Business Coaching: How to Find the Right Coach (2026)

Life as an ecommerce business owner can be exhilarating, nerve-wracking, all-consuming, and occasionally isolating. Even the most successful business owners have moments of doubt. Solopreneurs torn between two equally appealing growth strategies need trusted confidantes to bounce ideas off of.

What’s a leader to do when there’s no obvious mentor in sight? One option: Hire an experienced business coach, an expert who can provide feedback, recommendations, and overall support for business success.

The business coaching industry is very much alive and growing in 2026. In the US alone, the sector is valued at an estimated $20 billion, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 4.5% over the past five years.

Here, learn what a great business coach can do for your company, what to look for in a coach, and how to find a business coach who can help you identify opportunities and establish actionable plans to achieve your company's vision. 

What is business coaching?

Business coaches are professional consultants who help company owners tackle work problems and achieve professional goals.

“A business coach is someone with specialized knowledge who collaborates with you to help improve your company,” says Kristi Soomer, a business coach who focuses on ecommerce. “A coach leverages their specialized knowledge to understand your business and its goals, provide recommendations, and guide you toward being an even better leader.”

Here’s what distinguishes coaching from other types of support, like mentoring or consulting:

• Mentoring is usually informal and experience-based. Think of a seasoned founder sharing wisdom from the trenches.
• Consulting is heavy on analysis and deliverables. A consultant is a paid professional who steps in to diagnose issues and provide solutions.
• Coaching is collaborative and goal-focused. A coach asks insightful questions to sharpen your strategic focus and keep you accountable to your vision.

Because business owners are whole humans with habits, fears, and blind spots, coaching often blends the personal with the practical. 

Business coaching services can include collaborating on a startup’s business plan, reviewing financials, recommending growth strategies, setting goals, workshopping solutions, or anything else your company requires of you. On a personal level, a coach can help you develop new skills, make decisions with confidence, and implement your goals. 

Some business coaches run mastermind groups, bringing together entrepreneurs and owners in similar situations. 

It’s also worth considering what coaching is not. It’s not therapy, and it isn’t hiring someone to “fix” your business for you, either. And it’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all pep talk. Good coaching is strategic, honest, structured, and focused on your goals for business success. 

What to expect from business coaching

A good relationship with a business coach compounds over time, often unfolding over months. 

How a business coaching relationship works 

In the early days, your coach should spend time getting to know you, your business model, your goals, and your obstacles. This is your time to lay the groundwork by sharing your fears, worries, and dreams, and setting expectations for your time working together. 

As the relationship develops, you can expect thoughtful conversations that inspire strategic thinking. Your coach is absolutely not there to judge you and your decisions, but rather to help you see what you might be missing. 

What a typical engagement looks like with a business coach

After a discovery call to explore alignment, you’ll likely move on to an in-depth kickoff session, where you’ll explain your company, goals, metrics, and challenges. Later, you’ll meet at a regular cadence that suits your needs. 

Your coach may assign action items or “homework” between sessions, and should provide the right tools, worksheets, and frameworks to help you complete them. Over time, you’ll revisit goals and tweak your strategies to fit your current reality. The best business coach relationships are iterative and flexible, adjusting as needed to keep you moving in the right direction. 

Coaching sessions come in all shapes and sizes. Some coaches prefer a rigid structure with clear agendas and goal reviews, while others favor a fluid and conversation-driven approach. 

Formats can include:

• One-on-one sessions over Zoom or by phone
• In-person strategy days or workshops 
• Email or Slack coaching for quick check-ins between sessions
• Asynchronous voice notes or recorded feedback
• Access to templates, dashboards, or frameworks to support implementation

Benefits of business coaching

• Objective perspective
• Partnership in planning
• Accountability and motivation
• Feedback and problem-solving
• Professional development
• Skills development

Although each relationship and company is different, business coaching services generally provide a few key areas of support:

Objective perspective

It is well established that diversity of thought and experience is associated with better business outcomes. One of the perks of working with a coach is getting that outsider’s view, learning from someone who isn’t knee-deep in the daily work, who can spot patterns or blind spots you might miss. This perspective can be particularly valuable as you grow your business scale. 

