40: How Coaching Made the Difference: Accountability, Support, Success

In this episode of Accounting With Confidence, I share my personal journey and experiences with coaching in the accounting industry. From the initial reluctance and skepticism to the transformative impact, I delve into why having a coach has been pivotal in my professional growth and business success. I discuss the various types of coaching available—group, individual, and specific business areas—and provide insights on how to find the right coach for your needs. I emphasize the importance of being ready and open to coaching and how a timely email and joining group coaching with Woodard significantly turned my business around. Through anecdotes, practical tips, and recommendations of reputable coaching organizations and programs, this episode aims to guide and inspire those navigating the challenges of building a business while seeking growth and fulfillment.

Woodard: https://www.woodard.com/practice-coaching
Michael Hyatt/Full Focus Coaching: https://fullfocus.co/coaching
Maxwell Leadership: https://www.johnmaxwell.co/corporate-leadership-training
Les McKeown: https://predictablesuccess.com/growth-coach-les-mckeown
Gino Wickman/EOS: https://www.eosworldwide.com/resources
Mike Michalowicz/Profit First: https://mikemichalowicz.com/books; https://mikemichalowicz.com/masterminds
Jack Stack/Open-Book Management: https://www.greatgame.com/coaching

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Beth Whitworth
• 0:34 The Importance of Coaching
• 4:31 My Personal Coaching Journey
• 9:10 Types of Coaching
• 12:28 Finding the Right Coach
• 21:36 The Impact of Coaching on My Business
• 27:47 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

 I am Beth Whitworth race car driving quilt making CPA firm owning wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.

Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence.

Hi, and welcome to Accounting With Confidence. I'm your host, Beth Whitworth, and I am here today to talk about whether or not you think you need a coach, and that is something that. I have an opinion about. I know you're not surprised, but I'm just gonna hop right on in here and talk to you about what I feel is.

A part of your business or a part of your life that if you haven't experienced being coached for something that you really could benefit from. But it depends like most things in life, kind of where you're at, how you're feeling, how receptive you are, and so I just wanted to share my experience with you on.

What my coaching journey has looked like from having no business coach to now having business coaches and providing coaching. So for me, coaching is a lot of things, and there's a lot of expectations out of what you can get from coaching. Some of those things that are super important would be trust, having someone that you can trust to share things with that.

Will support you and have your back, but also, you know, give you that tough love and maybe that perspective that you can't get the space to have on a situation. A coach is someone who can hold you accountable. Accountable for what you say, accountable for the goals you've set and helping you kind of gauge those, that kind of the progress on those goals.

They should be a cheerleader. They should be someone who wants you to get to the goals that you've set to succeed, to essentially share in your celebration of your wins. I find that coaches should be a good sounding board, someone who's not gonna jump in and necessarily give you an answer, but maybe help you talk through how to get to your own answer.

And the big piece that I find with coaches is they help me with the planning and not just the planning, but the, the tracking of that plan. What. You know about me at this point. If you listened long enough, I am not your typical accountant who is process driven. Give me a list. I'll follow it. Yes, I will.

But I will de definitely stray. I probably won't completely follow through on some of the final steps in one of those areas that I have found in the past is that, yeah, I set the goals and I make them smart goals, and there's a timeline and there's, you know, they're attainable and all of those great things.

As far as setting up some sort of place to track, how am I doing, keeping those statistics up to date so you know, if it's a revenue goal, keeping track of where I am on those revenues and what my projection looks like and keeping that up to date. Well, I know if my coach is gonna say, Hey, how are you doing on that goal?

It gives me that push that I need to actually put something down on paper to look at it, to track it. I've set a lot of goals that I never actually measured, and what you manage and measure is what you will achieve. Well, I don't manage or measure things very well, and so I think I have found that over the years.

I had to accept that. I had to realize I need help in that area, and so I hired towards it. And then I also have people in my sphere that are helping me to get more follow through on my projects and my goals. So how I got to the point of knowing that I needed a coach was several years ago, I mean, 18 years ago.

I had an experience where I decided after that experience with a partner and a partnership not going so well that I was never gonna have another business partner. The closest thing I have to a business partner is my husband, and he's, he doesn't own any portion of my business and I don't own any portion of his, but we definitely work together on each other's businesses in a lot of ways and support each other there.

But I have no external business partners and I figured out, you know, over the, the years after that, it was a little bit of a, a slog. There's so many things and so many pressures, and it was a little bit lonely, and I know that I started to feel like I didn't love my business. I've told the story before and I needed to find something to either get me excited and get the business moving forward again, or I was gonna have to do something else, and that was very scary for me.

So it was scary for me. I had employees. I was one of the employees. I don't feel like since I've been working on my own that I would make a very good employee for someone else. So I realized that, okay, I might need, let me find something. And the where I started was with some group coaching. But as I even went through that, I realized that some of the reasons why I needed to coach was to keep me from second guessing myself.

