Why business coaching
There are 5.7 million private businesses in the UK. About 1.4 million of them employ someone, and around 260,000 employ between ten and 250 people. That last group is where business coaching lives: companies big enough to have real problems and small enough that the owner is still the one carrying them.
Most of those owners have nobody to talk to. Their staff work for them, their accountant does the numbers, their family has heard it all before. A business coach is the person who has run things, who asks the questions nobody else will, and who holds them to what they said they would do. Owners pay for that month after month, for years, because it works and because there is nothing else like it.
Source: Department for Business and Trade, Business Population Estimates 2025.
Where Focal Point came from
Focal Point was founded by Brian Tracy and Steve Thompson. Brian Tracy has written 85 books on business, sales and personal performance, and the Focal Point method is his. Steve Thompson is the global CEO. Between them they built what is now the largest business coaching network in the United States, with more than 250 coaches worldwide and two international conferences a year that bring them together.
They started it for two reasons that have not changed. Experienced leaders wanted a tested way to turn what they knew into a business of their own. And business owners wanted advice from people who had actually run something. Focal Point exists to put those two together, which is why it is built for someone like you rather than adapted to fit.
The method, and the tools behind it
More than 200 coaching modules, covering every part of running a business, from the first sale to succession. Each module is a written piece of work that you and your client go through together in a session, and before the session it is rewritten for their industry. A care home owner opens a module about keeping customers and finds it is about residents and the people who refer them, in their language and with their examples. People get hung up on words. The method takes care of that so you do not have to.
Alongside the modules you have thirty years of Focal Point tools and resources to draw on, including its own AI. It helps you prepare for every session, run it well, and do the follow-up work afterwards. You are never going into a session unprepared and never left to work it out on your own.
Alongside all that is the business development system: it finds the right businesses in your sector, opens the conversation, gets the appointments in your diary and briefs you before each one. It is built and connected before you start, which is why a new coach’s first weeks are spent talking to business owners rather than setting things up.
And there is the training. Certification is a serious programme, most of it live, inside fifteen months of development in an international cohort. When you are certified you are paired with a practice mentor who works with you, one to one, on your own plan and your own numbers. A second certification in executive coaching takes the same method into leadership teams and the managers of larger companies, which widens who you can work with inside your sector. The support does not stop when the programme does.
Thirty years of experience, and you start with all of it on day one.
The UK network
Focal Point is growing its UK network now, and most sectors are still open. If you move early, the sector you know best is probably yours to take, for the whole country.
You will not be on your own. You train in an international cohort, you join your sector’s Mastermind Group, and the whole network meets twice a year. Dr James Onslow, who runs Focal Point in the UK, is the person you meet before you decide and a phone call away afterwards.