Entrepreneurial assessment tests and coaching tools for Career Coaches
Discover how our tests, tools, and training can help you as a career coach or job counselor to help people pursue a career in entrepreneurship due to outplacement, job change, or as an extra income stream.
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ou first get an interactive overview of the impact of our tests, tools, and online training, and after the overview, you can send in your request for a free trial of E-Scan to experience its full potential.
What career coaches must know when clients are considering an entrepreneurial career?
Most people who want to take up entrepreneurship as a career hardly know what they are getting into. The truth is that it is not a journey for the faint-hearted. There will be pitfalls and challenges before they get to a place of stability with their entrepreneurial venture.
They fail to define their true purpose in life and their area of passion for their new business. Others have no good reason why they want to be entrepreneurs, while others have their skills misplaced. A good number also forget to do market research before launching their businesses.
These are a few aspects that can lead to starting a series of businesses that fail to take off.
As a career coach, it is your duty to help your client start the entrepreneurship journey well-equipped to become a successful entrepreneur. Here are a few things in your career guidance you should know when your client is considering an entrepreneurship career.
1. Your client may lack a clear picture
People prefer the entrepreneurship path for many reasons. Some will want the freedom it gives or want to run from a career they don’t like or simply start a new income stream. However, the right reason to start a business is to provide a solution for customers’ needs in your client’s area of passion and skills.
You should seek to determine the reason behind your client wanting to open a business. Assess their passion and skills. Do they have the passion, expertise, or experience in the potential niche? Can the skills be upgraded to match the requirements of small business management? If the expertise is in one aspect of the business, how will they manage the rest? For instance, a person who loves cooking can’t rely on only this to open a restaurant. He or she will need to manage finance, business administration, and employees, among other duties. Are they willing to hire help from other business professionals? If not, how are they going to bridge the gap?
Directing them to the right reasons for a change in their career path, as well as helping them identify their area of expertise, will help them change their attitude. It will equip them accordingly, which will eventually set them up for success.
2. Not all are business ready
Starting a business is no mean fit. There will be challenges on the way. In addition, most companies take time before income starts streaming in. If this were to happen to your client, are they willing to work with a bare minimum before the business picks up? How about their entrepreneurial spirit? Are they ready to start small and expand as they grow?
Seek to find how resilient your client is. Focus your career guidance on areas that they can cut back to ensure they do not affect the company’s cash flows. For instance, you can suggest that they work from a coworking space near them to cut back on office overheads such as rent.
Help them identify potential challenges that they may face and offer them some tactics to counter them. They may also need to overcome the fear of the unknown as their entrepreneurship careers are venturing into new territory. It is your job to coach them on how to overcome the fear and to soldier on.
3. Not all business ideas are viable
As said above, most people will want to start a business just for the sake of becoming a small business owner. Only a few will go to the lengths of conducting market research to establish the viability of their business idea or innovative idea.
As a coach, guide your clients to determine if people would be willing to buy from them. Encourage them to establish if there are any customers’ pain points the potential product or service is seeking to fulfill. How is the product or service different from the competitors? Is the client targeting the right demographic?
With such data, you can then help them adjust the business idea to match the market’s findings.
Conclusion
When a client approaches you with the interest of taking up entrepreneurship as a career, you should assume that they have no idea where to start. Start with them from the drawing board and help them through each step of the way.
Equip them with the right processes, procedures, and systems, and they will need to start and build a well-run business. Be the push that they need if they are procrastinating for fear of the journey. As a professional, help them become confident of their products, skills, and expertise required to succeed as an entrepreneur in their niche.