Post Coaching Feedback

So, my personal experience of having Nike as a business coach has been reassuring in the sense that often when you are a small business, um, you don't actually know how to measure yourself and how to measure the progress that you're making in the business, especially when you see what other people are putting out there. There's a lot of times where you question yourself where the self doubt and you actually wonder if people, um people are basically, um, as as successful as they make it seem to be. Um So it's been reassuring because the challenges that you deal with on a, on a day to day, um challenge, sorry, the challenges that you deal with on a day to day business, I'm more likely experienced by other business owners. It's just that we don't have the networks to, to shape, um, failures, um, which, which I have found. So it's reassuring to have someone who can have that industry inside to say to you that, listen, this is what everyone is feeling. Um, and it's not just you, so when you're seeing a decline in your profits or basically just um something as simple as a low engagement on your social media and um, yeah, stuff like that, it's reassuring to know that it's basically what, what might be happening in the industry. Uh, secondly, it has been challenging because she forces you to, she forces you to stick to your brand promise. Um, often when you build a business, you have this idea wish to serve um, to the people and the foundation that you build your business on. But when you're running a business, you tend to be to operational and you don't um often have the time to actually go back to your brand promise and to your strategy. So it was challenging because you have to confront the strategy that you have to validate the strategy that you have uh in the context of the market that you are that you're servicing. So there's a lot of brand promise that you really have to drill down to your business and to constantly keep asking yourself if everything that you're doing is aligned to to your brand promise. Um but overall it's been quite positive having a business coach um get that certain layer of confidence um when you get to share your dreams and your aspirations for yeah, when you get to share dreams and aspirations for a business with, with, with with another person, um they obviously get to validate that um they also understand the challenges that you're experiencing and they're able to basically just walk you through um those challenges and let you know where where, where you could be improving or where um or if if if there's something that you just need to just stop doing. And the other thing that Nikki helped me with is um looking at the costs of the business and looking at where I was literally just giving out money as she liked to say. So it helped to kind of put a I mean to to to put a, so what that I'm looking for a stop to that and to see how you can improve the business uh, coaching with Jackie does not guarantee that you're going to see this extraordinary growth from the moment that you start to um when you hope to finish the program, it's a process of testing and validating what works for your audience. What does not work for your audience, It's a process of having to try something to wait it out to see if your market, um, all your consumers respond to that and if not for you to adopt other strategies, which I found when you are just working by yourself um as a business, you tend to be very despondent and you tend to to just be discouraged when you try something that doesn't work and you just don't have the confidence to try something else again. Uh, so the relationship that I've had with Nike was reassuring in the sense that we would try something that doesn't work and we'll get back to the drawing board which doesn't leave you as despondent as you normally would find yourself. Um and the other thing that I liked is that you kind of develop a framework for what your business uh, needs to stand on. Um, I think you called it the pillars, the pillars of the business and what it needs to stand on. So at any time you can go back to the pillars, uh, and it will give you an understanding of what you need to amplify and where you need to basically to focus your energy on. So my experience has been positive. It's still a work in progress. The program was supposed to be a three month program but it's taken us longer because we had to wait. Um we had to wait and see certain um strategies that we test out, yes strategies that we tested to see if they do respond and basically to adapt. So it has been, I mean it still is a very fulfilling journey. Um when I started, I wasn't really, I didn't really have a goal, I just thought that it would be um a way to open my eyes to the shortcomings that I had as a business because obviously I wanted to see myself achieving certain targets, which I wasn't and I thought it would, it would be a straight, yeah, it would basically be a straight and simple, This is what you need to do, this is not what you're doing and this is what you need to do, but it's been more of a testing and validating experience um which has left me to be very comfortable and very certain with where I'm going. Um I know now what what I need to focus on and most importantly I know what my consumers, uh and my customers react to and I know the type of brand promise that I need to be focusing on, and the type of message that I need to get out to my customers. So everything that I'm doing for the future, it's been built on those pillars, which we had to literally work on for most of the two to establish that. So, So yeah.

So Nike as a coach is very open, she's engaging. She also holds you accountable to what you say you are going to do and what you are going to implement. In the beginning. She used to give a lot of homework, which I found to be quite daunting because the following week when she reviews it, you are always asking yourself did you do it right, Are you gonna have to redo it and all of that? So, so she does have a bit of a teacher element to her and you do sometimes see yourself as a student, but she's very um, she's very committed. I think that's the one thing she's very committed to to your business and to your cause. Um, even though you do know that she does have relationships with other businesses and, and, and yeah, other people who are probably in the, in the in a similar industry that you find yourself in. But I mean, you could rest assured that the confidence, the confidentiality is guaranteed and that your strategies that you implement are only for your business. That's that's what I liked about her