Millstone resident moves business plans into action
Free seminar to take place at community center on July 27
BY JENNIFER KOHLHEPP
Staff Writer

MILLSTONE — A Perrineville woman has dedicated herself to improving other people’s businesses.

Susan Koval, of the Perrineville section of Millstone, is a certified business coach who works with business owners by teaching, guiding and holding them accountable to achieve their personal and business goals and dreams.

She works with Action International, a global team of business coaches that provides seminars and workshops to help the owners of small and medium-sized businesses improve all aspects of their business.

“As business coaches,” Koval said, “we help business owners with planning and goal setting, sales, marketing, team building and building good systems within their business.”

Koval said it’s her goal to “get the business to a point where it meets Action International’s definition of [being] ‘successful,’ which is a profitable enterprise that can work without the owner.”

“A business owner should spend as little or as much time working as he or she wants to,” Koval said. “We provide them with the means to be able to do that.”

Koval has 20 years of experience in business, engineering and education in both large and small companies. She said her background gives her the unique ability to apply problem-solving engineering experience to business problems, and to teach practical solutions to problems in a clear and effective manner.

“Business owners build their businesses through blood, sweat and tears, usually over a number of years,” Koval said. “All of the knowledge they have about their work exists in their head.

“What I do,” she said, “is I help them develop a process that someone else can follow, so a team can run the business for them.”

Koval said Action International’s business strategies can work for any kind of business.

“I currently have clients in trades, retail, professional services, arts and education,” she said.

Koval will work with businesses as small as a one-person company to a company that employs a couple hundred people, she said.

“I don’t want to limit the size,” Koval said. “A company with the right attitude and desire to grow — that’s my ideal client.”

Action International currently services 18 countries around the world with more than 600 business coaches. Koval called the franchise “a perfect fit for me.”

“I taught for a couple of years at the high-school level, but while I was teaching, I missed the business world.”

Koval has a master’s degree in business from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken; a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Rutgers School of Engineering, Rutgers University, New Brunswick; and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Cook College at Rutgers.

Koval said business coaching allows her to marry her love for teaching and her love for business into identifying problems and solving them for people to enable them to better themselves.

“Business coaching allows me to do something that I love and make an impact on people’s lives,” Koval said. “Not only do I help business owners, but I [also] help their team of workers and their family. Some people work so hard that they don’t have time to spend with their families.”

All Action International coaches are former business owners or business leaders, according to Koval.

“We’re helping people because we’ve been through it,” Koval said. “We’re not talking from an ivory tower.”

Koval said a business coach customizes a plan for each client. She can work one on one with a business owner or in a workshop setting with multiple owners.

“We have a program for a small group of business owners called quarterly planning days, where we meet in a group for one day each 90 days to discuss plans and how the business put the plans into action,” Koval said.

Koval said business owners vary in terms of how long they remain with a business coach.

“Some people see progress after a couple of months,” she said, “[while] others stay for years.”

She has clients throughout the state, from Bergen County to Burlington County, said Koval, who has seen an increasing need for her kind of work.

”Society moves so fast, and sometimes people struggle to keep up and [in doing so] get overwhelmed,” Koval said. “When they can’t see the forest for the trees, that’s when we pull them out and help them keep moving forward.”

Koval will provide a complimentary, two-hour business seminar on July 27 at the Millstone Township Community Center, located at 463 Stagecoach Road in Clarksburg.

“The seminar,” Koval said, “is two hours of knowledge, strategies, marketing concepts, sales promotions and profit-building strategies that’ll amaze you with their simple brilliance.”

Koval said that during the seminar she will address the following topics: advertising; growing a business through referrals; getting repeat customers; attracting the right employees; and ways to increase profits while working fewer hours.

“Business owners have nothing to lose and everything to gain,” Koval said.

The free seminar will begin at 6 p.m. with networking, pizza and soft drinks. At 6:30 p.m. Koval will begin her seminar titled “Five Ways to Super Sales and Profits.”

“I’ll also be setting up a table so that the business owners can display their brochures or pamphlets,” Koval said.

Seats are limited, and a validation code is required.

For more information, call (732) 792-1311 or e-mail susankoval@action-international.com.