models including McKinsey’s 7S framework. Your new toolkit will also include the use of comparison models such as Kaplan’s Balanced Scorecard. Using these tried and tested frameworks with your clients will significantly add to your developing credibility as a Business Coach.
New coaches in this field can sometimes feel that they are not up-to-speed in areas such as marketing and business finance. A number of useful marketing models are considered to help if you are in that position, including the Ansoff Growth Matrix and Life-Cycle Analysis. You will also deal with cash flow management and financial modelling for business start-ups – both key issues facing newly developing businesses.
Finally, this module looks at the importance to a small business of industry standards and best practice and recognised accreditation. Your coaching will need to be able to flex to accommodate these standards – potentially new and unknown to you as a coach, but highly influential in the thinking of your new clients.
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
On the Customer Focus Accelerator Event you will think about the relationship the small business has with its customers. A key early lesson is the need to firmly establish in the client’s mind exactly who their customer is and this comes from a clear understanding of where they position themselves as a business. The 4Mat system is introduced as a useful tool in this context.
The Customer Focus module explores ways to help your clients identify their ideal customer. It can be a powerful realisation for small business owners that successfully target their efforts towards a small proportion of their customers which can have a disproportionate effect on sales and profits.
You will consider how the correct positioning for your clients supports them in their marketing activities and will discuss different ways of marketing and selling to customers, alongside the importance of being flexible in the sales process. An interesting part is exploring the impact that our beliefs can have on our ability to sell and how you can assist your clients in adopting the empowering beliefs of successful sales people.
The module also looks at pricing policies in conjunction with sales and builds on customer retention and account management theory.
The Customer Focus module covers the following topics:
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
Whilst coaches are in effect, small business owners, the reality of running a coaching business can be quite different from the challenges faced by Managing Director/Owners (MDOs) running small businesses with 10-50 staff to manage, products to sell, technology to rely on and constant market pressures to take into consideration.
For many MDOs, running a Small Business can be a lonely experience for which more often than not, they have had no training or experience on how to deal with many of the challenges which they face on a regular basis. This is why more and more MDOs are hiring coaches to help draw out their strengths, focus their energy, hold them accountable to their actions and challenge their thinking.
The Small Business Coaching 'For Real’ Accelerator Event will put you into the shoes of your client to raise your awareness of some of the issues they face, give you a deeper understanding of life as an MDO and armed with this new insight help inform many of the questions you will ask to coach your client towards success. Learn some of the extraordinary situations faced by real-world client examples and explore the questions you might ask and the strategies you might use.
The event is hands-on, practical and packed full of opportunity to put your developing coaching skills into action.
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
The lack of a long-term plan and the lack of adequate measurements of the delivery of that plan are frequent challenges of the small business owner. The Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation Accelerator Event provides coaches with the knowledge and skills that can help to resolve these major issues.
A key aim of this particular Accelerator Event is to enable coaches to discuss with the small business owner exactly what their exit plan strategy is. No matter what stage of development a small business is at, its owner can be guided by the ultimate goal of the Exit Strategy. If they don’t know where they are going, how will they know if they’ve got there?
The Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation module reviews the ideal business structures and how to go about creating a business that can thrive without the owner’s involvement. As coaches you will often need to guide clients towards the assessment of the current situation, planning in order to achieve their long-term vision and establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as measurements of on-going success.
The Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation Accelerator Event will help you as a coach in dealing with issues around planning, monitoring and evaluation of your client’s business. What processes and systems do they have to support the growth of the business? How do they control business data such as financial and performance information?
And how do they go about ensuring their systems establish the best practice within the company so that they themselves can take a step back and pass on tasks to others?
Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation covers the following topics:
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
The Practicalities of Being a Business Coach live online training Event is full of great ideas that will help you get off the ground as a Business Coach. With the inspiring guidance of your trainer to help you, you will be positioned to establish yourself and your business and manage your new clients through to success. Your trainer is of course a successful small business owner and a successful Business Coach to other small business owners: so rest assured, you will be taught by someone who is already walking the walk.
Some of the topics explored will include the ideal way to set session structures and the associated fees, the logistics of managing multiple clients and the necessity of robust contracts.
