Business Coaching · Liverpool
Business coaching: what it is, what it costs, and how to tell if it’s right for your business
A plain-English guide for business owners, written by Luke Kay of ActionCOACH Liverpool: what a business coach actually does, what coaching costs in the UK, and how to tell whether it is right for you.
The straight answer
What is business coaching?
Business coaching is a structured, ongoing working relationship in which an owner steps back to work on the business, guided by a coach who brings a proven method, an outside perspective and real accountability — so decisions get made, plans get finished, and progress is measured.
Structured means a method: a way of diagnosing, a way of planning, numbers you both watch. Ongoing means a rhythm across a year or more. Accountability means somebody outside your business knows what you committed to, and asks.
Owners get stuck because they are the busiest person in the building. The diary fills with other people’s problems, and the work that would change the shape of the company — pricing, margin, hiring, systems — keeps sliding to next month. A coach interrupts that.
Be clear what you are buying. An opinion, and someone who makes sure it gets done. The work stays inside your business, so the capability is yours when the engagement ends. And a good coach spends real time on how you think, decide and lead, because those set the ceiling.
In practice
What does a business coach actually do?
Strip away the language and the job is concrete. Four outcomes — more cash, more time, a business that works without you, and a net worth outside it — reached through six steps, repeated for as long as you work together.
1. Reviews where the business is — and where you are
The numbers, the margins and where enquiries come from — and what the business is actually paying you and what you own outside it. The review covers you as well as the business. This first step is free.
2. Sets the outcomes
For the coaching and for the business: a destination connected to what you want from your own life — income, hours, what happens to the business in the end — worked back into real targets.
3. Builds the plan to close the gap — every 90 days
A year is too long to plan in detail; a week is too short to change anything. Ninety days works: a few priorities, actions with owners and dates, rebuilt each quarter in a room with other owners.
4. Grows revenue and profit
Half the work. There are only five numbers in a business that make you money — leads, conversion, transactions, average sale, margin — and most owners only ever push on the hardest one. Improve each by 10% and profit rises 61%.
5. Builds the business so it works without you
The other half: people who can do the job, a recruitment process that finds more of them, KPIs for every role, and systems that live in the business.
6. Gets the value out
Then it depends what you want: the cash out of the business and into assets you own, the business made ready for sale, or succession to the next generation. Either way, selling becomes a choice you could make. Underneath all six sits the least glamorous part, which produces most of the result: every session opens with the last one’s commitments.
Know the difference
Business coaching vs consulting vs mentoring vs training
These four get used interchangeably and are genuinely different products, each answering a different problem.
| What they bring | Who does the work | What you’re left with | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business coach | A method, an outside perspective, and accountability over months. | You and your team, with the coach setting direction and pace. | A better-run business and a more capable owner. The improvement stays when the coach leaves. |
| Consultant | Specialist expertise in a defined problem — a migration, a restructure, a pricing review. | Largely the consultant, on your behalf. | A deliverable: a report, a build, a solved problem. Faster, but the capability often walks out with them. |
| Mentor | Lived experience in your sector, offered generously and often unpaid. | You, when you choose to act on the advice. | Perspective, contacts and shortcuts. Rarely structured, rarely measured, dependent on their availability. |
| Trainer | Skills delivered to a group to a syllabus — sales, management, software. | The trainer teaches; applying it afterwards is on you. | Knowledge, and a team taught something. Whether behaviour changes depends on the following Monday. |
A rule of thumb: if you know exactly what needs doing and lack the skill in-house, buy consulting or training. If you know roughly what to do but it never quite gets done, that is coaching territory. Good coaches move along the spectrum, but the centre of gravity stays on building capability in you and your team.
Pick the right format
Types of business coaching
The term covers several formats. Most businesses use two or three together.
One-to-one coaching
Private sessions between owner and coach, on that business. The most common format for business owners, and the one that allows real candour.
