In 2003, I decided it was time to explore the phenomenon of "B-Coach", a sub-set of Leadership University, which is an amazing learning process.

I learned more in six months than in any other period of my life.

Mike has been an active business coach since 1988. As a business leader for the past 25 years, he has experienced first hand what it means to make a payroll and deal with difficult management issues in a turbulent and ambiguous environment. Mike was also a member of the United States Marine Corps and a graduate of Texas A&M.

My first question: What do leadership and coaching have to do with each other, from the perspective of the professional service/solution provider working with business owners?

I believe that coaching is a subset of leadership. We have coaching leadership styles and leaders who coach, and there are skills that are used in both domains that revolve around some key abilities.

We teach these abilities in our program: Listening, Learning, Discerning, and Modeling. These are all linking tools that one would need to understand about coaching and leadership.

Our approach to coaching, which separates it from leadership, is that the coach does not have power, accountability, authority or responsibility for the outcomes of the person being coached. This is not THE truth; it is our opinion about differentiating coaches from leaders.

The distinctions become pretty profound as we get into the mechanics of coaching because of the issue we call PAAR: "Power, Accountability, Authority, and Responsibility." If we don't take those things as a coach, we will be able to remain much more objective in terms of the types of interactions we have with our clients without being attached to their outcome.

Some people might not like that, because coaching in general is thought of as a consulting paradigm with people working together one on one. There's nothing wrong with that, but we like to make those distinctions between coaching and leadership, with coaching being a subset of leadership.

Let's say that I'm a successful lawyer, accountant, conflict resolution professional, financial planner, etc. -- someone who works with small or family businesses every day. How can Lead U training help me to offer better value and service to my clients?

That's a question we hear a lot: How can I do what I do now even better? One of the things we're convinced is important at Leadership University isn't so much a coach approach so much as an integral approach. There are aspects of everything we do that center around four basic perspectives: the internal perspective, the external perspective, the financial, and the developmental. One of the things you'll find at Leadership University is that we have programs that address each of those perspectives.

If someone were asking me how they could improve what they're already doing, I would ask them to look at what overall approach they are taking. Are they a more holistic approach and focusing on internal development? Are they focusing on the external development they need in terms of skills, production, behaviors and competencies?

Are they continuing to support the growth of their "Wellth," which means looking at both the spiritual and fiscal aspects of their financial perspective, and then from the developmental perspective, who are they becoming as a person? Not who are they as an accountant or a business owner, but who are they becoming as a citizen, a family member.

We have a curriculum on resilience. We look at personal resilience, professional resilience, and even network resilience. It's the idea that a person can begin to learn attributes that will help them in the face of events they can't predict.

Lead U provides its students with a range of training and experiences that will let them focus on the internal, the external... even more traditional business skills like management and marketing.

We ask our students, do you have a personal development plan? Do you have a professional development plan? Do you have a map that tells you where you are right now with your life and business? Can you navigate with that map to produce the returns you're looking for? Are you building the kinds of relationships you need? These are the kinds of things we do at Leadership University.

We don't take a faculty-driven approach, because we allow people with expertise or the willingness and motivation to teach others who bring to the table their own successes, we actually create a community of teachers. You design the curriculum, so it fits your needs.

Why is business development such a difficult issue? I've met people who are incredibly bright and have a lot of skills, but they've told me they're not making the money that they're worth. In the universe of coaching, why do coaches fail to achieve financial success so much of the time?

If you were to move to a new town, and you needed to find a dentist, you'd probably start searching for one by picking up the phone book. You'd be able to find most professional service providers in there. But with coaching it's different. The profession of coaching is still in its infancy and doesn't have the built-in market that many of the other professions do.

Additionally, most of the people who are attracted to coaching haven't run successful businesses, per se. Most of them approach coaching from the social and psychological side rather than the business side. Many of they haven't had experience with marketing, and it's been my experience that most of them don't like to sell.

People ask me how I've been successful and developed a global coaching practice working out of a town of 1,900 people in a remote state. There are some things I found I had to do when I decided to grow this practice. Here are the seven rules that I found worked for me:

The power of networks. Most of us understand networking, but I bet most of the people who will read this interview hasn't networked today. I've learned to do it not only every day, but also I've created asynchronous systems to do it for me. When you get into a web-based environment, we have a number of newsletters, a number of contact points and a number of access points just like a bricks and mortar business would have.

Every time someone comes to one of those access points we ask for their name, their email address, and permission to send them information. If people will do that same simple thing over and over and over again, before long, they will have a large network of people.

Having affiliates. Second, you have to develop satisfied customers into affiliates. Most of the work that comes to us comes from referrals, and those referrals come from other referrals. An affiliate network that you educate, train, and can ask for help with referrals is an important part of business development. Some coached try to go it alone, because the nature of the business is one-on-one. They don't understand the power of an affiliate network.

Asynchronous systems. Then there are asynchronous systems. Asynchronous systems are things that work when you don't. When you bill by time, you end up selling all your time, and the only way to make more money is to sell more of your time. You're tied down to the business. People have to learn to create value outside the time they sold, and the time they did sell had to be the most valuable aspect of their business.

Most people don't understand the power of aggregating behind the scenes people and processes to delegate responsibility when you're not working. Most business people have learned to do this: they have a sales network and customer service representatives, dealers, warehouses, manufacturersŠ In general, coaches who don't come from a business background won't understand this concept.

Business skills may be learnable, but I've found that the most important lessons in business are learned through direct experience. Consequently, if you don't come to coaching with business experience, you may not have all of the skills you need, because some of these skills can only be learned first hand. That point leads me to the concept of execution.

Execution. Successful business people are executing day in, day out. The better we are at executing, the more successful our business will be. Execution becomes the lynchpin for all these other issues.

A mastermind. In terms of a mastermind, you need to get other smart people around you. For example, I value your opinions, Wayne, and I appreciate your questions because they make me think differently.

Resilience. The idea of resilience is to be able to respond to the right things at the right time, for the right reasons, in the right way, and with the right people. That's the concept of right action. The ability to adapt quickly and taking advantage of opportunities is essential to successful business.

Those are some of the things that you won't normally find in unsuccessful people. It is almost impossible to be unsuccessful if you're continuously networking. It is almost impossible to be unsuccessful if you have an affiliate network. If you've got asynchronous systems, you are using someone else's time, money and effort to increase your own business.

Too many people don't understand how to leverage these things. They're still trying to go it alone. That means they are restricted to whatever amount they can get for their time.

Those are the kinds of things that people in business today need to be aware of. They need to be prepared to operate in a global environment, you need to work on your networks, educate your affiliates and teach them how to refer, build asynchronous systems, focus on execution, surround yourself with smart people, and above all, you must learn to be resilient.

You may not need to understand 'business' in order to coach business people - but you must understand their fears, challenges, and possibilities, if you want a business owner to hire you! "Doing It Right" will help you address issues such as management, growth and transition, succession, and strategic planning - with confidence.

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