Episode 103: Maximizing Coaching Impact and Business Growth with Gary B. Henson

Ever wondered how to transform your coaching practice into a thriving business? Join us as we chat with Gary Henson, a respected business coach and prolific author, who reveals the blueprint for turning coaching into a sustainable entrepreneurial venture. Gary shares his journey, including his experience coaching a billion-dollar healthcare organization, and breaks down the vital differences between business and executive coaching. Get ready for a treasure trove of wisdom on structuring a coaching practice to maximize both client impact and business success.

As we explore the entrepreneurial mindset necessary for coaches, you'll hear compelling stories and actionable advice. Discover why having a well-structured plan and sticking to it is non-negotiable, and how understanding your niche and ideal clients can set you on the path to long-term success. We also touch on the multifaceted nature of running a coaching business, from marketing and sales to accounting, illustrated through the story of a former corporate VP who successfully transitioned into coaching. This segment is packed with practical insights that will resonate with both new and experienced coaches.

Finally, we reflect on the evolution of the coaching industry and the importance of choosing the right coach. Hear a personal anecdote about hiring a challenging but effective coach, emphasizing the value of stepping outside your comfort zone. We'll discuss the origins of business coaching with pioneers like Jim Selman and Werner Erhard, and explore the modern-day applications of AI tools like ChatGPT in coaching. This episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about mastering entrepreneurial coaching strategies and achieving sustainable success.

Watch the full interview by clicking here.

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Gary Henson here.

Gary has provided Free Resources to the listeners of choice which you can find here.

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

Transcript

Garry Schleifer: 0:08

Welcome to the choice Magazine podcast, Beyond the Page. No, not the Twilight Zone, Beyond the Page. I know it sounds like it. choice, the magazine of professional coaching, is your go-to source for expert insights and in-depth features from the world of professional coaching. I am your host, Garry Schleifer and I am thrilled to have you join us. In each episode we go, well, go figure, beyond the page of articles published in choice Magazine and dive deeper into some of the most recent and relevant topics impacting our world of professional coaching. We explore the content and interview the talented minds, let's see if I get this right because we're on video, behind the articles and uncovering stories that make an impact.

Garry Schleifer: 0:49

Choice is more than a magazine. For over 21 years, we've built a community of like-minded people who create, use and share coaching tools, tips and techniques to add value to their businesses and, of course, to make a difference with their the clients. That's what we're all trying to do. In today's episode, I'm speaking with Coach Gary Henson, who is the author of an article in our latest issue " A Livelihood From Coaching ~ Feasible Or Fanciful. His article is titled "down to business getting real about coaching and creating your ideal future. Gary Henson has trained and certified more than 7,000 business coaches worldwide over the past 35 plus years. I think he'd like to say it's 37. He's founder of businesscoach. com and established becomeabusinesscoach. com, a company devoted entirely to equipping business coaches to be highly successful through training, resources and certification. He has personally coached more than 500 organizations and 7,000 coaches as an industry expert, business coach, mentor and trusted advisor. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today.

Gary Henson: 2:01

You're welcome, Garry, and I cherish our relationship.

Garry Schleifer: 2:10

You were mentioning this was like our 20th anniversary of knowing each other and I'm like, I don't know how you knew that, but I'm not going to argue with it which is, you know, says we've been around for a long time.

Gary Henson: 2:21

Yes, we have. Yeah, and we both still have hair left on our head.

Garry Schleifer: 2:27

I know, right? I love that part. Yeah, but we still need the glasses, you know. Yeah, absolutely so. So, other than the obvious, I mean the issue was about business, about being a coach, making money from coaching, questioning whether it's feasible or fanciful. Why did you decide to write at this time?

Gary Henson: 2:48

Why at this time? Because it's a broken record for me, Garry. For years I've been saying to coaches and potential coaches, people that are going from part-time to full-time or people that want to start business coaching or coaching as a career, I think we've been doing a horrible injustice to them by not pointing out the fact that we have to be entrepreneurs. You know, you may be the best coach in the world and I think you're excellent at coaching.