Group and peer coaching
A small cohort of non-competing owners coached together, usually monthly. Cheaper per hour, and the other owners are part of the value.
Executive coaching
Focused on the individual: how a senior leader thinks, decides and handles pressure. More psychological than commercial.
Leadership and team coaching
Aimed at the layer beneath the owner — managers learning to run their own numbers, meetings and difficult conversations. What makes an owner genuinely removable.
Sales coaching
How the business wins work: pipeline, enquiry handling, qualification, pricing, follow-up, conversion. Often the fastest place to find money.
Exit and succession coaching
Preparing a business to be sold or handed on: systemisation, clean numbers, a management layer that survives your departure. Started years ahead.
Inside the room
What actually happens in a coaching session
Few coaches describe this properly, which makes it hard to judge what you are buying.
Length and cadence. A one-to-one session usually runs 45 to 75 minutes. Fortnightly is the most common rhythm for business owners: long enough for something to get done between sessions, short enough that nothing drifts for a month. Weekly is the intensive end; monthly suits a stabler business. Sessions may be in person or on video.
The arc of a session. The specifics change every time; the structure should not. A session with no structure is just a conversation, and conversations feel good without changing anything.
1. Wins and commitments You open with what was agreed last time: what happened, what did not, and honestly why. Wins get named — owners are bad at this — and anything unfinished is dealt with.
2. The numbers A short, unsentimental look at the KPIs you agreed to track — enquiries, conversion, average sale, margin, cash, pipeline. Leading indicators, which surface problems early.
3. The main piece of work The bulk of the time, on one thing: rebuilding a pricing structure, designing a sales process, facing a people problem you have been avoiding. Often the coach teaches a framework and you apply it to your own business in the room.
4. The owner as well as the business Ten minutes on you: energy, hours, what you are avoiding or tolerating, what would have to change for the plan to be realistic.
5. Commitments and dates The session closes as it opened: a few actions, each with a date, written where you both can see them. Three things that will definitely happen beat twelve that might.
What changes a business is a handful of ordinary disciplines, repeated until they stop requiring effort — the numbers looked at weekly, the follow-up made every time, the meeting that happens whether or not it feels urgent. Coaching works because it makes those small repetitions non-negotiable.
The part most people miss
Good coaching is more than the one-to-one
If you are comparing coaches, one question separates them and hardly anyone asks it: what exists around the sessions?
A coach who sells you a slot in their diary is selling their time. A coach who has built a system is selling an environment — planning, teaching, tools, frameworks and other owners — in which the sessions are one part. Here is what a complete programme looks like.
Quarterly planning workshops
A full day every ninety days, out of the business and on it: the next quarter written down week by week, the last one honestly reviewed first. A quarter that starts with a plan on paper behaves nothing like one that starts with intentions.
Workshops and masterclasses
A topic properly taught — marketing, pricing, cash flow, recruitment, systems — then applied to your own business before you leave the room. Teaching only counts when you apply it. Ask whether their training days end with you having built something.
A room of other owners
Genuinely half the value. Owning a business is isolating, and most problems that feel uniquely yours have been solved by someone three tables away. A peer room also raises your standards: you calibrate against the company you keep.
Learn before you earn
The best programmes rest on a principle worth stating plainly: you get better first, and the results follow. That turns training from a cost to be minimised into an investment, and puts learning in the diary before the results arrive.
Video training your team can use
An on-demand library extends the programme past you. When a new manager can be pointed at a structured course, the coaching stops living only in the owner’s head.
Planning software and dashboards
Somewhere the plan and the numbers live between sessions, visible to you and your managers. Plans that live only in a notebook stop being plans by week three.
Proven frameworks
Repeatable models for profit, sales, team and systems, tested across thousands of businesses, beat one person’s instincts. Ask what the method is. A method you can be walked through end to end is what you are looking for.
Ask any coach what happens between sessions. A full answer to that question is what you are paying for. Some hard work is sawing with a blunt blade. The hour spent sharpening it is the one that changes the number at the bottom of the page.
