The client questions business coaches hear most — and where to send each one

Scratch any business goal and a personal finance question is underneath. I want to exit in five years means what is this business worth, and can I retire on it? I want a four-day week means can the household cash flow survive it? Coaches hear the unfiltered versions: the founder whose entire retirement plan is a company nobody has valued; the director drawing £4,000 a month with no idea whether that is sustainable; the couple whose business and personal finances are so entangled that neither can answer a simple question about either. Then the direct ones arrive: Should I sell? Should I be paying into a pension? What would you do with the surplus cash? The coaching relationship practically begs for these questions — high trust, regular contact, explicit permission to discuss ambitions. Which is precisely why the boundary needs to be deliberate rather than improvised.

Coaches hold no FCA permissions, which sounds like a weakness and is actually clarity. There is no grey zone to agonise over: any recommendation about pensions, investments, protection or what to do with sale proceeds is regulated advice, and it is simply not yours to give. No hedging required. The clean move is to reframe rather than answer: that's a great question and it's a regulated one — let's make finding you the right adviser an action item. The coach's genuine contribution sits one level up: helping the client articulate what they want the money to do — the retirement age, the income target, the risk they can stomach — so the eventual professional conversation starts from clarity instead of a blank page. A client who arrives at an adviser's office knowing their number is a dramatically better client. Producing that clarity is coaching. Producing the recommendation is not.

Keep it short enough to memorise. Business valuation and sale readiness: a corporate finance specialist or the client's accountant. Personal wealth, pensions, investing sale proceeds, protection gaps: a regulated financial adviser — the FCA Register confirms authorisation in under a minute. Wills, powers of attorney, and what happens to the business if the founder dies on a Tuesday: a will specialist or estate planner — a referral that lands with surprising force, given how many founders have wills predating their company. Tax structuring: the accountant, before the deal, not after. Timing matters as much as destination. The worst referral is the brilliant one made three months too late, after the client has signed heads of terms or made a pension decision in the dark at 55. Coaches, uniquely, hear about plans years early. That lead time is the referral's real value.

The moment a client says I've had an offer for the business, it is too late to start searching for advisers. The working bench is small: one regulated financial adviser comfortable with business owners, one estate planner, one corporate finance contact, one accountant you would trust with your own numbers — each personally vetted, each willing to take a call at short notice. Introduce warmly, with context, and disclose any commercial arrangement in plain writing; undisclosed referral fees corrode coaching trust faster than bad advice does. Some coaches formalise the process — SmartPeer, for instance, tracks referrals to vetted advisers and generates the disclosure letters automatically. However it is run, the effect is the same: money questions stop being awkward dead-ends in a session and become action items with names attached. Clients notice. The coach who solves the question behind the goal is the one who gets renewed.