Gary Henson: 3:16

And I've heard some things that some of your clients have said and I've followed some of your work on the coaching side outside of the magazine. And if you can't let your people know that they have to think like an entrepreneur, like choice Magazine doesn't just happen. It's the entrepreneurial spirit, the entrepreneurial direction that you go in order to make it profitable.

Gary Henson: 3:40

And coaches, as noble as we are, and I love the fact that we want to make a difference with our clients as noble as we are we have to provide ourselves a profit and a business model to sustain ourselves. Otherwise we're not going to help anybody. We do all the buddy-buddy coaching we want to do, but it's not making a difference in the world. The difference that we make is when we engage with a client and truly make a difference in their business and personal lives and we move the ball forward for them. And we have to think like an entrepreneur, have a plan of attack, have a system, a process, a direction that we can work with our clients to make sure that we're doing just what I said, making a difference with our clients.

Garry Schleifer: 4:25

Yeah, having that opportunity freely. Okay, so I need to ask you a question, for myself and for our audience. So you call yourself business coach and you teach coaches the business of coaching and how to be a business coach both? Yes, that's correct. And so how do you distinguish yourself from, let's say, an executive coach?

Gary Henson: 4:51

Yeah, that's a great question and people oftentimes get confused and they come to us wanting to have conversations about business coaching, executive coaching, success coaching and they get confused with all of that and again, I think our industry has done a pretty poor job of defining these things because I think there's several definitions. But my opinion is a business coach works with the owners, the leaders of the organization from the top down. Typically they have employees, a number of employees, and they take their business to the next level. An executive coach works one-on-one with executives, in my opinion, and works one-on-one with executives in that business on a one-on-one relationship, and they do personal, business and executive coaching with that individual and it doesn't impact directly the rest of the organization.

Garry Schleifer: 5:45

So what's the biggest business you've coached? Like give revenue, employees size like business.

Gary Henson: 5:53

Garry, I've done hundreds of these interviews and all kinds of podcasts and video interviews and audio interviews. Nobody's ever asked that question before.

Gary Henson: 6:04

I was hoping at some point in my career somebody would ask me that question. Actually it was a billion dollar organization, annual revenue of billion dollars. It's a health care organization that was worldwide and I'm very proud of that. Not because it was a billion dollars, not because it's in a certain industry or whatever. The reason why I'm proud of it is because the companies merged with other companies and they kept growing and growing and growing. It was a lot smaller when I initially started coaching them and the president of one of the divisions called me up one day random.

Gary Henson: 6:42

I wasn't expecting the phone call and he said you know, we are now merging with another organization. We're going to become a billion dollars in annual revenue if you combine all of our different divisions. And he says I don't get along with the president of that other division and he and his executive team are coming to California next month and I would like to hire you to help facilitate that particular meeting, a two-day meeting, and walk us through the planning session. I want you to be there to protect him and me, but I also want to make sure that we are moving forward and we are making a difference in the organization and we're not getting stuck with the political side or each individual ambition of the people attending. Wow, amazing, what a great story. Well, congratulations, kudos, thank you A lot of fun. I have a lot of fun with these and I probably should say at this point, there may be some people listening to this and saying to themselves but I don't have what Coach Gary or Garry at choice Magazine have.

Gary Henson: 7:46

I don't have the skill set, the experience, the background, the gray hair, the wisdom to be able to work with an organization like that. And that's simply not the truth, because the difference that we make with people is not simply asking a bunch of questions and wearing them down to see if they can answer the questions or have breakthroughs themselves. It's not bringing an MBA or a PhD to the table. Those are not necessary for business coaching. Business coaching, we can do three things for the client that they'll never, ever be able to do for themselves, and the people that are listening to this recording can do this. Three things are very simple. Number one we bring an outside objective opinion. So everybody has an opinion nowadays more than ever, and you bring your opinion, your support, your opinion to that business leader or leadership team and you bring that opinion and it's just your opinion. So we could have five different people, five different opinions, but the leader gets to choose what he or she wants to follow and follow through with.

