How to Get Free Business Advice that Works

Are you thinking that you may need a little guidance as you build your business? Here’s my quick advice on how to get started when you’re starting from the actual, true, bottom-of-the-barrel, humble beginnings that I am coming from: Do it yourself for a while. Probably now what you want to hear but it's so important. Get your bearings before you actually start throwing money at a coach. Waiting a little bit will ensure that you get the right coach for your business and your style. Work your business as a solopreneur until you have good direction and you know your true north.

You may think you already know this in your business (I thought I did too) but it shifts a little the first couple of months. Use the free resources from the top guys and gals in the business to build your framework. I fell in love with these industry experts along the way and their free materials helped me so much - 

• Don Miller – StoryBrand
• Amy Porterfield – Online Marketing Made Easy
• Michael Hyatt – Lead to Win
• Ken Coleman, Ramsey Solutions - Entre Leadership
• Marie Forleo – Marie TV
• Adam Grant – Work Life.

The free resources and books from these six are the foundation that I build on regularly. I know I will be participating in paid programs with these foundational teachings in mind in the future, but it took a lot of culling of podcasts and blogs to get to this group of super trust-worthy guides. As you seek out your own group of guides, here are a couple pieces of advice that you can bank on:

• If a prospective coach is continuously reminding you that their paid program is where it’s at, they’re more motivated by what you can do for them than what they can do for you. I want to know that a coach has a paid program, but I don’t want to hear about it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME they talk to me.
• If they have short open windows of enrollment and they are trying to sell me on the exclusiveness of their program, but they open it their super exclusive group for enrollment every other month, they are self-serving, not client-serving. You’ll sign up for email notification announcing the next open enrollment. When you get the notice in just a couple of weeks that the group is opening for new members you’ll think ‘What timing, the super exclusive coaching group I want in is opening right away.’ You sign up for the group thinking you are the luckiest girl in the world to get in so soon but what you don’t see is that in two months that group is going to open again. There’s no fanfare so you don’t even know that there are new members suddenly. They are the folks that signed up to get on the email list since your enrollment. They’ve been receiving the same nurture sequence that you received just two months ago and now they think they’ve beat the odds and been invited into the group with hardly any delay. Bad form b*tches!
• Make sure anyone you hire as a coach has built their business on the advice they are giving you. In other words, make sure they drank the Kool Aid they’re trying to sell you. There are a lot of snake oil selling folks out there that want you in the program that they have created based on all the books they have read or the seminars they have attended or the podcasts they are listening to but their own business is either failing or built on a whole different foundation than the one they are selling. Years in the game has nothing to do with it either. There are some sneaky snakes out there that have been there awhile.

I hope this advice helps you along your path as you decide when (or if) you’ll hire a coach or who that should be (or more importantly, who they shouldn’t be).