Get better, and it gets easier.
That’s the work we do together — on the business, and on you as its leader.
The money question
How much does business coaching cost in the UK?
There is no standard price, because there is no standard product. It helps to think in three tiers. The figures below are general UK market context — typical ranges.
| Tier | Typical rate | What you’re actually buying |
|---|---|---|
| Generalist business coach | Around £100–£300 an hour, or about £1,000 a day | A broad business background — often a former manager, banker or consultant coaching part-time. General advice and a sounding board, usually without a formal methodology, a structured programme or accountability between sessions. |
| Trained, certified coach | Roughly £300–£500 an hour; monthly retainers commonly £800–£2,000 | Formal training and certification, a repeatable method, a structured programme, and accountability between sessions. |
| Specialist growth and scale coach | £500–£1,000 an hour, and sometimes more | A proven track record taking businesses from seven-figure revenues to seven-figure profits. Usually comes as a full programme — sessions plus quarterly planning workshops, masterclasses, training platforms and frameworks. |
Group or peer coaching sits outside those tiers and typically runs £200–£600 a month — shared sessions in a cohort, less tailored, but you gain the peer room. Whichever tier you buy into, engagements typically run 12–18 months: coaching is a programme, and structural change needs that long to reach the accounts. VAT is normally charged on top of all of these figures, so budget for it.
As a rule of thumb, the hourly figure is the wrong lens at the top end. Coaches at that level rarely sell hours at all — they sell a programme, and the number that matters is the return that programme produces in your business. When comparing an hourly rate with a monthly programme, count everything included.
For context, Luke’s 1-2-1 business coaching programmes run from £250 to £2,500 +VAT a month depending on how often you meet, and every 1-2-1 tier includes the same one-to-one coaching, planning workshops, masterclasses, the ABOS dashboard and the full video training library. Executive coaching for leadership teams starts from £3,000 — see the programme levels and what’s included.
Getting commercial results
Is business coaching worth it? How to judge the return
Ignore anyone quoting an industry return figure. The calculation that matters is the one you do on your own numbers.
A worked example
Say a programme costs £1,200 a month — £14,400 a year, plus VAT, usually reclaimable if you are VAT registered.
Now apply your own net margin. If you make 10p of net profit in every £1 of sales, you need roughly £144,000 of extra revenue in a year to break even on your coaching investment. On a business turning over £2m, a 10% uplift is £200,000 of extra sales and £20,000 of extra profit: the coaching is paid for, with £5,600 of profit on top. As a certified ActionCOACH, Luke has systems and frameworks to increase profitability across the whole business. More leads are part of it, and there are many other numbers that make you money in a business that cost next to nothing to improve.
Revenue is only one route. Converting more of the enquiries you already get, or reviewing pricing you have not touched in three years, can pay for it too. Coaching often finds money there first, because neither needs more leads.
Then judge it over the right period. Structural change — a new sales process, a manager who can manage, a business that runs without you — tends to land between months six and eighteen. Assess a twelve-month decision on twelve months of evidence.
The five numbers that make you money
Take a business turning over £2m at a 10% net margin: £200,000 of profit. Most owners try to grow by chasing more leads. Get 10% more leads and, with everything else the same, you get 10% more revenue: £200,000 more sales and £20,000 more profit. That covers a year of coaching at £14,400, with a little left over.
Now improve all five numbers by just 10% each — leads, conversion rate, how often customers buy, average sale and margin. They multiply together:
| The five numbers | Today | Each up 10% |
|---|---|---|
| Leads | 2,000 | 2,200 |
| Conversion rate | 25% | 27.5% |
| Transactions per customer | 4 | 4.4 |
| Average sale | £1,000 | £1,100 |
| Revenue | £2,000,000 | £2,928,200 |
| Net margin | 10% | 11% |
| Net profit | £200,000 | £322,102 |
That’s 46% more revenue and 61% more profit: an extra £928,200 of sales and £122,102 of profit a year from a 10% improvement in each area. Against £14,400 of coaching, that’s around 8.5 times the cost back, or roughly £10,000 of extra profit a month against a £1,200 monthly fee.
