A business plan consultant can be worse than a nightmare if you don’t choose one wisely. The business plan you want to pay for is the one that you can be successful at. You want a business plan that takes advantage of your strengths and minimizes your weaknesses.

Your first meetings with a business plan consultant shouldn’t be about the business. It should be all about you. If it’s not, then your worse nightmare may just be about to happen. The best business consultant is also a business coach.

A coach should focus on your inner and outer game. Let’s face it, you may not be facing reality in your ideas about how successful this business of yours could be. A great coach will recognize inner game issues like this one and coach you through a reality check.

The following inner game tips will help you recognize whether your business consultant is helping you to create a generic business plan without you in mind or one that’s especially designed around you to guarantee your success.

What Should A Business Plan Consultant Do?

Your consultant must start with understanding where you want to go. She needs to nail down your business vision for success. Nail this first tip and you’ve solved 50% of your business planning challenge.

Your business coach should mentor you to answer questions about what is your purpose in life. Because if you can get down to the root of what’s really the thing that’ll drive you, then that’s when you’ll be most satisfied and successful. Success is not just measured in terms of dollars. Happiness is far more valuable for most entrepreneurs than if you feel like you’re just not doing what you want to do in life.

The truth is starting your own business will be the most challenging thing you’ve ever done. If your vision doesn’t keep you engaged and energized about seeing your vision to completion, your passion for working hard won’t carry you through to the finish line.

Your Business Plan Consultant Should Recognize Your Patterns

Your business coach should then walk you back to the beginning. She needs to trace back how did you get to where you are today. Now this is very important because you want to make sure you don’t repeat failure patterns in your life, which could sabotage your dream.

More importantly, your business planning coach needs to know your strengths because strengths are what you want to cultivate and rely on for getting more success in your life verses focusing on improving your weaknesses. The biggest problem I see as a coach is people often don’t know their real strengths and how to apply them effectively and efficiently.

Your Business Plan Consultant Should Create Your SWOT Analysis

Now you should know what your business vision is you want to make happen and what truly drives you to want more responsibility in your life. The key is you’ll know your strengths and weaknesses after you’ve done tip 1 and tip 2 .

Now the third tip is for your business coach to guide you through developing a personal SWOT analysis: your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. SWOT should be a key step in the process of creating your business plan. A business SWOT analysis should come later in the planning process.

Opportunities should support your business vision and mission. Opportunities are revenue generating actions you should take or decisions you need to make to get you closer to your business vision. Coaching comes in where you’re getting ideas and strategies from your business coach to capitalize on your opportunities. Remember, sometimes you may not know much about how to do what you’re consultant is suggesting. As your coach, she should give you the step by step plan.

Threats are the areas of where you want to go that may be scary for you to deal with. Threats can be simple areas of life such as your business and personal relationships. Entrepreneurs must deal with challenging relationship issues before you take on the additional stress of starting your own business. Threats can also come from within you. Then threats can be external such as the overall economy. Your business planning coach should uncover threats for you to steer you past any roadblocks that may get in your path towards making your business vision a reality.

To discover more coaching tips about what your business plan consultant should do for you and avoid getting yourself into a possible nightmare scenario, call or email me for more information.

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