Gary Henson: 8:54

The second thing is we become a powerful accountability partner. If we can get out of our head and get beyond that I want to look good and I want to make them like me and trust me and so on and so forth and we just become their accountability partner and say, look, you promised you were going to do some assignments last week when we met and you didn't do them and we're not going to move the ball forward. You're not going to get the results you want out of your business model unless you do that and follow through and read the books that I'm assigning to you and go through the different assignments that you have. If you don't do that, then we're not going to get the results that you wanted. You said you wanted the results. I'm here to protect you and make sure you do that.

Gary Henson: 9:35

And then the third thing is to help them get results in their business, and we can do that again by helping them transform the thinking process that they have in their mindset and shift from I know all that. I know everything about my business, I've been doing this for 10 years and shift into something different and maybe look at different things. And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. So it's an opportunity for people to be coached and not understanding or believing that they understand everything that there is to know about their business.

Garry Schleifer: 10:08

Yeah, no, well said and it sounds like a little bit of that is consultative. Would that be the case for your style of coaching?

Gary Henson: 10:17

Yes, yes, our style is that we give them the consulting piece for free, so we have a whole list of items for them to a checklist. And, by the way, your listeners can become a business coach. com, and they can get free resources directly from that website, no charge, no obligation. There's some really good stuff and they can get a list of requirements of the consultative side that we have our clients go through to make sure they have job descriptions and org charts and regular meetings with their entire staff, that they have a vision statement, mission statement, core values. These kinds of things are significant and we give them that for free to get to the coaching side so that we can get inside of their psychology and find out what's really holding the organization back.

Garry Schleifer: 11:14

Yeah, it's kind of like a massive corporate discovery session. Yes, right. There you go yeah.

Gary Henson: 11:20

There you go.

Garry Schleifer: 11:21

And folks. You need to have this in place in order for us to move forward effectively. Standard, absolutely, that's great, absolutely. So I'm going to go back a little bit. Earlier, you said that coaches going into the business need to have an entrepreneurial mindset. Would you say that's what you might think is the biggest mistake coaches make, or is there something else we need to know?

Gary Henson: 11:43

Well, there's a lot of mistakes that we make.

Garry Schleifer: 11:46

Sorry, we're not making people wrong, but different. Yeah, let's go from there.

Gary Henson: 11:50

Yeah. So the idea is that if you're an entrepreneur, you have set aside a certain amount of money to promote your business. You have set aside a certain amount of money to sustain yourself and pay yourself as you are attracting the right types of clients. You are putting together a plan, a plan of attack. It doesn't have to be a 50-page business plan, but you can have a two or three page plan and you're going to stick to that plan and do those things on your plan daily and remind yourself.

Gary Henson: 12:23

This is what I agreed is going to get me the success. This is what I would teach my clients have a plan and let's follow the plan. You're going to understand what your niche is. You're going to understand who your ideal client is, and all of those things are entrepreneurial spirits. Again, I don't want to placate our audience, but those are things that choice Magazine had to make, those choices and decisions, in order to be in business. You can't just throw something on gets well up, well, let's just write some articles and and a whole bunch of subscribers are going to subscribe to our magazine. We got to have a plan and a business plan and a model going forward so that you know that you're following your plan and that, and you're able to pivot if things in your plan don't don't work out the way you want to.

Garry Schleifer: 13:10

Plan the work, work the plan. You know it's funny. I guess it's a thing that I take for granted, but I know that others need to have, is I've been an entrepreneur for longer than I've been running choice and all that. I've run several multi-million dollar businesses, art or full and merged and sold and all this sort of stuff. So to me it's kind of normal that you know, running a choice magazine and my coaching business is just you know, it's just what I do and it's not everybody. So it's always a good reminder.