Say, for example, you’re running an online clothing brand and have expanded to five staff members, but are still using the same fulfillment process from your solopreneur days. A business coach might compare your fulfillment costs per order and suggest new metrics or automations you hadn’t considered.

Partnership in planning

A professional business coach understands where you want your venture to go and recommends specific strategies and tactics for getting there. 

Maybe you’re debating whether to expand into Europe or invest more in TikTok ads. With a coach, you’ll unpack both options, including what the numbers look like and how each option aligns with your term vision and strategic planning. Then you’ll pick one or two goals (e.g., “Launch in EU by Q4” or “Increase TikTok conversion to 3% by midyear”) and plan the tactics. 

Accountability and motivation

A talented business coach motivates you to make a plan and stick to it. By acting as an accountability partner, your business coach decreases the likelihood that you’ll procrastinate.

In one survey of business owners, 31% of respondents ranked accountability as coaching’s biggest benefit, followed closely by growth and profitability.

Imagine you commit to launching a new upsell funnel by the end of March and your coach schedules weekly check-ins. Because you’re held accountable, you get the launch done on time, and your average order value goes up 12% over three months—a feat you might’ve put off without that external nudging. 

Feedback and problem-solving

A great coach can identify challenges—perhaps ones you didn’t recognize—and help you create solutions. They can leverage their expertise and experience to suggest solutions to specific obstacles, while also offering action plans and feedback.

Although measuring coaching’s impact can be tricky, a small study involving 19 early-stage entrepreneurs found that evidence-based coaching led to higher levels of solution-focused thinking and goal orientation.

Let's say your abandoned-cart rate is stuck at 78%. A coach might ask you to walk through your checkout process, question each step, and suggest a 30-day test to see whether changing the color of the Buy Now button, adding urgent copy, or following up with a short feedback survey to lost-cart users will make the most difference. 

Professional development

Even successful businesspeople can improve. One leader may struggle with work-life balance, while another seeks guidance after hiring employees for an expanded team. Effective business coaching can address these personal aspects of running a company.

Imagine you’ve just hired your first operations manager. You realise you’re no longer micromanaging every parcel, but you don’t yet know how to delegate, set performance metrics, or hold your new employee accountable. A coach can help you determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) are important and how to use them to measure success.

Skills development

Beyond strategy and metrics, business coaching helps you grow personally and professionally by building skills that pay off—not just in work, but in life: 

• Soft skills: Communication, authentic leadership, emotional intelligence, delegation, resilience, and community-building
• Hard skills: Finance dashboards, digital marketing metrics, scaling operations, ecommerce funnel design, analytics, and partnership-building

On the soft-skills side, coaching might help you run weekly team huddles with confidence. On the hard-skills side, your coach might guide you toward building a proper cohort re-engagement funnel using a simple analytics dashboard that doubles your repeat purchase rate in six months. 

What to look for in a business coach

Picking a business coach is a big decision. You want someone who gets you, understands your business model, and can challenge you in a way that feels supportive. 

Here are the big things to look for: 

• Relevant experience. Look for someone with at least a few years in business leadership, consulting, operations, or entrepreneurship. Bonus points if they’ve worked with ecommerce or digital-first brands. 
• Credible training or certification. Look for coaches who’ve completed recognized coaching programs or have certification from a credible organization like the International Coaching Federation (ICF). 
• A coaching style that fits your personality. Some coaches are warm and nurturing, others are direct and tactical. Neither is inherently better—what matters is what you respond to. 
• Proof they can deliver results. Read testimonials and case studies, looking for any patterns and specific results they’ve achieved. 
• Industry specialization. Seek a coach who knows your world, whether that’s ecommerce, software-as-a-service (SaaS), direct to consumer (DTC), retail, or another niche. 
• Clear boundaries, structure, and process. A good coach should provide session structure, set expectations, and be transparent about pricing and engagement length. 

