Sunday, October 04, 2026
Most SME owners have one growth plan: get more customers. There are actually four distinct ways to grow, and the cheapest one is usually sitting in your existing customer file.
Search "business coach" and you'll drown in certification badges — ICF-accredited, NLP master practitioner, six-figure-mastermind graduate. None of it tells you whether the person behind the badge has ever met a payroll, negotiated with a bank, or fixed a business that was actually losing money. A certificate proves someone studied coaching. It says nothing about whether they've built anything, broken anything, or survived the version of your problem you're facing right now.
The enemy here is a coaching industry that has, in places, optimised for credentialing over experience — because certificates are easier to sell than scar tissue. That doesn't mean structured coaching training has no value. It means credentials are the wrong first filter. The right first filter is a track record: what has this person actually built, and what happened when it went wrong? A coach who has sat in the boardrooms of McDonald's, IBM and Samsung, and separately built and sold nine companies of their own, brings something no certification can replicate — pattern recognition earned from real risk, not from a workshop.
Before you hire — or renew with — a business coach, run this checklist instead of asking for their certificate.
1. Ask what they've built, not what they've studied.
2. Ask for a failure, not just a win.
3. Ask them to diagnose your business in the first session.
4. Ask what changes in the first 90 days.
5. Check whether the advice survives Monday morning.
"Kevin is a master of his craft. From creating and facilitating high-impact 'Grow Your Business in 1-Day' workshops to elite sessions for our flagship Owner Manager Programme — Kevin delivers excellence across the board. He is a powerhouse presenter and facilitator who brings an explosive blend of energy and expertise to every room he steps into. Participants don't just sit and listen; they leave buzzing with breakthrough ideas and simplified, highly effective growth strategies."
— Darilyn Kane, Coaching and Advisory Lead, The Icehouse
Most SME owners default to the badge because it's the easiest thing to compare on a website, and it feels like a safe, defensible choice — "they're accredited" is an easy sentence to say. But a business coach isn't a therapist or a regulated professional; the industry has no licensing body that guarantees competence, which means the credential you're actually looking for is evidence, not a certificate. That's uncomfortable, because it means doing the harder work of checking references and asking pointed questions instead of trusting a logo.
Kevin works personally with a select group of SME owners to build the systems, clarity, and accountability that make growth inevitable — not accidental, and not dependent on a certificate.
...and you become the owner who chooses a coach on what they have built, not on the badges they hold.