What is a Business Advisor?
A Business Advisor is a behind the scenes expert thought partner to guide and support a senior executive charged with delivering breakthrough results. Critical when the stakes are high, an advisor helps drive visible results and impactful leadership.
Serving as a sounding board, a Business Advisor provides guidance, content, and tools. Typically, more prescriptive than coaching, conversations with an advisor tend to be more about building strategies and influencing optics, perceptions, and results than about questions and reflection.
“We help you clarify the real issues and get them out on the table where they can be solved. Because you can’t solve what you’re not talking about.”
Jennifer Eggers
Who Benefits from Business Advisory Coaching?
Business advisory engagements are customized and often longer-term than coaching. An advisor is an objective, confidential, trusted expert thought partner who can strategize with you to plan your lasting impressions. Advisors help read the landscape, accelerate business results, and equip leaders to demonstrate visible leadership and credibility fast.
Business advisory coaching is designed for senior executives (SVP to C-Level) facing one or more scenarios where the organization must mitigate risk and maximize the ability to get it right the first time.
Business advisory coaching helps leaders:
Coach vs. Advisor
While there is some necessary overlap, coaches and advisors serve different purposes and have different skill-sets.
Main differences include:
COACH | ADVISOR |
|---|---|
| A coach tends to focus primarily on behavior and changing perceptions, often informed by personality assessments. | An advisor tends to focus on strategies, business results, optics and action items, often informed by stakeholders and results achieved. |
| Coaching is delivered primarily through thought provoking questions and reflection. | An advisor asks questions to be informed but will often provide a point of view, data, relevant content or applicable tools, ideas and solutions. |
| A coach generally acts as a third observer directing the client to come to their own insights. | An advisor may not have the exact answer, but they are a thought partner who is “in it with you” in building solutions and will provide insight and direct experience when relevant. |
| A coach can be highly effective without direct experience. | An Advisor leverages their experience in similar situations to draw parallels and help you see around corners and anticipate what’s coming. |
| Coaching is generally more behavioral insight-based. | Advisors tend to be more specific business focused and sometimes prescriptive. |