How to check a business coach's background in Australia

Start with the fact that decides everything else on this page. Business coaching is not a regulated occupation in Australia. There's no licence to hold, no government register of business coaches to appear on, no body with the power to strike anyone off, and no qualification anyone is required by law to have before they take your money.

Anyone can call themselves a business coach tomorrow, and that's entirely lawful. It also means the checking is yours to do, and there's no shortcut that makes it somebody else's job. Below is what can actually be verified, what can't, and where the limits are. If you're at the earlier stage of the search, how to find a business coach in Adelaide covers that.

Where this is written from: ADL Business Coach doesn't deliver coaching. It's a matching service, the coaches are separate independent businesses, and the coach pays ADL Business Coach a fee for the introduction. That's disclosed because it matters to how you read a page telling you how to check people.

What a coaching qualification actually means

You'll see letters, course names and memberships on coaching websites. Some of them represent real study. None of them is a licence, and none of them is issued by a body with statutory power over the person holding it.

Coaching credentials in Australia are issued by private membership organisations and training providers. They generally involve training hours, logged coaching hours and an assessment, and a member can be removed from the organisation. What they cannot do is stop that person continuing to trade as a business coach the next day, because there's nothing to stop.

So treat a credential as evidence of effort and of some grounding in method. Do not treat it as evidence of commercial judgement, which is the thing you're actually buying. Plenty of the most useful people in this trade hold nothing at all and have run 3 businesses. Plenty of credentialed people have never carried a payroll.

The related mistake is assuming a qualification tells you which job they do. A coach, a consultant and a mentor are 3 different products, and the letters after somebody's name don't tell you which one is on offer. The difference between a coach, a consultant and a mentor sets out what separates them.

The public records you can search yourself

This takes about 20 minutes and it's the highest-value part of the process. All of it is public, and all of it should be checked on the official government source at the time you search, not on a summary somebody wrote 2 years ago.

The Australian Business Register. Search the ABN on ABN Lookup. You're checking 4 things: that the ABN is active, that the entity name matches who you think you're dealing with, whether they're registered for GST, and the date the ABN was issued. That last one is the interesting one. An ABN issued 8 months ago sitting under a claim of long experience is worth a question.

ASIC's registers. If they trade through a company, you can confirm the company exists, its registration date and whether it's currently in good standing. ASIC also publishes a register of people who've been banned or disqualified, including from managing corporations. Searching a name there costs nothing and takes a minute.

Registered business names. A trading name that doesn't link back to the entity you're contracting with is worth clarifying before money moves.

Personal insolvency. The national personal insolvency index maintained by the Australian Financial Security Authority is searchable, for a fee. Most buyers won't bother, and for a large engagement it's a reasonable check on somebody who's about to advise you on cash.

The written record they've left. Search the person's name and the business name together, and read past page 1. Look at how long their site has existed, whether their described history is consistent across their site, their profiles and their proposal, and whether the numbers move. History that changes between sources is the single most useful thing you'll find.

What to ask them directly, and what a good answer sounds like

Public records tell you they exist. They don't tell you whether they can do the work. That comes from the conversation.

What have you owned or run, at what size, and what happened? You want specifics: the business, the years, the number of staff, and how it ended. "I ran a 14-person fabrication business for 9 years and sold it in 2019" is checkable. "I've helped a lot of businesses over the years" isn't.

What did you do before coaching? A career of nothing but coaching isn't disqualifying, but it should come with something else: operational experience, a finance background, or serious volume across a defined type of business.

What kinds of businesses do you turn away? Somebody who works with everyone works with no one in particular. A clear answer here is one of the strongest signals available.

Do you hold professional indemnity and public liability cover? Ask for a certificate of currency if the engagement is significant. Plenty of sole operators carry both, and a straight answer either way tells you something.

What's the last engagement that didn't work, and why? The answer nobody rehearses. Someone who can describe a failure specifically, including their own part in it, is telling you they'll be honest with you when it matters.

The full set, in the order worth asking them, is in 12 questions to ask a business coach before you commit.

References, and how to use them properly

Ask for 2 owners you can ring: ideally 1 who's finished an engagement and 1 who's in the middle of one. Confidentiality is a genuine constraint, so a fair answer is "I'll ask 2 people whether they're happy to speak to you". A flat refusal, or an offer of written quotes instead of a phone number, is worth taking seriously.

When you get the call, don't ask whether the coach is any good. Everybody says yes. Ask process questions instead:

• What actually changed in your business during the engagement?
• What did a typical session look like?
• What did they push you on that you didn't want to be pushed on?
• Did you finish the engagement, and how did it end?
• Would you have paid the same money again, and why?

The 4th question does most of the work. Engagements that ended cleanly, on a decision, tell you far more than engagements that are still running.

What ADL Business Coach checks, and what it doesn't

Being precise about this matters more than making it sound impressive.

Coaches in the network are assessed against a published standard before they're introduced to anyone, and that standard is set out in full on how the matching works, item by item, so you can read it and judge it rather than take a word for it. It isn't restated here, because a second version of a standard is how the 2 versions start to differ.

What that standard is not: it isn't a licence check, because there's no licence in Australia to check. It isn't a guide to whether a coach will suit you personally, which no process can settle in advance. And it doesn't remove your own checking. The public records above are public precisely so buyers can use them, and you should, on any coach, including one introduced through this site.

The diagram shows the matching, including the money: the coach pays ADL Business Coach a fee for the introduction, and that fee is how the site is funded. Knowing that is part of reading everything else on this page properly.

What none of it can tell you

Even done thoroughly, the checking has a ceiling, and it's worth naming.

Whether they'll be useful to you. Fit is between 2 people. The best evidence available is a first session, which is why paying for a single session before committing to a retainer is often the cheapest decision in the whole process.

Whether their experience transfers. Someone who grew a 40-person services firm may or may not be able to help a sole trader with 3 vans. Ask them directly how they'd approach a business your size, and listen for whether the answer is about you or about them.

What they're like when you don't do the work. Ask a reference this one specifically.

Do the 20 minutes of records, ask the 5 questions, ring the 2 references, then buy 1 session before you buy 12. That sequence catches nearly everything that's catchable. What it won't catch is the stuff in business coaching red flags, which shows up in behaviour rather than in records, and which is usually visible on the very first call if you know to watch for it.