Garry Schleifer: 13:43

I remember back in the day when people were first starting office and coaches I think they're still doing it, but it was a second or third career and they come out of corporate and it'd be like, okay, I've done my coach training and I hang up my shingle, I'm going to go be a coach. But they forgot that behind them in the corporation they had HR and accounting and marketing and sales, all that sort of stuff. And all of a sudden they're like oh, that's me. And I'm here to say that after 24 years of combined, you know doing both choice and coaching, so much has changed to make your life easier in all those categories.

Garry Schleifer: 14:22

It still goes back to business first, coaching second. Don't stop your marketing machine when you start getting a roll of clients, you have to run them continuously. Keep going and I know you and I know this, and I hope that our listeners are taking this into into heart and into consideration and lean on us if they want to like, we're always available. I know you are, I know I am. It is right in my signature schedule a call.

Garry Schleifer: 14:52

It might be a couple weeks out, but you'll get in there and I'm happy to talk to you, so thank you. What other advice would you give coaches struggling to earn enough income as a full time coach?

Gary Henson: 15:07

Yeah, you made a distinction there and I'd like to elaborate a little bit on what you said. There's a distinction of I'm an entrepreneur at someone else's business. Ok, so I had a gentleman call me a number of years ago and he was an expert Senior VP at General Motors, and they gave him an early retirement program. He was in his 50s and his wife said now, if you think you're going to sit home, eat bonbons and watch tv all day, that's not happening here that's her job and she doesn't do that, just kidding.

Gary Henson: 15:46

Actually, she was a full-time nurse and she had five years before retirement and she was kind of a little bit on the jealous side right. And he said back to her well, if you think I'm going to sit home and do honey- do lists all day long, every day that's not happening either.

Gary Henson: 16:01

So she said okay, so the obvious choice is take a part-time or a full-time J-O-B. So he looked at his career and he said one of the things, as he called me and first had a first conversation with me, he said one of the things that I do is I mentor a lot of the people that have come up through the organization and need some help and support. They don't get the proper training, they don't get the proper coaching in their career in order to fulfill their job requirements and their status. So he says I've been really good at coaching. Do you think I'd be a good at being a coach? And I said I think you have. I said what kind of sales experience do you have? Oh, he says that for years I was in the sales department. I was in charge of this and this and this and I said good. So if you're an entrepreneur and you can write out a plan, and we'll teach you how to do that. We have different pieces in our programs that teach people how to become an entrepreneur. Then you can go ahead and fill that out, do your plan and then work your plan and plan your work accordingly. Okay, now, that's one, one example.

Gary Henson: 17:08

I get hundreds of other phone calls of people that have what you and I would refer to as maybe an entrepreneurial spirit or a little bug in their system. Okay, they want to become an entrepreneur, they're frightened of it. And here's the distinction, Garry. A lot of them don't want to put in the time, the resources and invest the money in their career. They just want to jump from I make X amount of dollars as an executive over here. Now I'm going to get into this career and I'm going to get all these free resources from all these different places. And in parentheses, I want to say, I'm sorry, I can't help myself. I got to say this. They get bad advice from a lot of different organizations that are out there and they think that they can do all this because I have been coaching people and mentoring people and working with people for a long time now. But they miss, it's not the entrepreneurial spirit. It's the entrepreneurial acumen. It's the business mindset. It's the entrepreneurs' ideas that make them successful.

Gary Henson: 18:14

I still learn. I'm a researcher, I still learn things that I think, oh my gosh, I've been doing this the hard way for all these years and now I've learned something new and, like you say, the resources are unlimited. So a lot of times what I'll do is I'll find a really good book, I'll get it vetted by a lot of our coaches, a lot of our clients. They agree it's one of the better books that have transformation. It's got expanded thinking, it's got new learning inside of it and a business lesson.