I've almost always had a really good gut instinct on things, but I found when I was struggling with my business and making decisions and deciding how to move forward, forward, I would second guess myself, and I needed some reassurance and I didn't have a source for that. Then of course, what I mentioned before, part of coaching is having an accountability partner and having somebody keep me on track.

And when I finally discovered that, that is something that a coach could help me with, a business coach could help me with. Now I will admit, I have come from a background of thinking that life coaches were all kind of. Touchy feely and I didn't need one. I can manage this on my own, and I didn't see it from the perspective of a business investment, an investment in myself in my business to help my business move forward.

That was partly because it became more popular to have group coaching, to have a business coach as opposed to somebody who's considered a life coach, who's helping you with your relationships and your maybe your family and things like that. I wanted somebody to hold me accountable and be able to know what my business needed as well, and I sort of thought that I would never have a coach.

But the first thing I went through was a group coaching, and I had been in maybe one kind of professional group coaching situation before that was live and in person. And then the next one I did, I started in 2017 and it was a year long commitment, a year long program for this coaching group. And it was other accounting firm owners.

And that is what made the difference for me in recognizing that a coach that is specific to my specialty will get me farther than just a general business coach. So that's where I started with the, the group coaching and it was all remote. Um, we did end up, you know, seeing each other at the national conference I go to once a year.

So we did, we met, met in person at that point, but we were meeting every, almost every week. And we had homework and we had things that had to be, we had to be held accountable to do and report back on and books we had to read. There was a lot to it and it was a really, it was a kind of their pilot program for this initial group coaching.

And I'll say I am still with Woodard who started that group coaching with me in 2017. I'm still with them in. How their coaching has evolved. Their coaching has evolved. I have evolved and now what I'm working with, it's a one-on-one coach and for me, you know, I've evolved to that. Because there's lots of different kinds of coaching that you can have.

You can have the group coaching. Typically that's a representative from different businesses that are working with a single coach in some sort of group setting, you can have individual coaching, which is what I'm doing now where I have a coach that's assigned to me. We meet every two weeks. We work together on different items and situations and all the things.

And then we also, you know, you can get coaching for your team. So maybe you need coaching to help them learn how to be better team members, to learn how to communicate better, to learn how to delegate, to learn, all these things you can help your team with. And then there's of course, specific coaching. If you need to specifically be coached on your finances, your marketing, your, you can get something very specific that is not a general sense on as far as coaching is concerned.

So I have worked through having, I've, I've been in group coaching. I'm still in a of one group that is group coaching. I have an individual coach and they're with the same organization. I, I work with Woodard quite a bit and I'll have Becky post the link to their membership site. 'cause if you are in, if you're in any type of bookkeeping accounting field and have a business, they are top of the line for really being.

On top of new things, new trends in the, the industry, everything, and, and I think it's, they're definitely a good resource for education and there's various levels of membership, et cetera, but you can get coaching through them, whether it's group, specific team, all the things. And so it's great. And I'm a big proponent of Woodard and I'm, this is not a paid advertisement.

I just know that Woodard is the organization that saved my, my business when I was so down on it and lonely there and feeling that I was struggling with trying to move forward. A advertisement from Woodard for their Scaling New Heights conference just hit my inbox at a timely, it, it was just timely and it was something that I just said, okay, wow, I've never been to a conference and I I'm gonna do this.

And it was. Well over six months that I registered for this conference, before the conference was actually being held. And so I spent some time second guessing myself going, okay, maybe, maybe I, I should cancel. Maybe I, 'cause I'd never been to a conference for my industry. I. So I went to that conference and found my people, kind of found my tribe and at that point is when they were starting to talk about this group coaching.

And it just really spoke to me and it was a big investment and it was a, a very high time commitment. And you're, we were, we. The conference in June, I believe The group coaching started in September and went for a year. And it was a lot. I mean, it was a lot and it was a big commitment and I'm so glad that I did it.

But that is how I found my coaching platform. This is where I found someone. And that is something that I think is important to, to think about. How are you gonna find somebody that can coach you in what you need coaching with? I would say, you know, check with your peers. Who else in the industry you are in, do you look up to?

Do you see making changes in re having results? You know, and find out who, who are they talking to? What organizations do they belong to? Maybe it's an organization that you could be a part of, and maybe inside that organization you find someone who specializes in your industry. I. But I would say as you're looking to find who you need as a coach, you need to figure out what your focus is.

Are you focused on growth? Whether it's personal development or growing your sales? Is it financial focused? Do you need to understand more about your finances and how to be more profitable? Do you need leadership coaching? Are you, is your team growing and you feel like you're not either able to lead the way you want to, or maybe your team isn't responding to the way you lead?

