What to expect in the first 90 days with a business coach

The first 90 days of a coaching engagement follow a fairly predictable shape, and almost nobody describes it to the buyer beforehand. That's a problem, because the shape includes a stretch around week 6 where it feels like nothing is working, and owners who weren't warned about it quietly write the whole thing off right there.

What follows is the ordinary arc, as coaches in the network run it. It isn't a promise about your business and it isn't a schedule anyone will hold to exactly. It's what usually happens, so you can tell the difference between an engagement finding its feet and an engagement going nowhere. If you're still choosing someone, the guide on how to find a business coach in Adelaide covers that part.

One thing to be clear about first. ADL Business Coach doesn't deliver coaching. The coaching is done by separate independent Adelaide coaching businesses, and the coach pays ADL Business Coach a fee for the introduction. So this describes the job as those coaches run it, not a programme sold from this page.

Between saying yes and session 1

Expect a fortnight of admin and reading, not silence.

Most coaches send something before the first meeting: a short questionnaire, a request for your last 12 months of figures, sometimes a request for a profit and loss and a current debtors list. Some ask you to log your hours for a week. It's usually 30 to 60 minutes of work and it's worth doing properly, because the first session is either a real conversation about your business or an hour of you reciting basic facts.

You should also have, in writing, the cadence, the monthly fee ex GST, the notice period and what between-session access looks like. If any of those 4 is still fuzzy at this point, sort it now rather than in month 3. How to prepare for your first coaching session sets out what to bring and what to think about beforehand.

Weeks 1 to 3: diagnosis, and it's slower than you want

Early sessions are weighted towards understanding rather than doing, and that catches people out. You're paying real money and the first 3 weeks can feel like an interview.

What's typically happening in that stretch:

• The numbers get read out loud. Turnover, gross margin, what's owed to you, what you owe, and the gap between the 2. Most owners discover something here they half knew.
• The week gets mapped. Where your hours actually go, against where you think they go. The 2 are rarely the same.
• How work arrives gets traced. Referrals, repeat customers, a single source that generates most of it, and what happens if that source goes quiet.
• The constraint gets named. Out of 8 things that are wrong, 1 is holding the rest up. Finding it is most of what the first month is for.

A good sign in this stretch: the coach is asking questions you can't immediately answer. A bad sign: they've already told you what your problem is, and it's the same problem they gave the last owner.

By about the end of week 3 you should be able to state, in a sentence, what you and the coach agree the constraint is. If you can't, say so. Say it in the session, not to yourself in the car.

Weeks 4 to 6: the first thing you actually change

Somewhere in here the work turns from mapping to doing, and it starts smaller than expected.

The first change is usually 1 of 4 things: a price moves, a number starts getting tracked weekly, a task leaves your hands, or a meeting starts happening that didn't before. Not a restructure. Not a new brand. Something narrow enough to finish inside a fortnight, chosen because it's upstream of everything else.

This is also where the mechanism of coaching first shows up. You'll agree to do something by a date, and 2 weeks later somebody will ask you about it in a room. For a lot of owners that's the first time in years anything has been followed up. It's uncomfortable, it's the product, and it's the reason a coach and a book aren't substitutes. What a business coach actually does goes through the session structure that makes that follow-up happen.

Weeks 6 to 8: the dip

This is the part worth being warned about.

Around week 6 the novelty has worn off, the diagnosis is old news, and the first change hasn't produced a visible result yet, because most operational changes take a quarter to show up in the numbers. Meanwhile the invoice has arrived twice. The business feels exactly the same and you're now paying for the privilege of being asked why you haven't done the thing.

Almost every engagement has this stretch. What matters is what you do with it.

The wrong move is to go quiet and start rescheduling. The right move is to put it on the table: "I don't feel like anything has changed, talk me through what you think has." A serious coach will welcome that question, because they can usually point at 3 things you've stopped noticing: the number you now know weekly and didn't before, the job you stopped doing, the conversation you finally had.

If they can't point at anything, that's real information too, and it's better to have it at week 6 than at month 9.

Weeks 8 to 12: cadence takes over

By the second month the sessions have a rhythm and they get shorter on analysis and longer on execution. A typical session by now runs: what happened since last time, what you said you'd do and what actually happened with it, the 1 biggest thing right now, then actions with names and dates against them.

The other thing that shows up around here is scope creep in a good direction. You went in about pricing and by week 10 you're talking about who does the quoting, because the constraint moved. That's normal. What isn't normal is the topic changing every session with nothing ever finished.

There are 2 practical markers by the end of month 3. First, you should know at least 3 numbers about your business off the top of your head that you didn't know in week 1. Second, at least 1 thing you used to do personally should now be done by somebody else, documented, or deliberately stopped.

The 90-day check, and the 3 honest outcomes

Ask for a proper 90-day conversation, separate from the normal session. Most coaches run one. If yours doesn't, request it.

It has 3 possible outcomes and all 3 are legitimate:

1. Keep going. The constraint is real, progress is visible even if it's small, and the cadence is working. Most engagements land here and run 6 to 12 months in total.
2. Change the arrangement. The cadence is wrong (fortnightly is too much, or monthly is too little), or the focus needs to move, or a group setting would do the same job for less money.
3. Stop. The fit isn't there, or the problem turned out to be a knowledge gap that a bookkeeper or an accountant closes faster and cheaper. Ending an engagement at 90 days is not a failure. It's the system working, and it's a great deal better than 9 more months of politely turning up. Is business coaching worth it for a small business works through that judgement without attaching a return figure to it.

What won't have happened by day 90

Being straight about the ceiling makes the rest of it more useful.

Your revenue chart will probably look the same. A quarter is not long enough for a pricing change, a delegation change or a sales change to work through to a full set of accounts, and anyone who tells you otherwise before you've started is selling.

Your team won't have transformed. Culture moves over years, not weeks.

You'll still be busy. Most owners are busy at day 90 and busy at day 900. What tends to change first isn't the volume of work, it's which work is yours.

And you probably won't have finished the big thing. What you should have is a smaller version of it, done, with the next piece booked in for a date. That's what 90 days honestly buys, and for the right problem it's worth the money.