There are many coaching tips in business coaching that will help your clients become better business managers, owners, and leaders. However one of the most important tips is often overlooked and ignored.

What is Strategic Planning?

Strategic planning is a managerial activity that is used to capture goals and potential solutions, set priorities, focus energy, and organize goals and solutions to ensure that all parties (employees, management, independent agents, and others) are working toward common goals and intended outcomes.

Strategic planning is how organizations get from Point A to Point B and perhaps to Point C in the most advantageous manner. No list of coaching tips in business coaching would be complete without it!

Make Strategic Planning One of the Most Important Coaching Tips in Business Coaching

If you’ve been a business coach for any length of time, you have probably developed a toolbox full of strategies, exercises, skills, and other tricks of the trade. If strategic planning hasn’t been a part of your business coaching toolbox, it’s time to correct that omission.

Strategic planning is an essential coaching tip in business coaching, and here are three quick and easy steps to help you understand it better and to more easily explain it to your clients:

• Capture.  You need to collect (capture) all the date you can about your goals, the potential changes needed, and the solutions you are seeking. This is very similar to goal setting that all coaches are familiar with.

• Prioritize. What goals are most important? What steps are the most necessary to achieving those goals? You have to put your docks in a row to get to the finish line (sorry about the mixed metaphors!).

• Organizing. This where you put the “plan” in strategic planning. Athletic coaches are good at this (at least the good ones are). They have a “game plan” to reach a goal (win the damn game). It follows certain steps and details specific actions needed to get that victory. If you want to rock your clients’ world and give them one of the best coaching tips in business coaching, then start building up their strategic planning skills.

Without Strategic Planning You’ll Get Somewhere, But Where?

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?”

The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

Alice: “I don’t much care where – so long as I get somewhere.”

The Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,”

Strategic planning gives you a destination, and when you have a destination, you can then go in the direction that gets you there. Unlike Alice in Alice in Wonderland, your clients want their businesses to reach a specific goal, and you job as a business coach, is to help them get there. On of the most important and valuable coaching tips in business coaching is to develop your strategic planning skills and then impart your knowledge to each and every client.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “30-Days to Become a Coach” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your 30-day coaching blueprint videos.

Fred Philips
Business Coach
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