Wednesday, September 09, 2026
Most business owners survive the slow season and wait for trading to pick up. The ones who grow fastest use the quiet to fix last peak's bottlenecks, cross-train their teams, and renegotiate supplier terms.
Most business coaching relationships do not fail because the coach stops delivering. They stall because both sides quietly stop expecting anything new. Everyone stays polite, satisfaction scores stay high, and momentum leaks away without a single argument to mark the moment it happened.
If you are asking how to find a business coach, or whether the one you already have is still worth it, here is the direct answer: satisfaction is not the same as progress, and it is entirely possible to be genuinely happy with a coaching relationship that stopped moving you forward months ago.
Kevin has coached SME owners for years inside the Icehouse's Owner Manager Programme and directly through Simple-Growth, and the pattern shows up almost exactly at the one-year mark: the conversation that used to challenge the client starts, without anyone deciding it, to simply confirm what they already believe.
Here's the enemy: mistaking a high satisfaction score for evidence the coaching is still working. ICF and HCI research on coaching cultures found 78 percent of senior executives and 73 percent of employees who receive coaching report high satisfaction with it. Those numbers are genuinely good news for the coaching industry, and they are also exactly why so few people notice when their own engagement has quietly gone flat. You can rate a relationship highly out of comfort and trust built over time, while the actual challenge inside it has disappeared.
This is a deliberate reset Kevin runs with long-term clients, roughly once a year, structured around three questions.
1. What did you and your coach agree to fix at the start, and is it still the right target. Goals set a year ago are rarely the goals that matter most today. Name the drift out loud.
2. When did you last genuinely disagree with each other. If neither of you can remember, the relationship has likely slid from coaching into comfortable agreement.
3. What would a harder version of this conversation look like. Ask it directly, then have that harder conversation on purpose, not by accident.
"Talking with Kevin the first time was so valuable and we were learning so much. Within an hour Kevin had us thinking about our business and our goals in a totally different way. In fact we were supposed to be catching a flight but we decided it was more important that we continued the meeting with Kevin."
— Angus and Cameron, Flatpack Co
Nobody wants to disrupt a relationship that feels good and has delivered real results in the past. Raising it can feel like criticism of a coach who has genuinely helped. But the alternative, quietly coasting on last year's progress, costs far more than one uncomfortable conversation.
A good coach welcomes the re-contracting conversation, because it is the difference between a relationship that compounds and one that simply continues.
If you cannot remember the last time your coach genuinely disagreed with your plan, it might be time for a re-contracting conversation.
...and you become the owner whose coaching still challenges you a year in.