Every January for six years, Hemant has sat across a steel table from the same baker in Ajman with her year-end file between them. Every January she has said the same thing. "This year I'll hire a production manager."
Her bakery supplies cafés from Ajman to Al Nahda. On paper, the hire has been possible for two years. Her head baker has worked beside her for nine and has asked, twice, to run the early shift. She still opens the back door herself at a quarter to four, six mornings a week.
This January she says it again. Then, while Hemant is closing the file, she adds something she's never said before. "If I'm not there when the first tray goes in, I don't know what I am."
Hemant has spent fifteen years making sense of other people's numbers, and soon he leaves the firm to coach owners like her. Which kind of coach, he hasn't settled. Until about ten minutes ago, he'd have said business coaching without a second thought.
Neither Hemant nor the baker is a real person. In our experience, owners say sentences like hers more often than you'd think.
What's the difference between business coaching and life coaching?
Business coaching works with the people who run or lead a business, on the business and on how they lead it: direction, priorities, the team, the decisions in front of them. Life coaching works with a person on their life as a whole. The coaching skill under both is the same, and the two often meet in the owner.
The labels are used loosely, so treat those as working definitions.
Part of choosing what to train for is choosing where. For that part there's Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach. Her Zoom call is free, runs twenty to forty minutes, checks readiness and fit, and points you to the programme that matches, if one does. Book Sara's free call. Or read on.
What does a business coach actually work on?
In our experience, what an owner brings tends to land in four places.
- Direction. What the business is for over the next year or three, and what it will stop doing.
- Priorities. Which of twenty urgent things matters this quarter, and which can wait.
- People. A hire, a handover, a partner, a relative in the business, a conversation that keeps being postponed.
- The owner's own way of leading. How they decide, what they delegate, how they react under pressure, and what they can't let go of.
A business coach isn't a consultant, though the two are easy to confuse. A consultant diagnoses and recommends, so the answer comes from the consultant. A coach stays with the owner's own thinking, so the answer, and the decision, remain the owner's. ICF counts keeping that line clear as part of ethical practice: behaviour 1.06 of its 2025 Core Competencies is about maintaining the distinction between coaching and consulting, among other professions (coachingfederation.org, checked on 20 October 2026). Someone like Hemant can offer both kinds of work, as long as the client always knows which one is on the table. Our guide to coaching vs therapy vs mentoring draws the neighbouring lines.
Life coaching covers more ground: work, relationships, a move, a loss, what a life is for. Owners turn up there too, often because a business and the person running it are harder to separate than either expected.
Which background do business owners look for in a coach?
In our experience, owners weigh two things, and usually in this order.
Their world. An owner wants a coach who knows what a quiet month feels like, why one resignation can be a crisis, and what it's like when every decision ends at your desk. Some coaches bring that from running something themselves. Others bring it from years spent beside people who do, as Hemant does. His fifteen years with owners' files are real fluency. They're also the part of his background most likely to trip him, because the numbers often show him an answer while the owner is still talking.
Whether you can coach. That's what training and a credential speak to. ICF's credentials page lists three core credentials, the ACC, PCC and MCC, and none of them is tied to a kind of client (coachingfederation.org, checked on 20 October 2026). As far as that page shows, a business coach and a life coach climb the same ladder.
If your background is in corporate leadership rather than owner-run firms, how to become an executive coach in Dubai covers that road. And which owners you serve is a question of niche, which choosing a coaching niche takes up.
Why is the person running the business so often the real constraint?
Go back to the baker's sentence. Nothing in her file explains the production manager she hasn't hired, because the constraint isn't in the file. It's in the person holding the keys. In our experience, that's common in owner-run businesses: a sound plan keeps stalling at the one point where the owner has to let go of something.
Hemant would know its shape from the statements he reads every quarter. It behaves like a standing order. Twelve years ago, in a rented kitchen near Rolla Square in Sharjah, she let a friend open up one morning. The oven wasn't lit in time, two orders went out late, and one café never ordered again. An instruction was set up that day, be there for the first tray, every morning, and it has paid out ever since at the strength of that morning, without once coming up for review. Each January the stated reason changes: after the busy season, once the right person turns up, next year. The instruction stays where it is.
Cancelling an instruction like that means going back to where it was set up, the morning it began.
That's RSCI's ground: the person at the centre of the business, as well as the plan around them. And it starts with the coach, because coaches run standing orders too. Hemant's may be the one that sends his eyes to the numbers whenever an owner goes quiet. Our training looks for yours early, under supervision, before any owner meets it, which is why one principle comes before everything else we teach: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
If you saw an owner you know in the baker, or something of yourself in her, you already know which half of this guide pulled at you. The free call with Sara is about a narrower decision: where you train, and when. Schedule the call.
How can you tell which kind of coaching you're drawn to?
Try a constraint trace on one stalled decision, in a business you know well, your own or one you've watched from close by. It takes about half an hour.
- Pick a decision that's been "next quarter" for at least two quarters. A hire, a handover, a price change, a second site.
- Write the reason the owner gives, in their words. "After the busy season." "When the right person turns up."
- Under it, write what would have to be true for that reason to disappear. Be specific: a figure, a person, a date.
- Mark whether it's already true. In our experience it often is, or nearly is.
- If it is, write down what's left. Whatever comes first, even if it's about a person rather than the business. For the baker, it would be the first tray.
- Notice which line you wanted to stay with. Step 3, the business answer, or step 5, the person answer. Most of us favour one.
- Write one sentence about the clients you want, and look at its verb. "I want to help owners plan" sits closer to business coaching. "I want to help owners let go" sits closer to life coaching. Plenty of coaches end up doing both.
Step 6 suggests what to train for first. Step 7 tells you who you're training for.
Where does life-coach training fit if owners are the clients you want?
Underneath the business side, as the coaching skill itself. RSCI's training is likely to suit you if these hold.
- You're arriving from another career. Asked whether you need coaching experience first, our training page answers in five words, "Not for RS Method Coach.", and adds: "Applicants for RS Method Complete are assessed individually."
- You want the craft, not one more certificate. The training page puts it in one line that's worth reading twice: "You want to become a professional coach rather than merely collect another qualification." After fifteen years of professional letters, that's a fair test for someone like Hemant.
- You know which programme matches your aim. The page's own advice on choosing: "Choose RS Method Coach if your priority is to become professionally capable, earn your foundational certifications and begin working confidently with clients." RS Method Complete is for anyone who wants their education "built all the way through the ICF Level 2 standard."
Whichever kind of coaching you choose, the work we train for doesn't change. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
RS Method Coach comes to AED 18,000 with ICF education included. RS Method Complete, whose live training runs for five days in Dubai, comes to AED 35,000 with ICF education included. Both are mostly online and self-paced, and both include live training. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
Erin Kurt's sentence, quoted as she gave it: "My business literally tripled within 6 months." It's hers to say, and it tells you nothing about yours.
Our ICF certification in Dubai page compares the two ICF education levels in one table, with the hours each asks for and the steps they share.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. If owners are the clients you're picturing, settle your education level first, using the Level 1 and Level 2 table on our ICF certification in Dubai page.