Whilst I highly value my over thirty years of accounting experience, as a business coach I have come to see that it is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because I can dive deep into my clients’ financial accounts, quickly understanding their numbers and providing valuable insights about business performance. Yet, this same expertise can be a curse, as financial accounts inherently document past performance, meaning our conversations tend to focus on the past instead of looking forward to working out how to build the business they truly aspire to create.

This paradox was vividly illustrated in recent conversations with two clients who sought to leverage my accounting knowledge. Both were experiencing revenue challenges, though in distinctly different ways. The first client’s issue became immediately apparent — their pricing structure didn’t provide sufficient mark-up on service delivery costs for the business to earn an acceptable ROI for the owners. The second client was facing high debt levels due to the extended time it was taking to convert inventory on hand into sales and then into cash.

While my accounting experience allowed me to quickly diagnose these issues, I realized that simply identifying the problem was not enough. These clients needed more than someone to interpret the past performance of the business, as they were of the problems they were facing.  What they needed was a guide to help them be clear about the business they were aspiring to create and what success looks like to them. Once the client is clear about what success looks like, they have a context for determining the strategies required to continue with the journey to create the business to which they aspire.

For the first client, this meant implementing a strategy to increase service prices to reach a level of profitability that justified their investment in the business. With the second client, the focus was on reducing debt by improving cash flow management and optimizing inventory levels.

My lesson from these two conversations was that I must be conscious to reach a balance between using financial information to understand where a business is today and helping the business owners define success in the future. My skills set provides me with a unique advantage for my clients, by combining deep financial understanding with forward-thinking business guidance. The real art of business coaching lies not in choosing between looking backward or forward, but in knowing how to use the past to better illuminate the path ahead.