Gary Henson: 18:47

And I'll get the MP3 or the recording and while I'm driving to work in the morning or running an errand, I'll be listening to that stuff and learning new things all the time. And that's what entrepreneurs do. It's not just the spirit that's in your heart. That you have, but you also have learned the mindset of an entrepreneur and you take that to a level to where it's become successful. And when it's not successful, you and your team look at it and say, okay, we need to make some adjustments here because this part is not working.

Garry Schleifer: 19:13

Yeah, well, and you mentioned that in your article too. Your points for, put you in the right path to success as a coach and that is number four, become a continuous learner. So, yes, exactly what you're saying. And I agree, it's not about getting new certifications, it's about helping you grow your business and become that well trusted advisor and like confidant really in there. I'm going to point to that as well, that part of the article, because I really love what you said and I was guilty of this for a while to, hire a coach.

Garry Schleifer: 19:48

If you're going to and what you said is you're going to convince others that coaching is a good idea, you better have a coach yourself. And to me, I'm currently on a path of where am I out of integrity? And that was one of them. And I've since hired a coach. I've been working with somebody for a few months now. So I'm back on the wagon or is it off the wagon, I don't know, but I have a coach now. But seriously, like, how can you? I mean, even doctors have doctors and dentists have dentists. Yes, and for us it's kind of a double-edged sword, because not only do we have a coach to help us progress, but we also get to see what their methodology is and how they coach right. Yes, and we're all very collegial. I think doctors would criticize each other, but coaches would be more collegial and go wow, that's a great skill, or, you know, like we always say, what a great question, I love it. So thank you very much for saying that. I really appreciate it.

Gary Henson: 20:47

Yeah, and I would go a little deeper on that topic, Garry, and say that not only if you're going to promote coaching and suggest to people you need a coach, then you should have one. That's one thing, but here's a tip for your listeners that I think is very, very valuable that I learned the hard way. When I hired a high-end coach and paid a lot of money for a coach to push me to that next level, I started experiencing my resentment towards him asking me to do assignments. I started experiencing when I wrote a check and paid him and when he called me out on certain things, I started noticing internally my emotions responding to those things, and I said to myself, wow, my clients probably feel the same way.

Gary Henson: 21:38

I need to learn a little bit more diplomacy and how to work with them so that they understand the purpose here. It's not just for me to show off and say, Garry, you need to do this assignment and I'm going to send you this information. You need to fill it out. It's going to take you hours to do it. That may be the case, but the point is you need to do that work to get to the next level. That's something that I can see from here, looking at you, that you need to grow and learn and get out of that assignment. Get out of that assignment.

Garry Schleifer: 22:07

So it's really powerful to experience having a paid coach, somebody that you pay to coach you so that you can get all of the experiences that your clients are getting as well, right, and to see and know the value you're getting. And, if you have that reaction, dig deeper, like you did. And yeah, and something else that came to mind when I read that section. I want to bring this up and I know this isn't you or I and you said this earlier about different programs with people claiming you can get here, here and here, and it kind of goes along with this cope, having a coach conversation, go ahead and hire who you want to hire, but make sure they're a real coach and make sure that they are truly successful, because I hear far too many people saying you know, claiming be a six figure, now it's seven figure coach and stuff like this, and first of all, they're not. Anybody could be a coach.

Garry Schleifer: 23:03

So don't get me wrong. I know that we're kind of in that gray area. Trademark coach is actually a handbag. But do some due diligence into who you're hiring. See that they have truly have success in the area that you want them to coach you on. Right, right, like the guy that I hired recently, he's been coaching since Thomas Leonard was teaching. He didn't get taught by Thomas Leonard, but he was taught in that era with that school and I hired him because I had heard that he kind of holds no prisoners, gentle soul, extremely effective, and it scared me to hire him.

Gary Henson: 23:46

Yeah.

