What Makes a Good Business Coach? Lessons I Didn’t Expect to Share on a Podcast

What makes a good business coach? I don’t think anyone’s ever actually asked me that outright. But sitting down with Kevin Brent on ScaleUp Radio, together, I think we answered that very question at different points and in different ways.

One thing I said while talking to Kevin was that I used to call myself the Queen of Overcomplication, which made him laugh. But it also made me realise how much of coaching, real coaching, comes from having lived the mess yourself.

It was such a powerful conversation that I wanted to pull out five of the threads. The moments that speak to what actually makes a good business coach. If you want the full hour, the episode is linked at the bottom.

1. I didn’t choose coaching. It chose me.

I started out running a virtual assistant business, charging £25 an hour, which felt like a lot at the time. But clients wanted more than just tasks done; they wanted my opinion on their vision, processes, and hiring decisions. I was working a full day in someone’s office. Then I was going home to work for my other clients until one or two in the morning.

Most mornings, after throwing the kids through the school gate, I was checking my work from the early hours, which, looking back, was madness. So, I did what any exhausted business owner does: I got myself a coach. This was actually my second coach and probably my most powerful experience with one. Because she invited me to work alongside her, offering her clients marketing insight and general coaching support. She showed me that I could be a coach, which I thought was ridiculous. Until she pointed out that I was already doing it every single day without the label.

My first coaching package was an idea I shared with a good business friend of mine, someone already earning multiple six-figure incomes. I told her I’d built a £3,000 programme and wanted to check I hadn’t lost the plot. She said, “I’ll have it.” She wasn’t buying the programme; she was buying me, because we’d already built the trust.

That’s the bit people miss about “falling into” something. It only works once you’ve put in the years, and I had been: a PA in Hong Kong, run a charity, had ten years working with the Salisbury business community under my belt, and launched and built a successful business. I’d done the time, as they say.

2. Intuitive isn’t a soft word

I work intuitively, I always have, even before I knew it was a thing, it’s like a spidey sense for stuff. I still get asked what “intuitive” means in Intuitive Business Coach, which I don’t use as much these days because it’s overused or misunderstood.

But in essence, working intuitively is watching and interpreting body language, noticing when someone tells me one thing but clearly means another. It’s the pause before an answer. It’s noticing when a client is pushing through, struggling with something, or telling me what they think they should say.

That’s why I don’t think AI can coach, even at £25 an hour, which apparently now exists. Yes, AI can give you a framework, but it can’t hear the change in your voice or notice the tilt of your head. It can’t recognise a bad day and a knee-jerk reaction from a good day and measured thinking.

Intuitively or not, coaching lives in that gap between what’s said and what’s meant, and that is one of the things a good coach can do.

3. Running my own business taught me plenty

If I’m honest, the biggest learning curves for me haven’t come from a programme; they’ve come from watching my own patterns play out.

For example, when things got quiet, I got scared, and scared-me got busy in ways that didn’t actually help. Another plan. Another platform. Periscope, if anyone remembers that. I told myself being busy meant I was succeeding. It mostly meant I was avoiding the one or two things that actually needed to be done. Plus, being busy gave me a sense of purpose; I linked it to success, and that fed my need to overcomplicate everything!!

The fix wasn’t a new strategy. It was staying in my own lane and asking one question before any decision: will this move me closer to where I said I was going? Or is it just noise dressed up as progress? And in the early years, I needed a coach to help me with that.

4. The pricing conversation I have with almost every client

Women, in my experience, discount faster and more often than men. Not because the work is worth less, but because we haven’t built the confidence to say the number and then stop talking, the not talking was definitely me in the old days.

I tell clients: decide on your price, say it clearly, and don’t fill the silence that follows. If £495 feels like too big a jump right now, start at a number you can actually say with a straight face, sell it, and when it feels easier, increase the price. Don’t add more to a product or programme, as while that might feel better, it ultimately undervalues you and will most likely overwhelm the client you want to help.

And what you never do is drop a price you’ve already put out into the world. That’s not confidence-building; that’s telling people, plainly, that you weren’t worth it in the first place.

5. What actually brings me clients

Not funnels. Not a content calendar. It’s networking every time. It’s where I go when I need advice, a referral, or just someone who gets it on a hard day. My network is essentially my business family.

I’m going to leave this section neat and short because I could talk about the benefits of networking all day long, which have been the bedrock of my business’s growth again and again.

So, what makes a good business coach?

If you asked me now, it’s living the business owner’s life. It’s learning from the things that didn’t go to plan, from the books I’ve read, and the clients I’ve worked with. It’s empathy, reading between the lines, and asking the right questions. And there’s no one way, because every client I work with is unique, so the same question will land differently. That’s why I love what I do. And if anything resonated in this piece or the full episode, my door is always open.

Listen to the rest

There’s a lot more in the full conversation with Kevin. Including the manager who shaped how I lead people (a hydraulic hose assembly company, of all places). The books that changed how I think about my own limits. And why a 90-day plan is the one practical way of working that finally saw me making progress without being busy for busy’s sake.

Listen to the full episode: Tailored Coaching Based On Intuition on ScaleUp Radio with Kevin Brent.