As a coach and a consultant myself, it’s important to understand the difference between these two roles, as a lot of people mix them up because there can be some overlap in how these services are provided. However, they are two distinct business models.
People hire coaches and consultants because they are looking for support and guidance in the areas of their lives or professions where they are struggling or have a lack of confidence.
Ultimately, coaches and consultants are there to help you reach your goals and find real success, but let’s look more at the difference between the two.
The Role of a Coach
Coaches help you to accomplish something specific, for example sports training; business; health and wellbeing; personal development etc. Most coaches will focus on improving your mindset and enhancing your skills to make you feel more confident and motivated to achieve your goals. Essentially, a coach helps you to help yourself.
When you’re working with have a great coach, they will guide you to understanding and taking ownership of why you want to make the changes you’re trying to make, focus on finding the solutions and help you to make a plan to keep you on track.
Coaches are there to help you to make the right decisions that will inevitably lead you to success!
The Role of a Consultant
Whilst a coach helps you to develop yourself and be motivated to take action on your goals, a consultant is more proactive in helping you to actually achieve or do something.
Consultants are professionals in their field and give specific ideas or solutions to individuals and companies to help them perform better or deliver a required outcome.
The great thing about consulting is the ability to work directly with you and be more active in the projects that they are consulting on, but with coaching, the expectation is on you as the client to take action and figure things out on their own, with the support and guidance of your coach.
Consultants, among other things, provide research, advice, recommendations and a plan for your project as well as potentially being on hand to execute what needs to be done.
A great consultant can also work with or lead your team to delivering the results you are looking for and if required, measure them against your return on investment.
Where do you need support?
So, as a personal brand coach I help my clients develop their mindset and step into their success, learn how to work on their skills, knowledge and experience so they can feel valued, confident and empowered about who they are and what they have to offer their potential audience. Taking the steps they need to take to present themselves authentically as an authority and influence within their area of expertise.
As a business brand consultant, my approach is much more hands on in working on my clients to develop their brand in a holistic way, working from the bottom up to create consistency, improved productivity and a perception with their clients or customers that again, is authentic and influential within their industry
It’s understandable that they may be similar and therefore it’s also easy to confuse the two roles as they are both advisory in nature, but these two business models are distinct.
The reason I offer both is because as a entrepreneur myself, I know how important you are to your business. Therefore, the personal brand coaching I provide is essential for helping you to manage how you see yourself (your mindset) and focus on developing and managing strengths, weaknesses, assets and challenges so that you can maintain your success.
In addition, if your intention is to create a sustainable and long-term business, having a brand that lives and breathes its mission, vision and values is what will set you up for achieving this goal and where the business brand consultancy steps in as a full brand package for you and your business.
If you are interested in finding out more about how I can help you with your personal or business brand development, why not book a 90-minute discovery session with me and experience my coaching and consultancy style for free!