Difference of Consultant Vs Coach

What's right for your practice

Every Dental practice in North America should be achieving 10-15% growth every year!!

All small businesses and dentist owners reach a stage of their career when they become aware or realize that hiring an outside advisor, expert, or coach is what they need to sustain, grow or access the hidden potential in their practices. The biggest challenge you will face as the leader is choosing and selecting which expert and program is best for your customized situation. Are you a new dentist starting up, who wants to learn all you can about best practices in the early stages of your career? Are you at the midpoint of your career and reached a plateau for two years or more? Are you achieving healthy growth and want to make sure you have everything in place to sustain the growth long term? Regardless of your situation, the choices are vast and the most important distinction you will have to make is to decide if you need a consultant or a coach. There are many differences between what a consultant achieves and how a coach works beside you to achieve what you want. To begin, let's look at the following analogy in regards to learning to ride a bike. A true master dental coach will help you understand why you are riding a bike, teaches you how you ride the bike, and works together with you to map out your preferred bike ride journey. They jog along beside you as you ride to help with the bumps in the road and pick you up when needed.

A dental consultant will spend a lot of time to explain why one bike is superior to the other, tell you how to ride the bike and where to ride it based on their previous bike ride experiences, and ride the bike if necessary when the road gets bumpy. A consultant is someone who is an expert in their field; they hold a multitude of good information and ideas of what is working in the industry and spend time telling you what action you need to follow based on what they know. They will offer objective advice on what is not working for you compared to 'best practices' of their other clients and experiences. A consultant's objective is to give you a lot of action items to follow, answers and solutions that you should take to reach certain results. The expert "advice" you receive might be professionally accurate and workable, but might not be something you can work with easily and comfortably - it may not resonate with who you are. It may be very sound advice, and if followed, may achieve the desired outcome. The focus of a trained coach is to also take the time to assess how you are doing with analyzing your past, present, and look at your future vision in the context of your own personal and professional goals. A coach is certain to not spend energy on changing the things that are working, help you find the answers to your issues that are not working, and facilitates you in making sure you understand all facets of your practice for sensible change plans and goal achievement. Coaching is a goal oriented solution and outcome focused program that involves working in a partnership with professionals who usually, but not always, already have some degree of success but are "stuck" and want to move forward and don't know how. There is, in coach language a "gap" between where they are right now and where they want to be, and this may involve their professional career, or their personal life, or both. This may also be on a team scale or a smaller individual level. Your Coach will expect more from you than you would do on "your own" and will provide you with the support to see your dreams turned into reality. A coach works on bringing out the best that's already inside you. A coach will focus on the "bigger picture" of what it is you want to create for your business (and your lifestyle) and talk about what will keep you motivated to move forward on your dreams, goals and tasks. They focus on developing YOU to your highest potential as well as developing your practice. A coach encourages you, supports you, applauds you, and empathizes with you. They take the time to help you to discover honest insights into where things aren't working. We help you tap the "wisdom within." A true coach is trained in teaching, mentoring, facilitation, and confronting when needed to move you closer to what you want. Only you can decide which approach and style works for your time, budget, and desired goals and vision. If you are one who doesn't want to fit into a set model of best practices and operate according to other people's rules, desires, wishes, and expectations, then coaching may be the best choice for you as another way to reach the same "destination" that is more in alignment with who you are and what you are comfortable doing. If you just want information and ideas to implement on your own and follow someone else's model then a consultant would be your choice. In summary, Consulting is when you do it somebody else's way; with coaching, you do it your way.