Coaching is an investment, not a cost - here's the difference

When cash is tight (and in low margin food and drink manufacturing, it almost always is) every pound spent gets scrutinised. Packaging, co-packing fees, ingredient costs, listing fees, marketing spend. It's natural that business coaching costs end up on that same list, weighed against the same short-term question: what does this cost me this month?

That's the wrong question. Coaching isn't a line item to be minimised. It's an investment to be measured in the same way you'd measure a new piece of production equipment or a new hire.

Cost thinking vs investment thinking

Cost thinking asks: what's the cheapest way to solve this problem right now?

Investment thinking asks: what return will this generate over the next 12, 24, 36 months and is that return greater than what I put in?

Applied to coaching, the numbers usually aren't close. A founder who avoids a bad pricing decision, secures one extra listing, or holds onto an existing one because they walked into a category review prepared, has typically recovered the cost of coaching many times over. The same goes for avoiding a costly hire, a wrong channel approach or a launch that wasn't ready.

It's an investment in the business (and in you)

Here's where food and drink coaching differs from a lot of generic business coaching: the business and the founder are rarely separable. In an SME food brand, the founder often is the sales strategy, the brand story and the person in the room with the buyer. Investing in the founder's own skillset (how they negotiate, how they read a P&L, how they handle a tough review) is in practical terms the same as investing in the business itself.

That's why the ambition side of coaching matters just as much as the commercial side. Founders don't start food businesses purely to hit a revenue target. There's usually a personal ambition sitting underneath it, building something they're proud of, creating a legacy, proving an idea can work, building financial independence. Good coaching holds both of those goals at once, because a founder who's burnt out or directionless personally will struggle to execute a sound commercial strategy, no matter how good the plan looks on paper.

What the return actually looks like

For founders weighing up whether coaching is worth the spend, the return tends to show up as:

• Fewer expensive mistakes: wrong pricing, wrong channel, wrong hire, made once instead of repeatedly

• Faster decisions, because there's a sounding board rather than second-guessing alone

• Stronger buyer meetings, because the commercial case has been properly stress-tested beforehand

• A founder who's clearer on their own goals, not just the business's, which tends to produce better decisions across the board

  
  

None of that shows up as a single number on an invoice. But it shows up on the P&L, in the shelf space you keep, and in how sustainable the whole venture feels a year from now.

The takeaway for founders

If you're a food or drink founder currently treating coaching as a cost to be trimmed when things get tight, it might be worth flipping the question. Ask not "can I afford this?" but "what's the cost of not having this, in mistakes, missed listings, or burnout, over the next year?"

That's usually where the real number lives.

Results FMCG provides flexible, personal coaching for food and drink founders and teams, built around both business ambition and personal growth. Get in touch to talk about your next step.