Garry Schleifer: 23:47

And so I was finally ready to hire him and he's given me some weird assignments. Like there was one where he said go with your mother to church. So my mom goes to church all the time and I don't, and it's a bit of a contention between her and her kid. And it just so happened that that week I was going to visit, it was Mother's Day and of course the family was together and we all went to church and and I'm here to tell you it's still standing. No one was struck by lightning or hurt in the process of me entering a church. Ok, but I didn't really know why, and I may never know why, and sometimes that's true too about an assignment by a coach. Right, yes, absolutely.

Gary Henson: 24:26

Yeah, right, I think I think another disservice that we do in this industry as an industry, Garry, is we put certifications and letters and numbers after our title as more important than actually learning and doing coaching and expanding our capabilities. And I applaud that gentleman. I don't know why he gave you that assignment, but that's a sharp coach. Gets you out of your comfort zone and do something that you don't want to do. Now, there was a, there was a value in appeasing your mother and Mother's Day and all that, but you getting out of your comfort zone and doing something, there's value there for you to understand what you can and can't do, and look inside of yourself and see why am I resisting this? What is it about this assignment that I don't want to do this?

Gary Henson: 25:22

Right, exactly, and so it's not about the initials or the letters, the Roman numerals after your title as a coach, as a life coach, a business coach, whatever. It's more important that we understand that there's got to be a solid methodology that we follow and that we bring to the table for our clients and we make it really, really simple for our students and the people that we train in the coaching arena. But they got to do the work. You have to do that work and I don't know everybody's psychology.

Gary Henson: 25:55

I don't know what everybody is resisting and embracing and what their blind spots are. But it's up to me to bring to the table the best possible, and I'm going to use a word that's underutilized in our industry, the best possible methodology, system, process that people can embrace and learn and utilize, that works. And if I haven't figured it out in 37 years, I'm never going to figure it out. So I'm going to say ours works.

Garry Schleifer: 26:27

Yeah, and I want to add to that and go back to what you're saying about having certification stuff like that. What I've noticed for myself over the last couple of years is this I've been sitting down and saying, okay, where do I want to be as a professional coach? What do I need to be doing next, as opposed to just grabbing the next program that's on the wall, right? So, for example, I'm working towards my MCC with the International Coaching Federation Master Certified Coach, and I know I need more coaching externally to record, more peer mentor coaching. I've done coaching supervision, so I know the plan and so I'm sticking to that and I'm not getting distracted by the shiny objects. Right? Yes, I'm not doing those. I'm really not doing anything else because I want the universe to also help guide me.

Garry Schleifer: 27:21

So I will say there's some faith in there as well, and other things have come up and it looks like I won't be doing it this year, but I have no reason why I can't get doing it next year. So plan the work, work the plan. Don't get distracted by shiny objects, right? Yes, absolutely. You know we're getting close to wrapping up, but I wanted to get your take on what changes you've seen in your 37 plus years as the founder of becomeabusinesscoach. com and business oach. com? You've been a steady Eddie. You've been like this. What's moved around you? What's changed?

Gary Henson: 27:58

Well, if you do the math, Garry, you'll notice that there was no internet when I started our business, so we were well and there was no coaching, like no, the profession hadn't actually begun.

Gary Henson: 28:14

I learned business coaching and coaching from Jim Selman and Warner Erhart.

Gary Henson: 28:18

They were my mentors back 37 years ago, and so these guys were actually the early forerunners in the industry in the 60s and 70s of the last century. They were actually doing transformational business coaching and coaching in group and individual settings. So when I initially started, there was no internet, the internet comes along and one of my clients sits me down one day after the internet is new and they says, well, what do you do? And I said, well, you're my client, you know what I do. I coach you in business. What do you call yourself? I said well, look at my business card, says I'm a business coach. He says what's your domain name going to be? I go what's the domain name?