You will be given advice on how to build up multiple sales channels and processes over time, with newsletters/blogs, websites, social media, public speaking and sales techniques that all feed into your search for clients.
And by pinning down and labelling some of the key obstacles to small business success – such as lack of direction and control, a failure to convert clients, the need to re-invent the wheel due to lack of systems and the seeming inevitability of being swamped by the daily detail – you will be geared up for solving those problems in the development of your own business and of those clients that you will work with in the future.
The Practicalities of Being a Business Coach includes:
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
One of the most valuable things about The Diploma in Small Business Coaching is the knowledge gained from the trainers who each run their own small businesses. It can add real credibility to know that you are learning how to build your own small business from coaches who have already done it and very successfully too.
The 'You and Your Business’ Accelerator Event begins with a session on coaching to support business vision and purpose. Unless you as a coach can align your work with the business owner’s vision for success, you will continually be at odds and undermining the joint efforts you could be making. Ensuring your personal and professional goals are in line with your business vision and purpose is a key aim here.
You will go on to consider the role of the business owner’s (and therefore YOUR) personal brand and values in contributing to success. What does s/he as an individual stand for? What does that say about the business that could be of benefit or to the detriment of it?
A key issue for many business owners is that of work/life balance. Your clients are often highly motivated individuals, prepared to work very hard for success, but these hard working clients are sometimes the ones with issues to resolve around establishing a balance between home, work and family. Some small business owners need help in seeing that their own understanding of a healthy workload might not be the same as that of their workforce. Crucially, small business owners may need help in recognising and being coached through periods of burnout, when all that work becomes just too much.
Finally the hot topic of time (or task) management is considered. Frequently a massive issue for business owners, you will learn to coach effective responses to pressing time demands. Covey’s ‘Important and Urgent diagnostic’ will help you to guide your client towards the most effective use of time.
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
If you feel unsure of how to diagnose the issues which face small businesses, all will become clear after completing this module! The Business Diagnostics and Coaching Solutions Accelerator Event provides you with a wealth of business diagnostic tools that will help you and your client to gain a clearer understanding of the business environment in which they are working. It’s like a mini MBA!
The early part of the Business Diagnostics and Coaching Solutions Accelerator Event considers basic diagnostic models such as a SWOT Analysis, while later you will rapidly expand your small business coaching toolkit. You will leave this session feeling at home with a range of “external models” such as PESTLE and Porter’s 5 Forces, as well as internal models including McKinsey’s 7S framework. Your new toolkit will also include the use of comparison models such as Kaplan’s Balanced Scorecard. Using these tried and tested frameworks with your clients will significantly add to your developing credibility as a Business Coach.
New coaches in this field can sometimes feel that they are not up-to-speed in areas such as marketing and business finance. A number of useful marketing models are considered to help if you are in that position, including the Ansoff Growth Matrix and Life-Cycle Analysis. You will also deal with cash flow management and financial modelling for business start-ups – both key issues facing newly developing businesses.
Finally, this module looks at the importance to a small business of industry standards and best practice and recognised accreditation. Your coaching will need to be able to flex to accommodate these standards – potentially new and unknown to you as a coach, but highly influential in the thinking of your new clients.
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
On the Customer Focus Accelerator Event you will think about the relationship the small business has with its customers. A key early lesson is the need to firmly establish in the client’s mind exactly who their customer is and this comes from a clear understanding of where they position themselves as a business. The 4Mat system is introduced as a useful tool in this context.
The Customer Focus module explores ways to help your clients identify their ideal customer. It can be a powerful realisation for small business owners that successfully target their efforts towards a small proportion of their customers which can have a disproportionate effect on sales and profits.
You will consider how the correct positioning for your clients supports them in their marketing activities and will discuss different ways of marketing and selling to customers, alongside the importance of being flexible in the sales process. An interesting part is exploring the impact that our beliefs can have on our ability to sell and how you can assist your clients in adopting the empowering beliefs of successful sales people.
The module also looks at pricing policies in conjunction with sales and builds on customer retention and account management theory.
The Customer Focus module covers the following topics:
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
Whilst coaches are in effect, small business owners, the reality of running a coaching business can be quite different from the challenges faced by Managing Director/Owners (MDOs) running small businesses with 10-50 staff to manage, products to sell, technology to rely on and constant market pressures to take into consideration.
