Even though 90% of them had never met a coach, they were really describing the principal benefits of one - a person trained to help them uncover the issues and answers for themselves, with knowledge or experience formed around an understanding of family business people and their interdependent dynamic relationships.

Three years and dozens of interviews later we have yet to see coaching take hold with these mainstream companies.

At the same time the vast percentage of coaches fail financially. Two ends of the same thread - why are they still as far apart as ever?

To find out why so many people who enter coaching fail to achieve their potential, and to get a better understanding of why business people up and down Main Street are not using them, we set out to ask professionals like you and the thought leaders in the coaching industry.

During the lunch hour we broke away to a noisy Times Square Pizza restaurant where I asked him the questions that had been on my mind ‚ and maybe on yours as well.

How does a business owner know/decide when/why/how to hire a coach?

Typically, people in this situation know what they need to do, and they know how to do it, but for some reason it's still not happening.

Or, sometimes people know what they need to do, but they just aren't doing it. And sometimes people just don't know what to do.

I think this last issue is the reason most people hire a coach, and they look to that coach for wisdom and experience in a situation that's similar to theirs.

He's someone who's been down the road, who's got the expertise. You wouldn't try to climb Mount Everest by yourself,you'd find a guide who had been up the mountain before.

A masterful coach is going to have situational expertise to share. Maybe it's family business, maybe it's relationships, leadership... People look to a coach for situational expertise who can bring insight to their problem that they don't have.

If you're one of the people who knows what they need to do but for some reason aren't doing it. You know the right things, you've read the books, but it's just not happening.

This typically means that not only do you have an external, circumstantial challenge, but you've got an inner conflict. A masterful coach can help you there, too. They can assist you in sorting out your feelings about a certain situation.

That may sound a little far out, but we all know that a gut-level response is valuable, and a good coach is going to help us figure out what's going on.

Think about this scenario: the family business owner is trying to decide who should succeed him, Johnny or Billy.

There are good reasons for choosing either one of them to run the company, but his gut feeling is that Billy is really the right choice.

But Johnny's older, and he's put more time in - how does he make that decision? How does he resolve what his gut is telling him with what his logic is telling him?

He needs a trusted advisor, someone with no stake in the outcome, who can help him sort out these issues. And that's what a coach is.

They need to be masterful at understanding life, relationships, and the energy between people in order to be effective.

A masterful coach can do that, and a smart business owner can recognize that they need someone with these skills. My experience has been that the biggest challenge for most business owners is that they have no one to talk to.

Everyone they talk to has a stake in the process. Everyone they talk to has an angle. The consultant, the accountant, the financial planner, the kids, the wife - everyone has an angle! Who do you talk to who is both objective and smart? A coach.

You mentioned advisors. How does a coach differ from a traditional advisor? It seems like there are many people on Main Street who don't really know that coaching is available.

They don't know. And I'll tell you why: because, as an industry, we haven't done a very good job with a couple of things.

Number one, we haven't defined what coaching is. It has been defined in the past mainly in terms of what it's not: it's not consulting, it's not therapy, it's not this, it's not that. Well, how in the world do you figure out what it is if they're only telling you what it's not?!

So first, we, as an industry,need to define what coaching is.

Another thing is the way that coaches have been trained.

So many of them are trained in nonsensical ways that don't enable them to really do what the marketplace demands.

As an example, there's a ridiculous myth in coaching, as it's been practiced up to now, that the client has all the answers.

If the client has all the answers, what do they need us for? There's another myth that coaching is about helping our clients set their goals, and helping them with accountability.

Well, guess what? The people who can afford a coach can already set their own goals and have the accountability to get things done.

They need something deeper. They need someone with wisdom from their own life and from working with many other clients.

When you work with many clients in a similar arena, you develop an incredible wisdom, an incredible capacity to see distinctions and patterns.

For example if you've worked with a hundred family businesses, the hundred and first will not be much different from what you already know.

A coach must be a trusted advisor. Not someone who'll just say "What do you want to do?" Let's say you wanted to learn how to play basketball.

Phil Jackson isn't coaching the Lakers anymore, so you give him a ring and say "Phil, I really want to become a masterful basketball player, can you work with me?" Phil says sure.

You meet him on the basketball court and he says "So, how would you like to shoot the ball?" You'd be angry! You hired him to teach you, but all he says is "You have the answers within you!"

Imagine how ridiculous this scenario is - but this is the way coaching has been practiced for the last twenty years. What we know now is that a coach is someone who will understand your situation and apply their wisdom as well as your own, and together, with that collaboration, you'll find the answers.

Even successful people have blinders on. There are just some things they don't want to see, things that are too painful or too challenging.

This is especially true in a family business because there are a lot of things in a family that are hard to deal with. A coach will help you find the inner strength to deal with the real issues, both inside them and in the environment around them.

Another thing a coach is going to do is to help you redesign your environment so that any personal inner transformation is matched by the outside world.

We've all gone to seminars where we've come out really pumped, really inspired, then we go home and within a week it's gone.

Your environment will always pull you back to where you were because environments create consistency.

A coach can help you have that inner transformation and see those inner issues, but then they'll go to the next level and look at your environment, at the people around you, where your ideas come from, your physical surroundings and help you make changes to make that inner transformation stick. If you don't do that, no amount of coaching you can do will have an impact.

So people don't know about coaching because how we've described coaching to them is nonsense, and we haven't trained coaches to do all the things they need to do.

If you want to work with the president of a family business, you can be sure there are a lot of hotbutton emotional issues.

In the past, coaches have been told 'don't go there... leave that to the therapists."

That's nonsense! Adult human beings are entitled to have deep conversations about feelings and emotions.

We have to be able and willing to delve into those deep conversations. Coaches have to have the strength to deal with their own lives,their issues, their relationships,so that when they talk to a client, nothing their client is facing is going to throw them for a loop.

If a coach won't go to that level, they're not worth the money.

That's what I'm doing with Coachville: I am leading the movement which says that coaching must include deep conversation, expanding awareness, and designing environments or our industry will not survive.

How do you find the right coach?

That's a good question. Many coaches don't market themselves effectively.

There are a lot of resources online, such as our coaching referral service on Coachville.com.

What we're trying to do is to create a keyword-searchable database of coaches so that you can go to the site, type in "family business" and find the coaches that are masterful at family business.

Or at relationships or at small business entrepreneurship... or whatever your specific need is.

You have to first find the person or people who have the right expertise for you, and then you've got to talk to them and make sure they know their stuff.

If you contact a coach and they try to give you a line of bull, you can just shut the door.

You want a coach who is going to say to you 'Let's talk about what's really going on with your business,' and if they start delving into the meat of the situation, then that's the one for you.

Coaches have to know the subject matter, and they need to have the depth of understanding about life to go deep into the situation. You need both, and you'll only find that by talking to someone.

There's another myth about coaching, and that is that the success of a client-coach relationship is only based on the client and what they do. That's not true.

The success of a client-coach relationship is based about 75% on the coach, and the level of certainty and mastery that the coach brings to the equation.

People come to a coach when they don't know what to do, or they know but are afraid to do it.

The only way we can help someone who is afraid to take some kind of action is for us to have enough certainty about the situation to make the client feel secure in making new or challenging choices.

The coach has the power and the certainty to help give the client the confidence to take action.

When you're a client and you're looking for a coach, you're going to look for someone who gives you that feeling of confidence.

Dave has been a professional coach for nearly a decade and maintains a full-time coaching practice. In addition to his schedule of client based responsibilities Dave is President of www.CoachVille.com, the largest community of coaches around - with thousands of members from all walks of life and coaches with dozens of specialties.

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