Business coaching for owner-operators
Coaching for owners of small service businesses with one to ten staff. Fortnightly sessions over video, plain advice, and changes you can make the same week.
Coached 60+ UK owner-operators since 2019, after fifteen years running my own agency. Based in Epsom, working UK-wide over video.
You built a business that works. A café, a plumbing firm, a design studio, a cleaning company. There are one to ten people on the payroll and your name is over the door. The problem is that every decision, every awkward conversation and every late invoice still lands on your desk, and the week has stopped having any edges.
That is the person I coach. Not startups chasing funding, not managers inside big companies. Owners, with their own money on the line, who want the business to depend on them a little less.
If that's you, tell me what's going on or book a call. Twenty minutes, no pitch.
The stages, in order. Most clients feel the difference inside the first month; the point is that it holds a year later.
The first sessions map where the money, the hours and the stress come from. Not a 40-page audit: a shared, honest picture of what the business does to you in a normal fortnight. Most owners have never seen theirs written down.
Every business has three or four things that genuinely need the owner: pricing, key relationships, the standard of the work. Everything else can be handed over, priced differently or stopped. We work out which is which, and what that's been costing you.
Each session ends with one change, made before the next one. A price rise, a handover, a conversation you've been avoiding. Small, done and reviewed beats ambitious and abandoned. That rhythm, every fortnight, is the whole engine.
“Ellen asked me one question in our second session that made me put my prices up by thirty per cent. Nobody complained. I still think about it.”Dan Whitfield, plumbing and heating firm, Kent
A cleaning company owner in Leeds went from covering shifts herself most weeks to a rota that runs without her. Last summer she took her first two-week holiday in six years, and the phone didn't ring once.
A two-person design studio raised prices by 25 per cent across the board and lost one client out of eleven. The one they were glad to lose.
A landscaper in Surrey cut his working week from 68 hours to 51 in four months, with turnover up, not down. His words: "I coach the football on Saturdays now."
Results from real clients, shared with permission. Yours will depend on your business and what you're willing to change.
I spent fifteen years running my own agency. Hiring, firing, VAT deadlines, a recession, one client who was 40 per cent of revenue and knew it. I grew it to nine people, nearly lost it twice, and sold it in 2019.
Coaching is what I do with all of that now. I'm not a cheerleader and I won't send you worksheets. I ask the questions I wish someone had asked me, and I stay until the answer turns into a decision.
I live in Epsom and work with owners across the UK over video. Sessions are fortnightly, an hour each, and you get notes the same day.
Book a call and bring the thing that's bothering you most. You'll leave with one useful idea whether we work together or not. If a call feels like too much, the form takes two minutes and I reply within one working day.
One page, fifteen questions, fifteen minutes. Work out exactly which hours in your week only you can do, and which ones are costing you the business. No sign-up form, just email me and I'll send it over.
60+ UK owner-operators coached since 2019, across trades, hospitality, care and professional services.
92 per cent of monthly clients are still coaching after six months. Most stay eight to fourteen.
4.9 hours average drop in the working week within the first quarter, based on clients who tracked it.
Why publish prices? Because you're an owner. You price things all day, and you know what "let's discuss investment" usually means. Neither of us wastes a call finding out the fee doesn't fit.
What if it isn't working? Say so, and we stop. Coaching only earns its fee while things are changing. On the monthly plan you owe a month's notice and nothing more.
Do you work with businesses outside Surrey? Yes. Sessions are over video as standard, so location doesn't matter much. I work with owners across the UK.