How to prepare for your first business coaching session

A first coaching session is 60 to 90 minutes and you're paying for it. Turn up cold and most of that hour goes on establishing facts about your own business that you could have written down on a Tuesday night. Turn up prepared and the same hour gets spent on the thing you're actually stuck on.

This is the preparation, in the order it's worth doing. It takes about 45 minutes. If you haven't hired anyone yet, how to find a business coach in Adelaide covers the search, and this becomes relevant once you've picked someone.

Worth stating plainly: ADL Business Coach doesn't deliver coaching. It's a matching service, and the coaching is done by separate independent Adelaide coaching businesses. So none of this is preparation for a session with me. It's preparation for a session with whoever you've engaged.

What the first session is actually for

The first session is not where you get answers. It's where a stranger builds a working picture of your business fast enough to be useful in the second one.

That means the hour has 3 jobs: they need to understand how the business makes money, you need to name the constraint you think you have, and both of you need to work out whether this is going to function as a relationship. Everything below serves 1 of those 3.

A thing worth knowing before you start: the more honest the first session, the shorter the whole engagement tends to be. Owners who present a tidied-up version of the business spend 6 weeks getting to the real problem, and they pay for those 6 weeks.

The 6 numbers to have in front of you

You don't need a finance pack. You need 6 figures, written on 1 page, that you can talk about without opening a laptop.

1. Turnover for the last 12 months, and the 12 before it. The direction matters more than the size.
2. Gross margin, or your best estimate of it. What's left after the direct cost of delivering the work, before overheads. If you don't know, write down that you don't know. That's a finding, not a failure.
3. Cash in the bank today, and what's due out in the next 30 days.
4. What customers owe you, and how much of it is over 60 days.
5. Your own hours in a typical week. Actual, not the polite version.
6. Where the work came from. Roughly what share of last year's revenue arrived from your single biggest source, whether that's 1 customer, 1 referrer or 1 channel.

If pulling those together is itself hard, say so on the day. A reporting file nobody can read is a common starting point and it changes what the first 90 days look like.

Write down the problem, and what you've already tried

This is the highest-value 10 minutes of the preparation, and most owners skip it.

Write down, in a single sentence, what's wrong. Then rewrite it until it's specific enough that somebody could disagree with it.

"I'm working too hard" is a symptom. "I'm the only person who can quote, so quoting happens at 9pm and jobs go out underpriced" is a problem. "The business has stalled" is a symptom. "Turnover has sat at the same number for 3 years while costs went up, so what's left has shrunk" is a problem.

Then add the second sentence: what you want to be different, and by when. "By Christmas, 2 other people can quote a standard job and I've stopped doing it at night."

If you can't write those 2 sentences, bring that. "I can't tell you what the problem is" is a legitimate and common starting point, and a good coach will spend the hour on exactly that.

The honest list of what you've already tried

Bring a short list of things you've attempted and what happened. The software you bought and stopped using. The person you hired who didn't work out. The price rise you planned and didn't do. The process you documented that nobody follows.

There are 2 reasons. First, it stops the coach spending session 2 recommending something you tried in 2024. Second, the pattern in that list is often the actual diagnosis. A pattern of 4 abandoned attempts at the same fix usually means the problem is somewhere else.

Be honest about the ones that failed because you didn't follow through. That's the most useful item on the page, and it's the one everybody edits out.

Track your week before you go in

If you have a week's notice, log your hours before the session. Not to the minute: 30-minute blocks across 5 days is enough, written in a notebook or a phone note as you go rather than reconstructed on Sunday.

Split each block into 3 categories: work only you can do, work someone else could do at a lower rate, and work that shouldn't be happening at all. Most owners find the second category is far bigger than they'd have guessed, and it makes the delegation conversation concrete instead of theoretical.

That exercise is worth doing properly, whether or not you ever hire anyone. The owner time audit sets out how to run it and what to do with the result.

Have your own questions ready

The first session runs both ways. You're deciding whether to keep paying this person, and the hour is your best look at how they work.

Have 4 or 5 questions written down and actually ask them, even if the conversation is going well. What does a normal session look like with you. What happens between sessions. What are you like to work with when I don't do what I said I'd do. What kinds of businesses do you turn away. What would make you tell me to stop working with you.

The full list is in 12 questions to ask a business coach before you commit, which is written to be asked out loud. Notice how they handle being questioned, not just what they answer.

Also confirm the commercial basics if they aren't already in writing: the cadence, the monthly figure ex GST, the notice period, and what access between sessions actually means. For context, Adelaide 1-to-1 retainers run $800 to $1,500 a month for light touch, $1,500 to $2,800 for standard fortnightly and $2,800 to $4,500 for weekly, all ex GST.

The 4 things not to do

Don't tidy the business up first. The instinct to clean the file, fix the website and get the debtors down before the first session is strong and it's counterproductive. They need to see it as it is.

Don't bring a 40-page document. A single page of numbers and 2 sentences of problem beats a deck. Nobody reads the deck.

Don't bring your accountant's advice as a settled position. Bring it as context. Your accountant, your lawyer and a licensed adviser own their own territory, and a coach shouldn't be relitigating it.

Don't decide what the outcome should be before you walk in. Owners who arrive needing the coach to endorse a decision they've already made get exactly that, and it's a waste of the money.

After the session, do 1 thing within 48 hours

Whatever you agreed to, do the smallest piece of it inside 2 days, while the session is still live in your head.

This matters more than it sounds. The pattern for the whole engagement gets set in the first fortnight. If action 1 slips, action 2 slips, and by week 6 the sessions become a place where you explain why things didn't happen. If you want to know what that stretch feels like and what's normal, what to expect in the first 90 days walks through it week by week.