Naturally, if you are trying to make a living selling your services, there are numerous roadblocks to your success. That has always been true and it always will be. Having a Twitter account and a zillion followers won't keep you from failing.

Some things, no matter how much we want them to happen - are just not possible. Let's face it, if I could get on Oprah everything would be different. The results I want to achieve - no matter what they are, would be within my grasp if only I could get on Oprah, or ESPN, or on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.

Business owners have many goals. They are likely to fall into long term, short term, intermediate term, and undefined term categories. Some goals get met and others forgotten. Unfortunately the ones that get met are often those that are urgent - while those left behind are the ones that are really important to the success of the organization. This is where small business coaches earn their money.

Small business coaches can help you eliminate the frustrations and disagreements that often result from a lack of shared goals. They do this by helping to uncover the hidden agendas and secret desires of the participants. The result is a sense of common purpose and direction that solves the typical situation where there are arguments from different perspectives.

Why are some more successful than others? Why do some business coaches make three times, five times, even ten times what their counterparts make. How is it possible that small business coaches who look like they know the same stuff, have participated in the same business coach training, and seem to offer the same services be so far apart on the income scales?

Experts say there are four distinct phases in the life of a business. Transition planning then is the process of getting from one phase to the next as effectively and as efficiently as possible. Isn't this where small business coaches come in?

Heresy you think? Not really. You will have to work harder, you will have to take on projects you considered beneath you during boom times, and you will have to be more industrious and creative that you've been in the past. But you are in control of your results - you don't have to sit around waiting for a new prospective client to call you up.

That's right, business coaches are uniquely positioned and trained in the use of deep questioning techniques, making them ideally suited as historians who can help business owners and their advisors understand where the business came from - the first step in determining the right and best way forward into the rest of the 21st.Century.

Small business coaches have become a critical member of the business planning team. In the 21st Century we will see their role expand exponentially in importance, especially among the members of successful family owned companies.

According to the legendary Peter Drucker - as the story goes, efficiency is doing things right and effectiveness is doing the right things. That would mean then that maximum effectiveness, what I always strive for - sometimes more successfully than others, would be doing the right things right every time.