For many MDOs, running a Small Business can be a lonely experience for which more often than not, they have had no training or experience on how to deal with many of the challenges which they face on a regular basis. This is why more and more MDOs are hiring coaches to help draw out their strengths, focus their energy, hold them accountable to their actions and challenge their thinking.
The Small Business Coaching 'For Real’ Accelerator Event will put you into the shoes of your client to raise your awareness of some of the issues they face, give you a deeper understanding of life as an MDO and armed with this new insight help inform many of the questions you will ask to coach your client towards success. Learn some of the extraordinary situations faced by real-world client examples and explore the questions you might ask and the strategies you might use.
The event is hands-on, practical and packed full of opportunity to put your developing coaching skills into action.
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
The lack of a long-term plan and the lack of adequate measurements of the delivery of that plan are frequent challenges of the small business owner. The Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation Accelerator Event provides coaches with the knowledge and skills that can help to resolve these major issues.
A key aim of this particular Accelerator Event is to enable coaches to discuss with the small business owner exactly what their exit plan strategy is. No matter what stage of development a small business is at, its owner can be guided by the ultimate goal of the Exit Strategy. If they don’t know where they are going, how will they know if they’ve got there?
The Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation module reviews the ideal business structures and how to go about creating a business that can thrive without the owner’s involvement. As coaches you will often need to guide clients towards the assessment of the current situation, planning in order to achieve their long-term vision and establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as measurements of on-going success.
The Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation Accelerator Event will help you as a coach in dealing with issues around planning, monitoring and evaluation of your client’s business. What processes and systems do they have to support the growth of the business? How do they control business data such as financial and performance information?
And how do they go about ensuring their systems establish the best practice within the company so that they themselves can take a step back and pass on tasks to others?
Strategic Planning and Performance Evaluation covers the following topics:
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
The Practicalities of Being a Business Coach Accelerator Event is full of great ideas that will help you get off the ground as a Business Coach. With the inspiring guidance of your trainer to help you, you will be positioned to establish yourself and your business and manage your new clients through to success. Your trainer is of course a successful small business owner and a successful Business Coach to other small business owners: so rest assured, you will be taught by someone who is already walking the walk.
Some of the topics explored will include the ideal way to set session structures and the associated fees, the logistics of managing multiple clients and the necessity of robust contracts.
You will be given advice on how to build up multiple sales channels and processes over time, with newsletters/blogs, websites, social media, public speaking and sales techniques that all feed into your search for clients.
And by pinning down and labelling some of the key obstacles to small business success – such as lack of direction and control, a failure to convert clients, the need to re-invent the wheel due to lack of systems and the seeming inevitability of being swamped by the daily detail – you will be geared up for solving those problems in the development of your own business and of those clients that you will work with in the future.
The Practicalities of Being a Business Coach includes:
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
One of the most valuable things about The Diploma in Small Business Coaching is the knowledge gained from the trainers who each run their own small businesses. It can add real credibility to know that you are learning how to build your own small business from coaches who have already done it and very successfully too.
The 'You and Your Business’ Accelerator Event begins with a session on coaching to support business vision and purpose. Unless you as a coach can align your work with the business owner’s vision for success, you will continually be at odds and undermining the joint efforts you could be making. Ensuring your personal and professional goals are in line with your business vision and purpose is a key aim here.
You will go on to consider the role of the business owner’s (and therefore YOUR) personal brand and values in contributing to success. What does s/he as an individual stand for? What does that say about the business that could be of benefit or to the detriment of it?
A key issue for many business owners is that of work/life balance. Your clients are often highly motivated individuals, prepared to work very hard for success, but these hard working clients are sometimes the ones with issues to resolve around establishing a balance between home, work and family. Some small business owners need help in seeing that their own understanding of a healthy workload might not be the same as that of their workforce. Crucially, small business owners may need help in recognising and being coached through periods of burnout, when all that work becomes just too much.
Finally the hot topic of time (or task) management is considered. Frequently a massive issue for business owners, you will learn to coach effective responses to pressing time demands. Covey’s ‘Important and Urgent diagnostic’ will help you to guide your client towards the most effective use of time.
