Is a business coach worth it?

It’s become a boom industry in recent years but one of Perth’s most high-profile business coaches is warning small business owners to take care when signing on with so-called experts.

PR and marketing expert Nikki Milne — who works with luxury brands such as Mercedes-Benz Perth, Kailis Jewellery, Moet & Chandon and Empire Homewares — has been offering one-on-one tailored marketing strategies on and off for eight years, and said demand increased tenfold when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“It’s become just a booming industry, the coaching industry, because of the fact that business owners are turning to people for advice, and that’s who they’re looking to,” the founder of boutique agency The Perth Collective PR told AAA.

“I call myself a business mentor because I think coaching has been given such a bad name,” she said.

“I am so against it (business coaching) because what it is, it’s startups teaching startups and they’re getting these startups into all sorts of trouble and people are coming to me going ‘oh, this business coach told me this’.”

She said part of the problem was unlike the finance industry, where “it is so regulated”, business coaching is not regulated.

“Probably 70 per cent will not have indemnity insurance but they are giving these small business owners, that do not have much money or cash flow, advice and potentially giving them the wrong advice which can ultimately make a business go under,” she said.

Milne doesn’t have an MBA — actually, she’s a high school dropout — but she does have 17 years of business ownership experience. Some business coaches only do a short course before they start giving advice.

Milne said getting indemnity insurance showed clients she has the experience and credentials to back up her advice.

“It was a nightmare for me to get (indemnity) insurance because I don’t have a degree, it took me almost a year to get an insurance company to cover me because I’m giving advice to a business owner,” she said.