I want a business coach. I want a business coach. That's what people often say when they come to me.

My name is Dave Lorenzo. This is the Inside BS Show, and we're here every day with a show for you, the family business owner, to help you prepare for a transition, grow the value of your business, and protect your legacy. So today we're talking about why you want a business coach and how you can find a good one.

There are three main reasons why you should look to work with a business coach if you're a family business owner. Those three reasons are, number one, you want to put your business growth on autopilot. A business has to be able to grow without you as the family business owner.

That's right. If the business is dependent upon you, you really don't have a business, you bought yourself a job. So as a family business owner, the business must grow without you, and a really good business coach is going to help you put your business growth on autopilot.

How does a business coach do this? They're going to look at who your ideal clients are, and they're going to help you target your business development practices, target your sales, and your marketing, so that you're looking to always attract your ideal clients. If you're in a business that is consumer-related, you're going to build a client avatar with your business coach, and you're going to target your marketing at your client avatar. So all your leads are the ideal people who will convert into ideal clients.

If you're converting those people, and you have a team to convert those people, your business coach will help you look at your sales process, and make sure your sales process is optimized for conversion. Now marketing is about driving traffic to your family business, sales is about converting that traffic from leads into clients. So think of your ideal client as suspects, like in a crime drama.

You suspect these people will be the right fit for your business. You suspect they'll be ideal clients. You target your marketing at the suspects.

When your clients engage with your marketing, they convert from suspects to prospects. And a prospect is somebody who raises their hand and says, I'm interested in what you have to say. They engage with your marketing, they take you up on an offer, they come to your place of business, or they engage with your marketing in some way where they opt in to receive more information.

Those prospects then get on the phone or come in person to your place of business, that's when sales takes over. Sales converts the prospects into clients. Your business coach will help you map out that entire process, and your business coach will help to automate that process so that it happens without you, the business owner's day-to-day involvement.

The more involved you as the business owner are in your business, the less valuable that business becomes. So you want to increase the value of your business, which means we need to decrease your involvement. Your business coach will help you see that, he'll help you put a plan in place to do that.

The second reason why you want a business coach is to streamline the management and the leadership of your family business. There's a pretty good chance you started your family business as a way to feed your family, you started your family business as a way to bring money into your household in order for you to survive day-to-day. At some point, this business took on a life of its own, it became bigger than you, it became bigger than your family, but you put different people who you trusted, family members or really close friends into the leadership roles of your family business.

Well, we need to now streamline that management and leadership process and what we need to do is we need to determine who the next generation of leaders will be for each role in the business. From the person who sweeps the floors all the way up to your role as CEO, we have to determine what the next steps are for each person in the business and how people ascend to each role in the business. This is called succession planning.

A good business coach will help you do succession planning for every role in the organization. This means they have to redo your performance appraisal process and make your performance appraisal process one-third about how you're going to take that person and improve them to the next level, one-third about how they can be the best possible person in that role, and one-third about how they're preparing the person behind them to ascend to their role. This is a three-step performance appraisal process which should be in place for everyone from the janitor all the way up to the CEO, and when you put this process in place you create an environment of continuous improvement and the business automatically increases in value as a result.

People love to buy businesses that have this process in place, this succession management and performance appraisal process. Why do they love to buy this? Because the business continues to grow and improve on its own. The culture of the business is one of continuous improvement and a good business coach will install that for you.

The third reason why you want a business coach is so that you can ready the business itself for a transition. This is not just succession planning, this is exit planning. Now, if you don't want to sell your family business and you want to keep it in the family, you still need to prepare for the transition.

Here's the thing. If you want to make sure your business is as valuable as it can be when you pass it on to the next generation, you've got to prepare it for a sale even if you don't want to sell it. A good business can be sold or transitioned in six different ways.

The first way is it can be passed on to the next generation because it's ready to go. All the roles are in place, the systems, the processes are in place and the 10 drivers of enterprise value have been fine-tuned so that the business is maximizing the value it delivers to its customers and it delivers to its owner and its shareholders which are you and your family. The second way a business can be transitioned is that it can be passed on to the employees.

Now, you may want to consider an ESOP which is an employee stock option plan for your employees or you may want to consider an employee ownership trust. If you want to sell a portion of your business to your employees and leave the rest to your family, you need to prepare your business for employee ownership. You don't have to do this but preparing for it is a great way to enhance the value of your business so you have more options when it's time for you to transition the business.

Number three is the management buyout. If you've got five or six great managers, three of whom are family and you want them all to have a piece of the action, preparing your business for a management buyout is a great way to go. Now, you don't have to trigger the management buyout just like you never have to trigger the employee purchase option but the fact that you can and you have the opportunity to do so makes your business more valuable.

The fourth way is a sale to a strategic buyer. This is a sale to a competitor who's buying you for a strategic purpose. They're buying you to increase market share.

If your business is a perfect fit for that, it's worth way more than if it isn't. The fifth way to prepare your business for a transaction or for a transition, I'm sorry, is a transaction to private equity. This is a financial sale.

You're going to sell to a financial buyer who's buying you as an investment. That's why you should prepare your business as an investment that can run without you from day one, from the first day you start working with your business coach. The sixth and final way for you to prepare your business for a transition is simply to prepare for continuity.

Prepare for death, prepare for divorce, prepare for your own disability. Preparing for these things makes sure the business can always run without you. A great business coach will have you preparing for all of these scenarios so that your business has the most value.

Remember, you may not need any or all of these scenarios. You may only need one of them, but being prepared for all of them is the role of a good business coach. The role of this video, the role of you saying, I want a business coach and coming to this video is so you think about these things.

This is what a good business coach will do. I've just spent the last 10 minutes with you, getting you to think about things you haven't thought about before. If you want to discuss hiring a business coach, call me at 305-692-5531.

I'm Dave Lorenzo. I will see you tomorrow at 6 a.m. for another edition of our show.