Gary Henson: 29:02

That's how that's how I paid $35 for businesscoach. com way back in the original days of that. So what's evolved is internet, all of the different tools that we have available to us thanks to the internet, and emails and texts and all those things. But I would say that what really intrigues me now is I'm really following and learning artificial intelligence and seeing how that can help us, and I would say to the listeners that you need to really pay attention and not just go and get a free chat GBT account and experiment, but look at a couple of the different, they're very inexpensive, the different systems and don't be afraid to put some really hard questions in there and keep asking those questions. Like how do I develop a business plan for a business coach, for a life coach, for a executive coach? How Okay? So tell me more.

Gary Henson: 30:07

Because that's what I've been doing and it's been giving me some incredible, incredible insights, and all of my emails that I send are databases and all of the work that we put out. We always run it back through AI to make sure that it's spell checked and it's grammar checked and it points out different things to us. So there's so many great tools out there and the industry has expanded so much. It's just unbelievable what's going on. And not to mention I should probably also add not to mention, when I first started telling people I was a business coach or a coach, they said, oh yeah, you do marketing and sales. They said all kinds of things, everything but what I do and so the industry is now a multibillion dollar industry and most of the Fortune 500 companies have executive coaches and business coaches. Most of the major players in the world today, including actors and authors and book writers and all these people, are hiring coaches now and they're using a lot of the things that we as an industry have developed. So we've come a long way and we've got a long way to go.

Garry Schleifer: 31:16

Yeah, exactly, we're all transforming. To your point about AI, so for more information about augmented AI, which you're talking about, so supporting us as coaches and entrepreneurs? We did an issue on AI and coaching last year. One of the writers, Jonathan Reitz and I had a great interview and he mentioned a number of tools for coaches inside the actual coaching to support them in their mentor coaching and evaluation and preparation for being a better coach and a coach in general for certification, but for their clients. I think the other consideration is what's generative coaching, and I think that's still something that the jury's still out on for us as coaches. Although another friend, David Morelli, he's developing something through OwlHub. I interviewed him on the AI topic as well recently, and so those would be two great podcasts for people to listen to or articles to read. Yes, absolutely thank you for that reminder and, and I think, bottom line around AI and all that is, you can't be afraid of something that you know, so go find out more, right?

Garry Schleifer: 32:36

Get curious. Just ask how other people are using it. You talked about chat GPT, now we're talking about it like it was, you know, a ham sandwich. It's normal. I recently had a great experience with a fellow coach. We were at a leadership retreat and he walked me through and he was amazed at how I switched.

Garry Schleifer: 33:10

You know, when you're using Google, you just put in a question, right, or Siri, yeah, sorry, my phone's right here. Hey, Siri, hey, tell me this and stupid Siri will say here's what I found on the web and I'm like that's not what I want to know. But Chat GPT, consider having a conversation with it. And I did my mission and vision and I would say well, you know, that's great. Uh, we call him Chad, that's great Chad, but it's missing this word and this word and I'd like to have it feel more like this. And it's still requires our input, our oversight and approval before you can, and nobody says you have to use it. It's just a tool and I think everybody's afraid of the matrix and all the science fiction aspects of it.

Gary Henson: 33:46

Y eah, I would like to add a tip to that for people, something that I did, I think, last week or the week before that's a real simple thing. I went in there and, as a business coach, I said what are the 10 top topics that business owners are searching for most? What are the things that are top of mind for business owners and leaders? Where are business owners struggling?

Gary Henson: 34:10

So you just keep asking those questions and, if nothing else, it's doing the research for you, whereas if you go to the internet, I'm not going to mention Google or Yahoo or anybody like that, but if you go to the internet in general and you ask a question, it's going to give you a lot of different other companies that have answers and different resources and things, and a lot of that is spun through marketing and advertising and positioning, whereas the AI is strictly searching the world for answers and giving you the answer that they see is best suited for your question.

Garry Schleifer: 34:43

And you know that leads right away to perfect thing. You've got those top 10. You want to make sure that they're really relevant to your particular clients. Do a quick survey. Ask them which one of these is relevant to you? What are the top three things that are keeping you up at night right now? And then you've verified the information you've got, in case anybody listening is thinking well you know, is it real or is it not? There's a way to make it real. Again edit censorship choice.

