Richard Fifield: You can’t just rely on the fact that you’ve done a 2-day coaching weekend, and you know bit about business, and then you can get a really good result

Richard Fifield is a trained coach and mentor based in the UK. He has significant experience in managing early stage and high-growth investor-backed businesses. Provides strategic, financial, coaching and mentoring support for founders and business owners.

You’ve built an impressive business and portfolio and work with all sorts of people. What do you find most fulfilling about your work as coach and mentor?

It’s really just seeing some positive movement. There’s two sides to the work that I do. There’s the personal side of the coachee, or the client, or whatever you call them. And then there’s the business side. Because I work in environment where we’re trying to move businesses forward. I think the most fulfilling thing is when you see positive movement, and that can be positive movement in the individual, or it can be positive movement in the business moving towards some kind of goal. Hopefully, the two are intertwined and all make sense.

What challenges do you think mentors and coaches are facing at the moment? What sort of things are going on?

I think, proliferation of coaches and mentors which is leading to difficulties in differentiation. There’re just thousands of coaches appearing. A lot of people see AI as a threat, and possibly in the future you will be coached or mentored by an autonomous agent or a synth or a bot, and that  technology will be able to analyze your voice, your nuances, your perhaps your face, your expressions, and every type of coaching call and question that you could come up with. However, I still think that people haven’t evolved as fast as technology. And AI and people will always need people to interact with them to get the best outcome.

 And there’s lots of cliches about the qualities of coaches, but I do think authenticity is one of the main ones. If you’re not authentic, and you’ve got an angle that you’re trying to pursue, clients will find that out. And at the end of this, what is the key word that everyone wants to get to is a trusted relationship. People can have lots of different coaches, lots of different mentors. It could be their grandmother. It could be a peer, it could be anything. But at some point, the biggest thing you need to have is the ability to develop trust with the person or the team you’re working with.

The other quality is, you do have to work hard to learn and go deeper in your subject. You can’t just rely on the fact that you’ve done a 2-day coaching weekend, and you know bit about business, and then you can get a really good result. It’s about complete continually deepening your knowledge to be able to get the right kind of result.

How do you see the future of coaching and mentoring evolving?

I´m coming in it from a business point of view. Business is just crazy. It moves at such a pace, social media drives different opinions so quickly. We can change,  governments can change, Prime Ministers can change.  Everything moves quickly, and when you’re a business person that is so difficult to manage. And then, on top of that, you’ve got to manage people. If you are a people-based business, which, again, is harder and harder to manage people in business. So, the future is that as a business person you are going to need as much help as you can to stay on top of the changing environment. And I think that’s the future of coaching and mentoring. You’re there to help them cope with this ever-changing environment. And, as I said before, people don’t evolve as fast as AI. In fact, most people, I think, are probably the same as they were thousands of years ago, whereas technology is just going crazy. And my own view is, we just cannot keep up. Therefore, people would become more and more exposed, and they may indeed be replaced by some kind of AI, and that’s going to put more pressure on people. But from a business point of view, keeping competitive into even the short to medium term is tough, and I think you need as much help as you possibly can to do that. And that’s as much help from a coaching and mentoring point of view as it is from a business advisory point of view, because the world is spinning around you, and you’ve got to adapt your style, your behaviours, to keep up with everything. Laws are changing very quickly as well. So again, you’ve got so much to deal with that I think it really helps particularly to have an independent view on that. That’s one of the things that that people say to me. They just need somebody else to keep them grounded, basically as the world zooms by.

Entrepreneurs like a challenge, don’t they?

They do, and you could argue that true entrepreneurs are not coachable. In fact, they are.  They have their own sort of mindset, and they do what they want.

If you think about one of the things that I talk to people about is what makes a great entrepreneur. It’s charisma, fearlessness and domain knowledge. You’ve got enough charisma to corral people around you and get things done and convince clients. You’re fearless in the sense you take risks. And hopefully, they’re calculated risk because you have to create a competitive product set. And then you really know your area and you can go deep in that area. So, you can really understand the clients and to develop really cool products, to meet that.

What one piece of advice would you give to someone just beginning their coaching journey. What would you say to a new coach?

 I’ll do it from my angle, which is more around businesses and business coaching. And the advice that I always give, the cliched advice of learn, go deeper practice, have every opportunity to coach. But my biggest piece of advice is network as hard as you possibly can. Get out and speak to people, potential clients, other coaches. You do need a supervisor somewhere in the mix there.

Train, learn, go, and do unusual things. Try and find something that works with your personality, with your niche.  Get out and talk to people, don’t sit at home. And I accept that much can be done online now, but get out and actually find out what’s going on, because then you really start to learn about your particular niche wherever you are. There is a hidden clue here about niching there. Some people, again, slightly controversial like to have a sort of coach, free coaching, if you like.

But I think from my world of creating a business, you have to have some kind of niche to hang your hat on, or else clients get confused, and you’ll probably be out competed at that point.

Abundance is perhaps another one. It is quite an interesting word, because the more it could be that you refer potential clients to other coaches, because it’s not quite in your area. It could be that you say, actually, coaching is not right for you for this particular thing. Here’s a mentor who knows exactly what to do. They’ve done it a hundred times before half a day with them. They’ll solve your problem and you’ll move forward. So you’ve got that also comes into the network. And you have this network of people that you trust, and therefore the clients you trust to move them forward. So always abundance of trying to involve others, share things.

I think that’s a good way to operate as a coach, and then they’ll share with you, and then you start to increase your learning, and you have that network effect.

And networking will even give you opportunities to coach, because when you start to talk to your network around what you’re doing. Quite often someone will say, well, actually, I’d like to experience that. And then you’ve got some people, whether you have to do it free or pro bono. That’s fine, but you’re learning the whole time. And of course, once you do a good job for someone, and most businesses like this. It’s like mining a seam, a small sea seam of gold. You see it on the surface. You dig at it, and then suddenly, there’s a seam open up and you dig along it. It’s a bit like that. In coaching you find somebody who says, Wow! I really enjoyed that, or I got a real result from it. I know someone like me that you could really help, and off you go. And then I know someone like me, and then you’re off on that little seam in your niche. That that’s where I think from a business setting up a business. That’s definitely where you need to head.