How each number goes up
More leads come from putting the right marketing strategies in place and measuring them: knowing where your best customers come from, then doing more of what works. More of those leads become customers when you put a proper sales process in place: every enquiry answered quickly, every quote followed up, and a team trained to sell with confidence. Customers buy more often when you stay in touch: a follow-up system, offers for past customers and good reasons to come back. Average spend goes up with clear packages, sensible add-ons and pricing that reflects what you are worth. Margin improves when you know which jobs and clients pay you, tighten up costs and waste, and price with confidence.
Luke works on all five together and measures every one every fortnight. That is how his clients get the results they get, and why coaching usually pays for itself within a couple of months.
Work your own numbers through before your first conversation with any coach, and take them with you. A good coach will go through them with you and say so if the sums do not stack up yet.
An honest filter
Who business coaching works for
Coaching is the right purchase for a particular kind of owner, and a good coach will say so when the timing is wrong. A willingness to turn work down is one of the clearest signals of a good one.
It tends to work when you’re…
✓ An established business owner past the start-up stage, with revenue and a team
✓ Too buried in the day-to-day to work on the business
✓ Willing to be challenged on things you are quite attached to
✓ Prepared to protect a few hours a week between sessions
✓ Solvent enough that the fee is an investment
It won’t work if…
✕ You don’t want to be challenged — if every observation gets explained away, nothing moves
✕ You won’t do the work between sessions — the change happens in the fortnight afterwards
✕ You want someone to run the business for you. That is a managing director or a consultant
✕ The business is in genuine crisis. If payroll is at risk or creditors are closing in, you need turnaround, restructuring or licensed insolvency advice first — coaching is for building
Credentials
Qualifications, accreditation and training: what actually counts
In the UK, “business coach” is not a protected title. There is no register, no licence and no qualification anyone must hold before taking a client’s money.
So look past the certificate. What you want is a coach trained in how businesses actually grow, who understands what it is like to run one, and who can show you the results.
Coaching accreditation bodies
The International Coaching Federation (ICF), the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) and the Association for Coaching (AC) accredit individual coaches. Accreditation means a course, logged coaching hours and a code of conduct. Anyone willing to do the course can hold one. It shows someone has studied coaching. It says very little about whether they can grow your business.
Trained by ActionCOACH
ActionCOACH has trained business coaches since 1993. Its coaches learn multiple tested methods for growing businesses, built up over years and years of training. The learning never stops: webinars, conferences and world-class experts brought in to train the coaches, alongside coaches in more than 70 countries. It is training built for one job: growing the business of the owner in front of them. Very few coaches anywhere get that depth.
Commercial experience
Has the coach run or grown a business themselves? Can they read a P&L and a cash flow forecast and tell you what the numbers are saying? Do they understand the owner’s world — payroll, hiring, the month that goes quiet? The ones worth paying have both.
The question to ask any coach
“How long do your clients stay?”
A certificate tells you someone has done a course. Results and retention tell you whether the coaching works. Luke’s clients typically stay three to five years, with no long-term contract, because they keep winning. Nobody sacks the manager who has just won the league.
Progress gets measured. Results get achieved.
Who Luke has learned from
ActionCOACH, the World’s #1 Business Coaching Firm™, was founded by Brad Sugars in 1993. Through ActionCOACH, Luke has trained with and learned from some of the best in business, sport and performance:
That is the standard behind every session, and why results get achieved.
Due diligence
How to choose the best business coach for your business
Searching for the “best” business coach is the wrong frame. There is the right coach for your business, your stage and the way you work. The questions below are what separate a coach who will move your numbers from one who will simply have interesting conversations with you. If you are weighing up a business coach in Liverpool, ask all eight.