If you are an existing student and wish to book your place on this live online training, please refer to your online learning platform.
Our superior model of layered, multi-media learning means that your motivation stays high all the way through your qualification.
Within days of registration our courier will deliver your training materials - so if you want to, you can begin your studies immediately. Alternatively, you can start at any time that suits. This is adult education and our programmes have been designed for busy people giving you flexibility to fit your studies around life’s priorities. Whenever you are in a position to begin, the Welcome Letter and your Online Learning Portal will give you a set of simple, clear guidelines to explain how to get going.
You’ll consolidate your learning from the initial free introductory training and soon begin the exciting journey working through the range of multimedia resources. From the workbooks and insightful exercises within, to the many audio and visual materials that you can access online from wherever you are in the world.
You’ll soon be practising your burgeoning coaching skills with friends and family as well as your fellow coaches in training, building your confidence and competence that will help you become the best coach that you can be. All the while supported by the fantastic Coaching Academy Support Team whom are with you throughout your training to discuss both the challenges you may be facing and to celebrate your many successes!
You are given access to a private Members’ Area full of a wealth of resources including sample contracts, client sheets, checklists and a whole library of archived live online workshops. You’ll also be able to join our online global Coaching Community.
It won’t take long and you’ll be ready to attend your first online training.
Let us know which day you would like to attend the live, online training (we advertise our dates at least six months in advance on our website) and we’ll take care of the rest. The diploma qualification consists of six live ‘Accelerator Events’, with one running every month so again you can fit the live training around your life.
You have 3 years from your enrolment date in which to qualify.
At The Coaching Academy, we understand how important it is for your studies to fit around you. Based upon our experience, 3 years allows you the flexibility to complete all of the programme requirements at a steady pace, as well as allowing a little extra for any of those unforeseen life circumstances.
It’s layered learning so between each live training module there are live online workshops to watch, audio learning to listen to, live coaching to carry out, attend the live Accelerator Events and let one of our assessors listen to you coach a practice client at different intervals throughout your learning journey and with a little bit of help from us, you have done all that is needed to complete your qualification.
We pledge we will do everything we can to help you complete your diploma. Everything!
There are 4 clear steps to qualifying:
Remember you work at your own pace, fitting the programme around your life, qualifying in a timeframe that suits you. Welcome to the world of adult education!
Should you wish to apply to enrol on a diploma programme, our fees are simple and easy to understand. Each diploma has an enrolment fee of £3,997+ vat and with the BURSARY applied can be as little as £2,997 + vat on average.
If you are self-funding or funding your enrolment fees through a small business then you will be eligible for the bursary. The Bursary funding offers a contribution towards your enrolment fee if you are self-funding - generally speaking around £1,000 per Diploma, although it does vary a little from time to time. The Coaching Academy launched our Bursary funding programme in 2012 as a financial award to support prospective students who are self-funding one or more Diplomas with us. This is our contribution, not a loan and you do not have to pay it back.
The Coaching Academy are very aware that for some people, funding frustration can be a problem. Lack of funds prevent potentially great coaches from developing the skills required to break free and open up new possibilities through the acquisition of coaching skills - Our funding programme unlocks opportunity and releases potential.
Some people may need to spread their enrolment fee over a period of time. We offer tailored, interest-free payment plans to successful applicants.
Join Business Coach Adrian Webb, on this interactive and informative 90-minute training session and discover what it takes to become a successful and thriving Business Coach, making a difference to business owners and small businesses.
All our follow up sessions are run over Zoom. Pick from the available dates below...
Book our free webinar
If you’re starting out, start here - It’s a live, online, interactive, content rich session, designed to deliver all the information you might need to make an informed decision as to whether learning life coaching skills is for you.
View datesCall us
No time like the present! You can speak directly to a member of the course advisor team by calling us on 020 8996 5057. Our office hours are 9:00am - 5:30pm Monday to Friday.
Call usBook a call
By completing the form below, you can arrange a time for a call, or we will be in touch by email. We will get back to you and talk you through the process of studying with us and answer any questions you may have.
Scroll to formUnsure about something? Looking for more details? Or ready to embark on your journey with us? Our Course Advisors are here to help! Fill out the form below and we'll gladly assist with all your queries and enrolment needs.