AidaCom Business Coaching

Dr. Aida Anderson: Business Coach

For over 20 years AidaCom Business Coaching has been helping businesses small and large run and grow their business.

Dr. Aida Andersen (Dr. A) has a wealth of experience and great enthusiasm for business owners who have the vision of growth.(Image Credit: AidaCom Business Coaching)

KNR: I would like to know about your training and background as a business coach.

Dr. A: I’ve been a business owner for 25 years and basically what I have been working in is strategic planning, HR development, communication skills. I got into all that because I have a Master’s Degree in English and applied linguistics and basically worked a lot with teaching people how to communicate in business and English.

It’s a different language than the language that we speak on the street. So we have to understand how to communicate, how to write, how to present, et cetera, and that developed basically into the business part of it and I love studying. I’m very academic and I’ve taken various degrees but my most important degree I would say is my PhD in psychology.

I specialized in how adults learn and what exactly happens when they learn and how we as trainers, teachers can influence and motivate that learning to happen. The foundation of everything I do is understanding that concept.

KNR: What are you able to provide do as a business coach?

Dr. A: Well if you take any business, you start a business because you’re really good at what you do. But do you necessarily know how to run a business, how to do the whole marketing, the sales, the strategy, the content of the business itself? That’s not always the case.

Say for example you’re very good at plumbing…. but, do you know how to get the clients, how to make the best of the clients that you have? Do you know how to get repeat sales?

When you hire people, do you know how to hire people, who to hire, how to hire, how to train them, how to retain them.

What happens when they are well, naughty, and you have to get rid of them? How do you go about all that?

And, sooner or later if you have a single shingle business you reach a point of maturity where you will have to decide if you want to stay there. Quite often, you would reach a point of saturation and you start hiring people and you have an organization, not a business anymore. How do you handle all that?

KNR: That a lot of ground to cover… sounds like you are able to be with anybody on a broad spectrum.

Dr. A: Anywhere, anywhere. I particularly like to work with business owners who have the vision of growth. They want the business to grow. They look for the legacy of the business going forward. They have that attitude that if I grow the business, I’m somehow giving back to my family, to my society, to my staff and that feeling of enthusiasm triggers me very much and I get very passionate and very interested in what I’m doing.

Growing the business is an academic routine that anybody can learn. What’s very difficult is to take some of the theory and put it into practice. The theory is extremely simple. It’s an extreme no-brainer. What’s very difficult for a business owner is the performance and putting that into action.

KNR: Your ideal client then would be business people who are open and ready?

Dr. A: Yes. If a business owner doesn’t buy into the concept of wanting to initiate the change, then I’m a waste of time….but if the business owner looks and says, “I want change but I don’t have the capacity, I don’t have the time, I don’t have the knowledge,” or just quite often the case, “I don’t know where to start.”

If they come in with that attitude, I organize the whole scenario for them and point them in the right direction and help them through each stage to get to where they want to go.

KNR: Let’s talk a little bit about the stages of business is there a natural evolution?

Dr. A: The most natural evolution is that we always start with fundamentally understanding what the business is all about.

I have worked with business owners that have been in business for over 20 years and when I’ve asked them, “So who’s your ideal client?” they have absolutely no idea. So what is your best selling product? they have absolutely no idea. So what’s the lifetime of your product? How long will it take before the market is saturated and nobody wants your product anymore? They have no clue whatsoever.

So it’s going back to the fundamental strategy of business. Where am I today? Where am I going and how am I going to get there?

KNR: I find it challenging to accept there is an actual “no brainer” system to get through all the stages of business.

Dr. A: It is so simple. It’s asking very simple questions about what you want to achieve out of your business. It is so simple you can’t believe it. We’re not talking about pivot tables and conversions and huge financial equations with charts. Those won’t help you anyway except to give you data and information… this is acting on it.

KNR: Can we say you turn ideas into action?

Dr. A: Yes.

KNR: Is it important for people to separate themselves from the business?

Dr. A: Yes, you have to find a place where you can balance your private life and your business life. You don’t want them to lap into each other or you end up in chaos and lose one or the other.