Start here: business coaching is unregulated in the UK. There is no licence, no protected title and no legal minimum standard. Anyone can print a card tomorrow and call themselves a business coach. That is a reason to do proper due diligence, because quality control sits with you.
Look instead for credible proxies — accreditation, training inside an established firm, and real commercial experience — as set out in the section above on qualifications, accreditation and training.
Eight questions to ask before you commit
- What methodology do you coach to — and can you walk me through it? You want a described process for diagnosing, planning and reviewing, walked through end to end.
- What do I get beyond the sessions? Planning workshops, masterclasses, a peer group, platforms, team training. Get it in writing.
- Who have you worked with at my size and stage? Scale matters more than sector. A coach used to sole traders will struggle with a business of forty people.
- Can I speak to two current clients and one who has finished? The former client is the informative call; reluctance tells you a lot.
- How will we measure whether this is working? Agree the KPIs and review points at the start.
- What are the term, notice period and total cost? Including VAT, events and anything charged separately.
- What training and certification have you done, and who was it with? An accrediting body, an established firm’s programme, or both — and ask what was assessed. Then ask what they have built, run or turned round themselves.
- Will you tell me when I’m wrong? Then watch whether they do it in the first meeting. A coach who challenges you while winning the work will challenge you afterwards.
Red flags
A specific result guaranteed with no method behind it and no explanation of how it would be measured. No references, or only from people currently paying them. No structure — a promise to “see where the conversation goes”. High-pressure closing with a discount expiring that evening. And a coach who agrees with everything you say: you can get that for free.
Common questions
Business coaching FAQs
Do business coaches need qualifications in the UK?
No. The profession is unregulated and the title is not protected, so no qualification is legally required. Plenty of coaches hold a certificate from a coaching course. Ask instead for their results, and how long their clients stay. Luke’s clients typically stay three to five years, with no long-term contract.
How long does a coaching engagement usually last?
Twelve to eighteen months is typical, and many owners continue beyond that as the focus shifts from fixing to growing to exiting. Most coaches ask for a minimum term, commonly six or twelve months, because real change takes that long to reach the accounts.
How is a coach different from a business advisor?
An advisor answers a defined question on demand — accountants and solicitors work this way. A coach works with you over time on a broader brief, and the relationship includes accountability: they know what you committed to and follow it up. Advice is a transaction; coaching is a rhythm.
Can I just do one session?
Some coaches offer one-off strategy or diagnostic sessions, useful for a specific decision or a second opinion. What one session cannot deliver is sustained accountability. If your problem is “I need a view on this”, one session may be perfect. If it is “I know what to do and it never gets done”, you need the rhythm.
Is business coaching tax deductible?
Generally, coaching bought by a business is treated as an allowable business expense where the cost is incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the trade, and VAT-registered businesses can usually reclaim the VAT. Treatment can differ where the training is personal in nature, or teaches a new skill where it should develop an existing one. This is general information; confirm with your accountant.
What’s the difference between 1-2-1 and group coaching?
One-to-one is private and tailored entirely to your business and your numbers. Group coaching costs less per hour and brings the perspective of other owners, but the agenda is shared. Many owners run both.
How soon do results show?
Clarity arrives quickly: within a few weeks most owners have a written plan, numbers they watch and a shorter list of priorities. Commercial wins often follow in the first quarter, usually from pricing, follow-up or conversion. Structural change is a six-to-eighteen-month project. Judge the rhythm early; judge the money over a year.
So you just ask questions?
You get told what your coach thinks. Most owners already know what they should do; they have known for two years. Coaching is the reason it actually happens.
Do you do our marketing for us?
The job is making sure you have a marketing function that works, someone who can run it, and numbers that tell you whether it is working — the same with sales and pricing. And only whichever one is actually your problem: half the owners who say they need more leads need to follow up the quotes they have already sent, or put their prices up.