When do you need a business coach?

There may never be a perfect time to hire a coach, but you don’t have to wait until you’re struggling. Instead, look for key milestones or moments where a coach might make a difference. 

• When you’re stuck at a growth plateau. If your business is doing fine but you’re not moving forward, a coach can help you identify what’s holding you back. 
• When you’re overwhelmed and doing everything yourself. If you’re juggling too many roles and constantly putting out fires, a coach can help you build systems and delegate tasks to staff members. 
• When you’re making a big decision. If you’re planning to launch a new product line or enter a new market, a coach can be a good sounding board to help you weigh the risks and opportunities. 

How to find a good business coach

• Ask your network
• Research online and local resources
• Set up introductory calls
• Trust your gut

The right business coach is unique to you and your company, but there are a few universal tips to help you find a business coach that suits:

Ask your network

Talk to trusted sources like former colleagues, friends, fellow small business owners, and anyone else in your circle who has worked with a coach. Ask what they liked and didn’t like. Dig into details about the person’s coaching style and the outcomes they helped your contacts achieve.

“As with so much in business, one of the best methods is referrals from your network,” says coach Kristi Soomer. “It gives you a place to start, and there’s some degree of trust.”

Here are a few helpful questions to ask when evaluating referrals:

• What specific results did the coach help you achieve?
• How did their coaching style feel?
• What did you find especially helpful or unhelpful about working with them?
• How often did you meet, and did that cadence work well?
• Did the coach understand your industry or learn it quickly?
• Were there any surprises, good or bad, in the relationship?
• Would you hire them again? Why or why not?

Research online and local resources

Online resources can also help you develop a shortlist of potential candidates for your business. Memberships such as the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches maintain databases of business coaching services, which you can filter by industry and location. Depending on your niche, industry, and trade, groups may also offer resources to connect you with a business coach.

Local business groups and chambers of commerce can be another source of leads; networking events may produce similar connections.

Kristi recommends scrutinizing prospective business coaches’ websites. Read about their backgrounds, experiences, clients, and successes, as well as any external articles the business coach was quoted in or wrote themselves. Podcasts are another excellent way to get a sense of a potential coach, says Kristi, who says several clients found her via her eCommerce Maven Podcast.

Set up introductory calls

Once you’ve compiled a shortlist of business coaches, set up introductory calls or meetings. Hiring a coach is an investment of time and money, so take your time and interview like you’re hiring a long-term collaborator.

Most coaches offer a 15- or 30-minute complimentary call to assess fit. It’s a two-way evaluation, and that mutual mindset helps you get more out of the conversation. Use this time to get a real feel for how the relationship might work.

Pay attention to things like:

• How much the coach listens versus how much they talk. A great coach should spend more time asking thoughtful questions than giving monologues
• Whether they actually understand your business model or just nod along
• Whether the conversation feels collaborative or more like a pitch
• How comfortable you feel being honest with them
  
  

Ask practical questions, too: Do they stick to agendas? Are sessions structured or flexible? How often do they check in? Do they use Slack, email, dashboards, or other tools to keep you accountable?

“For both the coach and the client, it’s super worthwhile to take time for an intro call,” Kristi says. “Beyond the specifics of their work, do the two of you generally have a good rapport? This is someone you’ll likely be talking to often, and you want to find the right person to help achieve your business goals.”

Trust your gut

Sometimes, a business coach who seems perfect on paper just doesn’t feel like the right fit for you. Maybe you didn’t love their communication style on the call. Perhaps they glossed over important details. Or maybe the two of you just didn’t click. It’s OK; you can keep looking to find someone who feels like a match.

“We’re not therapists, but there is a very emotional component,” Kristi says. “You need to click with someone for them to be a trusted partner. Sometimes their job might just be to sit with you on a bad day for the business, hear you out, and ultimately help you find a path forward. You need to feel comfortable sharing all of that.”