Working with iBusiness Coaches

1. Once you have signed up for an iBusiness Coach contract your coach will work with you to agree a 'Contact Plan'. The 'Contact Plan' identifies the times and dates you will meet with your coach for 'Face to Face' discussions, and when you will be available for 2 weekly telephone contacts.

2. Your coach will set up your online iBusiness account. The iBusiness account will allow you to access all the business tools you will use to develop and implement strategy with your coach. These tools include:

• Action Plans - Describing when, where and what actions need to be taken to implement your strategy
• Forcefield Analysis - A tool used to help you prioritise decisions
• Strategic SWOT Analysis - A tool used to identify your businesses strengths and how to make the most of them, and your business weaknesses and how to reduce them.
• Value Chain Plan - A tool that helps you to improve your business model
• KPI's - A statement of the performance indicators you need to see in order to say the iBusiness coaching programme has been a success.

Your online iBusiness account will also be used to save any emails, documents and bookmarks that relate to your iBusiness coaching programme.

3. You will have weekly contact with your iBusiness coach, who will review progress with the strategy and help you overcome any roadblocks that are holding you and your team up.

4. You will have monthly performnce reviews to asses if the coaching programme is acheiving your Performance Indicators and if the objectives or working relationship needs to change.

What are the outcomes?

Once you the iBusiness Coach has developed a good understanding of your business needs, they will work with you to develop an Action Plan to help you and your suppliers work together to build an online success. The Action Plan will describe who needs to do what, when and where, in order to meet your objectives. Of course, the iBusiness Coaches won’t leave you to implement the plan on your own, they will be available either online or face-to-face to help you get things done as efficiently as possible. The sorts of things the iBusiness coach will help you with are:

·       How to make it easier for customers to find your website on Google and other search engines

·       How to make online advertising generate more sales

·       How you can use services like Facebook, Twitter and Scoopon to sell more product and build customer loyalty

·       How to set up an online shopping cart and sell products

·       How to analyse your website performance and set targets

·       How to use ‘Cloud’ services to reduce the cost of business functions like accounting, project management, and customer relationship management.

·       How to set-up and use services like Blogs and Forums

·       How to manage e-newsletters and automate responses

·       How to integrate your online and offline businesses

·       Plus much more