Maybe you need focus on your systems. You know, whether it's what you're doing for marketing or what you're doing for keeping track of your customer needs and you know, the, your engagements, your what, what is it that you need to focus on and see who you know or who you work with in those areas that could help with that.

So maybe you work with, you have A-A-C-P-A or an accountant. I now offer coaching. To my clients, and typically it's relating to their finances, but it's a little more broad because I also treat it as business coaching because I'm also a business owner and I've been through many, many, many of the same things that my clients go through.

Hiring and firing, working on your finances. Determining if you should buy or lease a vehicle. You know, talking about marketing issues, vendor issues, I mean, all of those things are part of business. Should you have a partner? What is your succession plan? I do lots of types of coaching and so think of the people that are in your world who maybe are providing you services now and maybe they know of a coach.

Think of your financial planner. They may know a coach, your attorney, anybody you can think of that you see as someone that may have an in on some of these, I think you should consider that. And of course, I work with Woodard closely, so I've been somewhere in their coaching or membership realm since 2017, so that's eight years now.

And I will say that, like I said, it was a timely email that I received. That was what got me to them. And so if you're getting emails or you're getting any type of information from specific industry related groups, that's where I would start. You know, those are the people who will know who's out there coaching in your industry.

Now, of course there are lots of leadership styles and there's lots of leadership courses and, and I would say that some of the ones that I have been drawn to are, I would say the Maxwell leadership. There's a podcast that they have on executive leadership. There's the. Leadership styles relating from Les McEwen, who's your Synergist?

There's probably coaching. I'm sure he offers coaching. There's, I would say Michael Hyatt, who does my, the full focus planner. They do business coaching, and if I hadn't found Woodard, I would say Michael Hyatt's group is probably where I would've landed as far as a, a coaching group or an an individual coach.

Now there's definitely, you know, lots of specific models out there. Like I mentioned, there's EOSA lot of people have heard of, and that is from the book Traction. And I can't remember the author off my, the top of my head, but I will have that posted in the show notes and a, and a link to that book. That is a really great book in.

Kind of looking at your, your entire business and having you know, the right people in place supporting you. I know EOS has a massive. Coaching program that works with management teams and does exactly what I said at the beginning. They're holding them accountable. They're helping them set goals. They're helping them work through big transitions.

They're being that sounding board for ideas. So EOS is, is one the other one, profit first. And, and the book. The book is Profit first, the pumpkin Plan. Clockwork, those are all by Mike Mcal and Profit First has been a, a huge coaching program relating specifically to financing and having your business pay you first and have profit and all of those things.

And so that's a, that's a huge in our industry, our clients want that, you know, and, but they also. Offer the ability to coach individual clients, or they can coach you to become a Profit First consultant and have, and be your coach inside having that type of a practice. The very first coaching system that I worked with before Woodard, and it was just in a very minor.

Kinda a minor way was with open book management, and that was a philosophy put out by Jack Stack and how he built his business. And I believe he was a Missouri business, and that could be why I was drawn to this, but it was open book management, essentially. I. Teaching financial literacy to your employees and having them help to make that bottom line bigger and y'all share in it.

And so I know there's a, a coaching program relating to that specific model as well. So there's lots of models out there and I've come into contact with a whole bunch of them just in, in my field. You, whether it's leadership or. Financial management, anything like that. If you have any questions or know, or thinking about being in a co group coaching or having an individual coach on any of these types of systems, or maybe you've heard of one and you wanna know if I've heard of it and what I think of it, and shoot, just leave me a message.

Go into where it says, leave me a text, and it's right under where you're watching or listening to this. So if you're watching it on YouTube, leave me a comment and let me know what coaching programs maybe you are thinking of doing or have done and have had great success with. I would love to share that with my audience.

Now, one of the, the big things that people need to understand about coaching is. You have to be ready for it. I can guarantee you that there was a time before 2017 that if someone said, join this coaching group and this will help solve your problems, that I would've still done in the mindset that was like, yeah, no, nobody can help me.

I have to help myself. I will tell you that I, that is a, a characteristic of mine that I, I've had for a long time, you know, from since childhood that I'm gonna take care of myself. And that kind of got perpetuated as I, you know, went to college and got my master's and got the C sat for the CPA, passed my CPA exam.

And when I did all those things that I felt was. Having made those accomplishments that should have given me the tools I needed to do all the things. All the things, and it took me a very long time, and I hope it doesn't take you as long as it is, took me to realize that I don't have to do it by myself.

That just because I accomplished things and I got the education and I got the CPA and I have my master's and I, these things did not equip me to. Actually be able to know how to do all of these things, how to grow, how to be a good leader, understanding my systems, having good financial control over everything.

