FOR many, successfully starting and operating a business means personally dedicating a high number of man hours towards working, and even then some might say ‘at least it’s their own thing’.

But maybe along the way, after making sure the business makes more revenue than needed to cover expenses, many have forgotten why they started the enterprise in the

first place.

Many business owners started for the wrong reason, by Marcia Woon Choy’s reckoning. “For many persons, it’s almost as if they went back to a job.” Her take is that individuals who pursue business should do so for one of two reasons: to build up an enterprise to sell it one day or to take the profit to invest in other areas.

Either way, a business should be considered a “commercial, profitable enterprise that works without you”.

After garnering 15 years hardcore experience in the financial sector and having spent the last three years providing management and executive training to big banks, Woon Choy now hopes to equip owners of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the tools they need to move away from being technicians or operators and towards being business persons.

“A lot of things we do in big business, small business can benefit from,” she told Sunday Finance.

In March, Woon Choy acquired the ActionCoach’s franchise for Jamaica and already plans to introduce the business coaching tools through an open seminar in Kingston on July 1. ActionCoach, which originated in Australia in 1993, is a business coaching firm that uses a six-step approach to taking a business from mastery to results that enable businesses to expand through product line growth and/or acquisition.

In recent years, SMEs have seen considerable growth in access to increasing levels of low-cost financing. It’s through these financial institutions, which provide these facilities, that Woon Choy hopes to reach SMEs, and she has already received the commitment of a number of the banks.

At present, ActionCoach Jamaica has three offerings: A one-day planning session scheduled once every quarter and in which participants work on 90-day business plan; group counselling, which involves a two-day seminar on building a business; and a 14-week one-on-one training programme, which delivers direct application to businesses.