Small Business Consultant and Coach
I’m John Meyers. I’m a small business consultant and business coach in Lexington, KY.
I can help you run your business successfully, to achieve your vision and goals. I can show you what’s holding your businesses back, and what you need to do to fix those problems.
Because management practices are often the root of these problems, much of my work includes business coaching – showing business owners how to manage their businesses more effectively to create high performance and successful results.
Do you want to –
- develop more and better customers?
- boost the quality of products and services?
- get the best performance from employees?
- grow your business faster — and make more money?
- improve you management skills to accomplish all of these, and more?
I can help you achieve these and many other goals — and make your business more profitable and successful.
Business Consulting Experience
For over 20 years I’ve brought a multi-disciplinary background to my work, having advised business owners in the various capacities of business consultant, CPA, and business lawyer. I’ve worked with business clients on nearly every aspect of their operations and throughout the business life cycle, from start-up, through growth and expansion, to eventual sale or other transition.
My experience with many businesses and entrepreneurs has taught me that the biggest challenge for most business owners is they lack certain management skills and knowledge. The difference between high performing businesses and their less successful competitors is almost always the effectiveness of management practices.
Business Consulting or Business Coaching?
Sometimes I’m asked to analyze a business situation, diagnose the problems, and suggest specific steps or activities to overcome these problems so the business can perform better. This sounds like business consulting, or business management consulting.
Other times I’m asked to show a business owner or manager how to manage the business more successfully and profitably. This development of management skills sounds more like business coaching.
Many projects, however, combine these activities. Helping a business perform better will often begin with an analysis of the situation and a diagnosis of specific problems and limitations. To fix these problems and limitations, we may suggest specific steps or activities (business consulting) and show the business owner or manager how to manage the business more effectively (business coaching).
It’s like providing the client a fish AND teaching the client how to fish. We fix specific problems in the short-term and teach the client how to operate the business more successfully over the long-term.
The BIZactly Plan applies to both of these activities. The BIZactly Plan provides us a framework for analyzing a business, diagnosing problems and limitations, and proposing specific actions to improve the business (business consulting). The BIZactly Plan also provides us a great framework for showing business owners and managers how to run their businesses more successfully and profitably (business coaching).
Improve Management Skills with the BIZactly Plan
To achieve their full potential, most business owners need to become better managers. Among other things, this includes steering the business towards better opportunities, inspiring and demanding higher performance, and providing the business the tools and resources it needs to excel.
I’ve developed the methodology presented in this website to fill a void I recognized a number of years ago — a simple-to-use, yet comprehensive, management process that anyone can learn and begin to apply in a short time. Most important is that the process must increase and accelerate business success, based on whatever criteria you set. I can help you identify and implement the solutions to your problems that are most effective for your situation.
My goal is to show business owners how to operate their businesses as successfully as possible, and achieve their full potential. Business ownership is a tremendous opportunity, and I hate to see it squandered by a lack of the needed management knowledge or skills.
Business Consulting Services — What’s it like?
Most projects tend to unfold, more or less, as follows:
A client is concerned about something bad that’s happening (such as quality problems or excessive costs) or something good that’s not happening (such a growth or profits).
Sometimes the client’s concern is very specific and well-identified (such as the need to improve the service delivery process), and other times the client’s concern is more general and not-so-well-identified (such as disappointment with overall performance, a feeling that the business is out of control, or personal burnout).
We usually start with in-depth discussions to better understand the concerns, and to identify the goals we’re trying to achieve. We also strive to understand as much as possible about the business and what brought it to this point. This process sometimes identifies an objective that even the client did not previously understand. For example, it’s not unusual for the immediate pain to overshadow a larger and more important issue.
Depending on the situation, our investigation can continue in various ways. Sometimes we will visit the business and observe its operations. Often we will meet with other people in the business to gain multiple perspectives on what’s working and what’s not working so well. Some of the most valuable information can come from workers directly involved in the operation of the business. For this reason, we frequently facilitate discussions with groups of employees to discover information that’s not previously been shared with or understood by management.
Using all of this information, and the BIZactly Plan as a guide for our analysis, we can identify for the client the problems and limitations holding the business back, and the steps that need to be taken to overcome these challenges and achieve the identified goals. In addition, we can prioritize these needs based on which actions will contribute the most and the fastest to the achievement of the client’s goals.
In many cases, one of the identified needs is to improve certain management practices. The BIZactly Plan again gives us an effective framework to explain where changes are needed, and then to guide the management improvement effort.
If you want to achieve more in your business, I can help. There’s no cost for an initial consultation.