You have to understand that you’re a private person and then a business- person and there has to be a very clear demarcation.

I totally understand when you’re a business owner – and I know that from my own experience – that the two blend into each other.

When work is available you forget your private life and people say, “Well next week, well next quarter, well next year, I will have time for my family and for my holidays and my friends,” but in the long term, that’s not going to work.

KNR: What other services do you provide?

Dr. A: I have the business coaching as I mentioned before which is basically learning how to run and grow your business.

I’m also in the process of developing what I’m going to call a Leadership Academy and that is not about growing the business or running the business per se but it’s for large organizations who have levels of management and levels of leadership and even evolving leadership as new talent who need to be trained in the disciplines of practical leadership.

KNR: When it comes to your seminars and workshops do you find that there is an average length of time that it takes to see results?

Dr. A: Well that’s really a very interesting question because I have some statistics about that that I’m very proud of. My longest lasting coaching client has been with me for seven years and the reason why she stopped is because she no longer works in the organization where she worked and that was a big – it’s what you would say a Fortune 500 company because she was a director of a huge division.

The shortest client I ever had was one hour. It was only one hour because this gentleman had a very, very specific question that he wished to hire me, to help him answer and device a plan to move forward from there.

He couldn’t wrap his mind around the question and by me sort of helping him understand where he was he was able to put precise words on the question. Once he did that, the answer was staring him in the face so he didn’t need me.

KNR: Do you find that the answer is already existing within your business clients already and you elicit it?

Dr. A: That’s very important to be able to do that. In my role as a business coach, I do enter the realm of being a consultant where I’m actually offering advice.

That’s inevitable because I look at the person and I can see that I can offer advice to really help them move forward quicker than just coaxing them to find that answer.

Of course I will go in and I will do that and then I will immediately say to them, “At this point, I’m your business consultant and I see you’re walking in this direction but I want you to excel and going in that direction for this and this reason.” So I’m giving a consultant role and not a coach anymore.

The best way of getting the best performance out of them is to have them answer the questions. Help me help them get the right questions and have them find the right answer that they buy into because it’s not what I think we should do. It’s what they buy into what’s good for them.

KNR: When you say the word “business coaching,” how do you find that people take that? Do they understand what that is?

Dr. A: My impression is that the answer would be no. Maybe the word “coaching” has been used and has been heard a lot about in various situations and maybe people think that it’s something to do with just asking questions. So how does that make you feel and how are you going to deal with that and what’s going to happen?

That’s a sort of misrepresentation business coaching. Business coaching is about helping, develop and grow a business

KNR: Tell me about your upcoming workshop. What can people expect in an hour and a half?

Dr. A: The workshop, the hour and a half would be the introduction to what people will be going through. The workshop is going to be over 12 weeks and in the 12 weeks, we will go through the various phrases in growing the business, the various areas that we have to talk about, questions that need to be asked and answered properly in order to grow a business and move it forward.

The seminar on the 19th is basically the introduction to the real seminar which is a 12-week course.

KNR: How do people come prepared for your seminar or do they just bring themselves.

Dr. A: Bring their doggie bag!

KNR: About the 12-week seminar what’s the structure?

Dr. A: It is ideal that it should be one representative of each business because they enter into a very intimate discussion about the facts of a real business.

We want to talk about the real numbers and so maybe if you’re an electrician, you wouldn’t feel comfortable having your competitor electrician take this seminar at the same time.

KNR: What makes you special as a business coach?

Dr. A: Definitely the fact that I am an extremely experienced teacher and a very, very passionate one at that.

Not just that I have all the degrees and the diplomas but I have a huge experience of how to teach and how to let people feel good in their mind about inadequacies and turn them into their strengths.

KNR: What’s the most important thing that you want people to know?

Dr. A: I want them to be very clear about what their business is all about, very – I want to wake them up at 3:00 in the morning and ask them, “So what’s your main product and how are you set apart from the competition because of that product?”

KNR: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Dr. A: Yes, I train dressage horses. If anybody wants to be trained in dressage, come to me. I have my little clinic up in Clearwater.

Dr. Aida Anderson

Image Credit (Facebook): Nakiska Ranch, Clearwater

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