This month marks a milestone for our humble little coaching firm, Michael Beach Coaching & Consulting. We celebrated ten years in business earlier this month. Might not sound like much, but when you consider the odds of creating a successful business and then the even more daunting odds of making that business a viable concern for a decade, we’re pretty proud of the accomplishment.
Most of all, we’re especially proud of the accomplishments of our many successful clients, including Founders, Business Owners, C-Suite Executives, Vice Presidents, Directors, and Emerging Leaders. The icing on the cake is the growth and development we’ve observed in our talented team, including coaches Linda Drake, Ron Friedman, Sharon Brown, and Melissa Worrel-Johnson. Frankly, we’ve had a great decade together, and we cannot wait for the next one to unfold.
A Calling
Back in the Seventies, I was a young man growing up in Wisconsin. I was very interested in music and one of the songs at the popular time was from a Scottish band called Marmalade, and the song was called “Reflections Of My Life.” Great song, if you’ve never heard it, go to YouTube and give it a listen. Tremendous. The lyrics reached out and grabbed me in a couple of sections. One was this “The world is a bad place…a bad place…a terrible place to live, oh, but I don’t want to die.” I wondered what led to one of my fellow humans writing such a sophisticated commentary about life on our planet.
Life in the seventies was an amazing mixture of incredibly positive experiences and a handful of terrifying experiences. Full disclosure, I was born an introvert and as a young man, I was troubled by inequities that I saw around me in the world. I wanted to do something to make the world a better place. I was concerned about “The greetings of people, in trouble….” and wanted to do something to be helpful. Another lyric that hit me with impact: “Changing, arranging everything around me.” Even at the tender age of 14 or 15, I was thinking about using my influence for good to make the world a kinder, and more positive place to live. Some might call that a calling, of sorts.
Fast Forward
I was very fortunate during my career to work with a great number of wonderful organizations and (almost as if by magic) I had opportunities to learn from a collection of leaders and managers. Some of them were incredibly brilliant and taught me a great many positive lessons. I’d love to name them all, but won’t, given the need to get this written briefly. A number of the leaders I experienced were disturbingly lacking in leadership ability and taught me an awful lot about how NOT to manage people and how NOT to lead. For obvious reasons, I shall not name them either.
Sadly, they probably still don’t know who they are. In any case, the combination of experiences with these leaders lead to me becoming very interested in what makes a person a great dynamic leader, able to navigate any waters, whether tranquil or turbulent. After my successful corporate career had left me feeling like I needed to do something more substantial, I answered the call to become a coach and founded my coaching firm.
Embarrassment Of Riches
I occasionally get asked about being a coach or about why I’m still working, now that I’m a gray beard. For me, it’s a simple answer. Having the opportunity to work with those “people in trouble” and to help them to find the secrets that I was able to discover (through the help of my many outstanding mentors from my career) was a chance too good to pass up. I’m proud that over the last ten years, my coaches and my colleagues have made a significant difference in the careers and lives of literally hundreds and hundreds of companies and leaders, especially emerging leaders. We get thank you cards that bring tears to our eyes, and we get excited email and text messages that tell us about their promotions, their bonus checks, their breakthroughs with their colleagues, customers, and families (yes, the strategies and techniques we share with them work at home as well as they do at the office…).
Probably my favorite benefit of running a coaching firm is receiving baby pictures from our clients as they begin to build their families. Those babies are miniature replicas of their mommies and daddies and we are so proud of our ability to participate in helping the parents to prepare the next generation to aspire to a higher level of life on Planet Earth. Frankly, being able to do what we’ve been able to do for the last decade has been a blast and it has led to an embarrassment of riches for me, for my colleagues, and we know it’s also enriched the lives of our many beloved clients. A win/win situation, at its finest.
The Future
All of us here at Michael Beach Coaching & Consulting are looking forward to the next decade and continuing our journey together with our clients. We’re so proud of their accomplishments and their growth, but we’re even more excited about what’s still to come. We can’t wait to celebrate those new developments that are going to arrive in the future and make our clients even more valuable to their families, their customers, their colleagues, their companies, and their communities. We are poised to continue seeing our clients in terms of their potential so that we can continue to encourage them, nurture them, develop them, and challenge them to greater and greater levels of capability in areas like leadership, people management, emotional intelligence, accountability for results, and predictable success.
We’ve loved working with you and we promise to keep doing what we’ve been doing and striving to keep raising the bar on ourselves as we keep helping you to raise the bar on your performance and those of your teammates. Thank you all for the faith you’ve placed in us, and for the confidence you continue to demonstrate as you invest in becoming the best that you can be while you lift everyone around you.
If you’re one of our many beloved clients and want to add your story to our article, please tell us about your experience here, we’d love to hear about your journey and your accomplishments. If you’re not yet one of our beloved clients, you can reach us at info@michaelbeachcoach.com, and begin a conversation with us about how you might be able to fast forward to an embarrassment of riches in your career or your life.
Michael Beach is the founder of a coaching firm, Michael Beach Coaching & Consulting, located in Minnesota, Arizona, Florida, and Iowa. Michael and his coaches are award-winning Master Coaches who specialize in business coaching, executive development coaching, and health and wellness coaching.
