Breaking Down Coaching and Consulting

By Next Level Pod on November 2nd, 2022 in Uncategorized

If you’ve ever thought about hiring someone to help you run your law firm, you’ve probably ran into the terms “coach” and “consultant.” 

These terms often leave law firm owners confused because they have no idea what the difference between the two is. Many law firm owners also don’t know which one they need to hire to help them.

Let’s break down both coaching and consulting and clarify when you should consider hiring one or the other.

Coaching vs. Consulting

Coaching is one great option to consider if you need help with your law firm. 

Coaching tends to focus on guidance and advice with less expectation of delivering anything specific. However, a good coach will also help you develop goals so that you can measure your own personal successes. In general, coaches often spend a little more time helping the business owner grow rather than working on specific deliverables for the business. 

Consulting, on the other hand, tends to focus more on deliverables and outcomes around the consultant’s area of expertise. Results are usually more concretely measured (i.e. done or not done). Additionally, consultants are typically independent. 

Typically, consultants will come into a business and say, “Here’s the project you need my help with, here’s how I’ll go about doing it, and here’s the end goal.” If they’re providing ongoing consulting work, they might set goals for each month or year and take actionable steps towards achieving those goals. 

Bottom line: coaches will usually ask more questions to help you figure out the next step or solution for yourself while consultants probably already have a solution in mind and will recommend it to you to solve a particular problem.

The Benefits

The main benefit of coaching is that it will typically include a lot of mindset work. This is important because, how goes the mindset of the owner, so goes the business. If you as the owner are struggling with something, your business is only going to grow so much. Coaches can help you work through your mindset blocks and limiting beliefs which will in turn help your business succeed.

Additionally, when you hire a coach, you’re essentially paying for accountability. Coaches provide accountability around the things that wil snowball into success in other parts of your life. In the busy life of an entrepreneur it’s easy to forget about things that don’t feel essential. It can be life-changing to have a coach to come in and remind you of what you talked about and check in on your progress.

As for consulting, the biggest benefit is that you have a deliverable. You’re working towards a goal that can be measured. When you have deliverables, you have actual data and points to improve on. You can measure your ROI and therefore measure the success of your consultant. If something isn’t working, you know exactly where to look to find and fix the issue.

If you want to learn more about coaching and consulting, check out Episode 066: Coaching vs Consulting – Differences and Benefits.