Our Story

The Growth Coach Business Coaching Story

Dan Murphy’s vision evolved into one of the top-ranked business coaching franchise opportunities

Before starting The Growth Coach and growing it into one of the top-ranked business coaching franchise opportunities, founder Dan Murphy was an accountant at Deloitte, where he helped dozens of small- and medium-sized businesses in Cincinnati navigate the often troubled and always complex waters of managing growth, cash flow and daily challenges.

To Dan, the small business owner is a hero, working tirelessly at managing and growing their enterprise and working hand-in-hand with employees to meet their customers’ needs. Through his work as a CPA, Dan spent a lot of time with these owners, supporting and advising them because, in reality, he wanted to be one of them. At the same time, he was beginning to see a trend.

“They were overworked, overwhelmed, and often a prisoner of the business,” Dan recalls. “They’d come to me and say, ‘Help me with that,’ but our firm didn’t have the answers.”

At Deloitte, Dan saw the benefits larger companies reaped from business coaching and sales training, but to most of his clients, these services were far too expensive. All the while, the mantra he kept hearing was simple: I was managing my business, now my business is managing me, please help. After seven years at Deloitte, Dan had built up enough of an idea of the demand for coaching services targeted at the country’s 28 million small- and medium-sized businesses that he was confident he could help. In 1992, Dan left Deloitte and became the first The Growth Coach.

“My mission became driving success, balancing lives, and making a difference to these small business owners,” Dan says. Along the way, he’d made notes. “I started keeping a journal of the success differences. That journal became the foundation of my coaching philosophy.”

Applying his “work on the business” coaching model to his own work, Dan quickly realized the limitations of a traditional business and sales coach: time. The coach only has so many hours and can only charge so much per hour. Eventually, he would plateau. Dan stumbled across a path forward that would allow him to continue to help small businesses while simultaneously growing at a much faster rate.

“A husband and wife wanted to go through the process together,” Dan says. “It worked great. Then they brought me a group of 7 engineers who we put through the process.”

The benefits of group coaching became immediately apparent. Not only was the coach freed up to help more clients, but they could charge less on a per-client basis while still growing revenue — opening the tremendous benefits of business coaching to an even wider range of small businesses.

Dan knew the coaching system he had developed was portable, that the materials he had created and the programs to help business leaders grow both personally and professionally could be facilitated by anyone well-trained in the method.

“We are the world’s largest provider of group coaching of business owners, managers and sales teams. That’s where the real magic is. Don’t come to The Growth Coach if you want to do one-on-one coaching. You’re swapping your time for that client’s money, and I’ve been there. That was my first mistake.”

Individual business coach franchises exist, Dan notes, but they still struggle with that “first mistake” — overcoming the limitations of too few hours and too many clients for one-on-one coaching. These competing concepts still fail to adequately address the need for group coaching.

More than 15 years and 64 territories later, The Growth Coach is the largest franchise provider of group coaching services, and our business coaches have helped thousands of small business owners, managers and sales teams to reach new successes while providing entrepreneurs with a spirit to serve an affordable business opportunity. Learn about the costs of becoming the next The Growth Coach in this potentially lucrative growth industry.