I've been working as a consultant for many years now. I've helped market and sell things as diverse as funeral services, golf courses, robotics, locum tenens services, financial services, houses and extremely complex software applications. The cost for these items ranged from a few hundred dollars to multi-millions for one sale. However, the other day a client asked me if I would be willing to coach her. I thought that part of consulting was to be a coach but I felt like I had better get her definition. It turns out she didn't have a real solid one. She said she wanted me to help "get the best from her" relative to her sales and marketing abilities. And, she wanted to be able to pass on the things she learned from me to her employees. Well, that sounded like coaching to me. It also sounded a lot like the consulting I've done for over 30 years.
Now it so happens that I've been lucky enough to know a number of great coaches and to spend time with them. One of the very best and someone who has also coached me around the golf course is Lou Holtz. Lou, by the way, just got named to The College Football Hall of Fame
Lou and I are from the same little town in Ohio that I write about - East Liverpool. We've worked on some fund raising together and we got to play golf quite a bit back in the early nineties. It was the first time I played with Coach Holtz in Florida that I learned what real coaching is all about. I took golf up late in life so I wasn't very good. On the first hole I drove into a sand bunker. It was filled with this soft, powdery white stuff we never would have called sand up north. Coach watched me hit out of the bunker and make a mess of the shot. Then he said wait a minute - let's try something before we move on. He dropped a couple of balls in the bunker and he "coached" me into a different set-up and a different swing. I then hit both balls perfectly, he smiled and said "you're very coachable" and on we went with our game.
By the time we had finished 18 holes, Lou had coached me well enough that I lowered my score by at least a stoke a hole. I was the same golfer with the same talent that started the game but I had been coached by someone who could bring out the best that was already inside me by their support and expertise.
Which gets me back to the title of this article; I don't think there is much of a difference between a good coach and a good consultant. Coaching is a co-creative process and so is consulting. A good consultant advises and helps provide answers and solutions. Some clients think that if they hire a marketing consultant, the consultant will provide marketing. It doesn't work that way. We will provide advice; possible solutions based on our years of experience, education, and research and often gut level feelings since marketing is more art than science. But, I think my job as a consultant is too also coach to help you find the answers to issues yourself, and in doing so you become more knowledgeable and aware and are able to both pass on that knowledge and work out answers yourself in the future.
Some clients are not real coachable. Picture a strong willed entrepreneur or highly successful business person who now is looking for marketing consulting. Sometimes when I coach this type of person, I will tell them that I think they are about to fall into a big pothole if they continue in a certain direction. And, I'll let them fall if that is what they feel they need to do. Then I'll help pick them back up and we'll start down a different path. Most of the time it only takes one fall into the hole to learn. But, I've also had clients who when coached not to go into the hole but go ahead anyway end up blaming the coach for their mistake. Then it's up to the client if they can get back on track and become coachable. Sometimes they don't and just like in athletics, the player goes on looking for a coach that will tell her what she wants to hear and not what she needs to hear to get the best out of her abilities.
Coach or consultant - I'd advise you to look for someone who does both for you if you want to find the solutions you need for you current challenges, the process that can help you find your own solutions in the future and the ability to help coach others on your team.
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