If you’re an educator, coach, consultant or advisor you usually want one main thing for your clients - that they use your advice.

That only makes sense, right? They’re paying you fees, sometimes large fees, to help them either change something or accomplish something that they just can’t manage on their own. It doesn’t matter whether you’re hired to give advice, as a consultant might do, or be more hands-on in helping with change as a coach might - the desired outcome is still the same.

This sometimes leads to pressure to help our clients get results. A little pressure on the client to change is good. After all, change is seldom easy and often requires a little push to get started (okay, and sometimes a big push).

Yet any good coach or consultant knows that we have to manage our clients and how they progress with a bit of skill. Sometimes we can put it all out there and people get it. Other times we have to pull back a bit and offer change in small steps. So we give each client what they can handle in the way they can implement it best. As I’ve seen it, this is the art to being an effective coach or consultant - and even to being an effective teacher, parent, spouse, or friend really.

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Andy Lapointe wrote an interesting article called Forget the Question…Change the Answer. In it he states that “For years…business owners…have wrestled with a number of questions about maintaining and growing market share and profitability.” Questions like “How can I increase my profits?”

Andy goes on to show how over the decades the question doesn’t change, but the answer does.

For instance, take the question, How Can I increase my profits? In the mid 19^th century the answer may have been: “Forget the pony express, start a railroad company.” Yet, by the late 20^th century the answer to the same question might be: “Start an technology-based Internet company.”

That might work for the large corporation or the v.c. startup. But these are not the kind of questions that small business owners need to be asking.

Why? Because these questions put the cart way before the horse.

Should you want to increase your profits or gain marketshare - absolutely! But for most small businesses, gaining marketshare doesn’t need to be the focus.

So what does need to be your focus? What questions should small business owners ask themselves as they begin or look to grow their business?