Entrepreneurial mentor and business coach, Colin Sprake is offering free business coaching courses for small business owners across the country. The program is focused on helping small business owners survive the COVID-19 pandemic, and thrive in their business once the economy is reopened.
“When anxiety and fear go up, creativity disappears,” Sprake said. “What we’ve been doing over the past five weeks is give people strategies on how to overcome anxiety, reduce fear, and bring back creativity so they can look at doing business differently.”
The pandemic has impacted Sprake as well. COVID-19 forced cancellations of hundreds of Sprake’s speaking events. In the face of sweeping cancellations, Sprake pivoted to provide this program to small business owners. He said 8,500 small business owners have joined in on the calls so far.
“I’ve had emails from people who were suicidal that said ‘if I hadn’t found your call, I might not be here,'” Sprake said.
Asked about the long term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sprake said the economy will be damaged, and will take time to recover. Despite the economic damage, he believes this is an opportunity to re-evaluate what’s truly important.
“The world’s going to change a lot when we go back. My goal is to set business owners up so when we come out of this, they can take advantage of the opportunity,” he said. “It’s not the way we’ve gone into this situation that’s important, it’s how we come out of it that’s critical.”
Sprake spoke at a Ladysmith Chamber of Commerce event in November 2019 and made connections with business owners in Ladysmith, some of those business owners have been benefiting from Sprake’s programs. One of them is real estate advisor, John Surtees. Surtees said that Sprake’s program has helped him reduce fears around the economic impacts of COVID-19.
“I’m actually in the process of doing more online, like a virtual open house this coming weekend,” Surtees said.
Real estate has undergone a large shift in the time of COVID-19. Surtees said only qualified serious buyers are being taken through homes for a purchase.
“We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the amount of real estate activity.”
Surtees was taking courses with Sprake prior to the pandemic. He said because of those courses, he spent a lot of time working on his business, which reduced his level of fear and anxiety.
“Through courses with Colin I’ve developed a cash flow projection sheet, which we monitor by-weekly. We know exactly what our expenses are, and project how much revenue we have as best as we can. When everything shut down I had a tool I could look at, and see what I needed to continue spending money on, and what I needed to curtail,” Surtees said.
“If I hadn’t learned that processor understanding where my business is week by week, and projecting into the future, I would have been freaking out because I would have had to start compiling all that information and start from scratch.”