Gary Henson: 35:11

I would ask the search. How do I know this is real information? See what they say. They may come back and say they got it from an article in Fortune magazine, or it could be a number of ways.

Garry Schleifer: 35:24

It came from choice magazine. It came from choice. There you go.

Gary Henson: 35:26

We searched and we found that choice had the right answers, and so we're going with those.

Garry Schleifer: 35:31

I love it, I love it. Oh my goodness, Gary, this has been great. What additional advice would you offer the listeners in addition to what they've read in the article and heard from us today?

Gary Henson: 35:48

Well, there's one other topic that I would add that I've been thinking about as we've been speaking, and that is we've talked about being an entrepreneur. We talked about planning and work your plan and plan your work, and all that. But I think there's another exercise that is very much missing in our industry, and that is what is the outcome that I want? If I'm going to be a certain type of blank coach and I'm going to charge blank dollars per hour, per month, whatever, we personally never charged by the hour, so I'm against that. But if people, if that's their idea, then multiply that times how many clients do I need to have and how much money do I want to make? Can I actually do it? We get so many people that come to us and they say I bought this guy's course, this guy's course, this guy's course.

Gary Henson: 36:38

And I said well, did you do the math? If what they taught you is accurate and if you're going to use their system for your pricing model and what you're going to provide for your clients, then how many clients do you need and how many hours a week is that going to take you to do that? I did that exercise. A coach brought me to that to my attention years and years and years ago and I was horrified when I hung up the phone because we didn't have video in those days. I hung up the phone and I did the exercise and I thought if I'm the most successful marketing guy in the world, I'm going to work 80 hours a week and I'm not going to make my goal.

Garry Schleifer: 37:18

Exactly yeah.

Gary Henson: 37:19

So we need to think like an entrepreneur, but we also need to do the math and do the planning of understanding. If I'm successful and if I get to the goals, what is it going to take for me in terms of how many hours a week, and so on and so forth. Now I get business coaches that come to me and say well, I'm working 30 hours a week. Now how can I make a half a million dollars and work 20 hours a week? And so we start working backwards from that.

Garry Schleifer: 37:48

Increase your rates. There's the first one there you go.

Gary Henson: 37:53

So that's a tip that I think is worth people really doing the exercise and paying attention. Yeah.

Garry Schleifer: 38:00

Yeah, that's great, thank you, and thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode. It's been absolutely fabulous. Thank you for all your words of wisdom and sharing your experience over these 37 plus years. You're the winner. Longest before the internet, both of us actually. Best way to reach you. Should it be through businesscoach. com or an email or LinkedIn? What would you prefer?

Gary Henson: 38:25

Actually, I think the best thing for people to do is just go. They can reach me through becomeabusinesscoach. com. My handle is Gary@ businesscoachcom.

Garry Schleifer: 38:37

With one R, not two like my name.

Gary Henson: 38:38

G-A-R-Y, one R. Gary@ businessach. com and there's a lot of free resources that we put on that website, Garry, that are right out of our program.

Gary Henson: 38:48

So we don't make up phony half-baked cakes and put it on there and say now you have to contact us to get the rest of the information. It is stuff right out of our playbooks, right out of our system, our methodology. We put it on there. There's a bunch of them on there. I would encourage people to go and get the free resources and take advantage of that and they can always as you said earlier, can always contact me and or you.

Gary Henson: 39:12

We're happy to answer questions and give feedback to people and get them on the best track that they can be on.

Garry Schleifer: 39:16

Thank you very much for that. Very generous. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe like you did to get here via your favorite podcast app. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine, you can sign up for your free digital issue of Choice Magazine by going to choice-online. com and clicking the sign up now button. Thanks again, Gary.

Gary Henson: 39:41

My pleasure.

Garry Schleifer: 39:44

I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.