Every champion has a coach.
What it’s like with Luke
Everything above is good coaching. This is what it’s like with Luke.
The same three stages for every client. A review to find out where you are, an alignment day to decide where you’re going, then the coaching rhythm that gets you there.
The review
A free conversation, numbers first. What the business turns over, what it nets, where the work comes from — and what it’s actually paying you. Luke asks the personal question early, because what you want from life sets the targets for the business.
- Free, and you keep the numbers
- A straight answer on whether coaching fits
Alignment & road-mapping
Half a day in Liverpool. Your business model and numbers, your systems, your sales and marketing, then you: your biggest successes, what drives you, and where you want to be in three to five years. The plan is worked back from there into the next twelve months.
- One clear 12-month road map
- The few numbers you’ll track every week
The coaching rhythm
Regular 1-2-1 sessions with Luke, a 90-day planning workshop every quarter and a masterclass every month in a room of other Liverpool owners. Between sessions you have direct access to Luke, and the ABOS dashboard keeps the plan and the numbers in one place.
- Every session opens with last time’s commitments
- Every session closes with dated actions
How Luke coaches
Direct, numbers-first, and about you as well as the business.
“What’s the net on that?”
Every idea gets tested against the numbers. Turnover is a vanity figure; Luke wants to know what the business nets, what it pays you and which jobs make the money.
He tells you what he thinks
You’re paying for an opinion. Luke will tell you what he’d do in your shoes, then hold you to what you decide.
Your goals set the plan
The plan starts with the lifestyle you want: the income, the hours, what you own outside the business. Then it works out what the business needs to deliver to pay for it.
Commitments get checked
Whatever you agreed last session is the first thing on the table next session. Done, not done or changed, and honestly why.
A net worth outside the business
Profit gets moved out of the business and into assets you own. Luke works on this with you from the start, alongside your accountant and advisers.
Learn before you earn
A book a month, a masterclass a month and half a day a week working on the business. Get better, and it gets easier.
Every session ends with the same question: “What’s the biggest thing you’ve got out of today?”
If the answer isn’t clear, the session hasn’t done its job.
What you get from Luke
- ✓ An honest outside view of your business and your numbers
- ✓ A written plan, reviewed every quarter
- ✓ Direct access between sessions
- ✓ The ActionCOACH results guarantee, agreed in writing
What Luke asks of you
- ✓ Half a day a week working on the business
- ✓ Your real numbers, every month
- ✓ The actions done between sessions
- ✓ An appetite for straight answers
How Luke does it in Liverpool
Business coaching in Liverpool with Luke Kay
Everything above is what good coaching looks like. Luke Kay is Liverpool’s leading business coach. He has spent over ten years running his own business and been inside a hundred and fifty others — trained with ActionCOACH, the World’s #1 Business Coaching Firm™. Here is how Luke builds it: the core is 1-2-1 coaching with Luke Kay, an award-winning business coach in Liverpool, and every programme includes the events and tools around it, all year round.
What’s included
Regular 1-2-1 coaching sessions with Luke, applied to your business and your numbers.
Quarterly 90-day planning workshops — the next ninety days written down week by week, the last quarter reviewed first.
A masterclass every month in a room of other Liverpool owners, applied to your own business on the day. See what’s coming up.
The ABOS platform and the full video training library — on-demand for you and your team. More on the video training library.
And the ActionCOACH guarantee. Results guaranteed — the terms agreed with you in writing before you start, so you know what you are being held to, and what Luke is.
What results look like
300%
Revenue and profit growth in 3 years
7-figure exit
Inside 18 months
400%
Revenue increase in 12 months
Start with the review. That bit’s free.
Where the business is now, and where you are personally: what it is actually paying you, and what you own outside it. It takes a couple of hours, and you keep the numbers whether you work with Luke afterwards or not.
Book your free business review →Or call 0151 440 2410