It doesn't come just with the education and taking a test and I, but I had it in me and I put the pressure on myself to make it work. So it, it was a, a wall. It was a wall that I had to say I, yeah. I had to get past, I had to say that yes, it's, it's not failure to have someone help me. To ask someone to give me their thoughts on an idea, to have some, to tell someone, Hey, I'm not sure about this.

I might be, you know, second guessing myself. Could you, you know, could you help me? And it took a, a long time and I would say I. Before I had a coach, I was still doing a lot of the day-to-day work, doing tons of tax returns, doing even doing bookkeeping. I was still cutting checks for clients. I was still doing a whole bunch of that, and even though I had a team, I was still in the day-to-day because I knew how to do it.

I felt like I could do it faster. I wasn't great at creating a process. So that means I, it would take too long, you know, for me to create that process, train, delegate, and I did not recognize that I could do it better and different. So I, I, I'd say my business was very stagnant. It was very flat. We weren't really growing by very much.

We weren't really improving a lot of things, and we weren't really well-defined. So once I went through that group coaching that started in 2017, I learned. Each area of my business that needed my attention and I learned, okay, here's the things I need to focus on with my team. Here's the things I need to focus on with me being able to do things like delegate.

Here are the systems that we need to fix. I. Here are things like standardizing some pricing. Our pricing model needed to change maybe who we wanted to work with and our messaging needed to change. There was a, I would, things were specifically identified and when I was opened up to that, I realized that I don't have time.

To focus and fix these things and do all the day-to-day work for my clients. I didn't have time to be in the weeds of bank reconciliations and paying the bills, and those are important services that we provide. But my clients needed me up here on a more of a 30,000 foot level, looking down and not down here on the $10 at Starbucks level.

But it took me to be open to going to committing to this group and doing the work. I. And because I was so miserable before I got there and I said, yep, I'm gonna, and this is costing me money. So sometimes having some skin in the game motivates you to really do the work. I realized that I'm not alone.

Other people in this country and other countries have the same exact issues that I have. They also have solutions. They also second guess themselves. They do. They do all those things. And so after that, when there was an opportunity to have a premium coach, which would be the one that is specifically working with me, we're talking every two weeks.

We're doing our planning together. All of those things I would say. The difference between that and just the group coaching has been directly seen in my revenues growing and growing faster. My mental health being a little bit more stable and being able to get through the hard things easier. And there was a jump between having no coach and group coaching.

I mean, huge. That was a huge jump. But there was also, it was also a little overwhelming having that individual coach that you can say, okay, hey, I'm having this, I'm running into this issue. How would you. Address that, what do you think I should do? And I guarantee you, Kim, I love her to death. She does not, she does not just tell me the answer.

She works me through the decision and and where I need to land and then supports me in it. And that is something that is just. Invaluable and I will continue, I think to have a coach for my business. For as long as I am in, I'm in a growth mode or I am trying to achieve something. And right now my. My goals are relating to, you know, yes, financial growth, revenue growth.

It's also relating to profit growth. It's also relating to this, to me, getting this podcast out every week. Now, I don't have tens of thousands of listeners or followers or downloads, and I, I love you all who are listening, watching, and downloading. For me, this is my outlet. I am not your typical accountant.

I what? Because I can do your bank reconciliation, doesn't mean that I'm the best one qualified for it, and it also doesn't mean that it brings me joy. Sharing my stories with you brings me joy. My coaches are continuing to help me achieve that because they, they say this, if this is bringing your you joy, you need to do more of it.

And so here I am. So shout out to the coaches if you are wondering if you need one. I would say the answer is probably yes. But only if you are ready. If you are ready to, to be a part of a team that is going to push you a little, maybe not always agree with you. Maybe give you some tough love. If you're not open to that right now, don't waste your money.

But if you are, I would say take the leap and be open to it and see what can happen. Because for me, it has made a huge difference. I have been. On my own in this business for 18 years, and I have only been loving it probably for the last six. And you know, that's, that's only a third of the time that I've been in business on my own.

So if I can help anyone get to that point faster, I am so happy to share how I got there. And I could not have done it without the coaching programs that I have worked through. Alright, that's what I have for today. Uh, I'm hoping that we will have a whole bunch of links in the show notes for some of the stuff that I mentioned.

Things like, you know, the Woodard membership, if you're definitely, if you are in a bookkeeping or accounting business, I highly recommend them. Um, also mentioned Michael Hyatt, which is full focus. I. Mentioned EOS, which is the traction program. Even if you just read the book and see if those things are things that you might be interested in and then, you know, kind of dig in and see what kind of coaching they might have.

There's so much out there that I think everyone should be able to find a coach and find one that's suitable to you. For me, I'm, I'm there. I found it. I'm, uh, very happy where I am right now. And it is just, just the right amount of time. It's just the right amount of push and accountability and it's just, it's when you find it, you'll know.

Okay. That's all I have for you today. I hope you all enjoy and have a wonderful rest of your week. Bye for now.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text.

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