Looking for an executive coach
The sounding board, for the person nobody gives one to.
You have a team, a P&L and nowhere to be uncertain. That is the job. It is also the problem. You came here looking for an executive coach. Read this before you hire one, because what most founders actually need is a fractional COO, and I will explain why.
Eighteen months in
The thing nobody warns you about.
There is a moment, usually about eighteen months in, where you realise you have run out of people to ask.
Your team cannot hear it. They need you steady. Your co-founder is inside the same problem and cannot see it either. Your board wants confidence, not questions. Your partner has heard enough about work. Your friends stopped following the detail two years ago and now just ask how business is.
So you say fine.
And then it is three in the morning and you are solving it on your own again, fourth night this week, same loop, same place you got to last week.
That is what a coach is for, and it is real. One person, outside all of it, who you can be uncertain in front of. The trouble is what happens next, because the thing you are uncertain about is nearly always sitting in the business too.
Say the one that stung
You would recognise yourself in one of these.
Say the one that made you wince out loud. That is the whole method.
If two or three of those landed, that is normal. They tend to travel together.
The work
What I actually do.
I listen properly. Then I tell you what I think is going on.
Most of the time the thing you booked the call about is not the thing. You come in with a hiring problem and forty minutes later it turns out you did not make a decision you knew you had to make in March, and everything downstream has been quietly bending round the gap ever since.
That is the work. Finding the actual thing, getting you to say it out loud, then moving it.
I go first. I will tell you where I have been stuck, and most people’s guard comes down somewhere in there. It is much easier to say the embarrassing thing second.
The narrative
The story you tell yourself is the first thing I go after.
I listen to how you talk about yourself. Then I ask the questions that make you say the narrative out loud, and we go looking for the evidence together.
Usually there is not any.
I know this one properly rather than academically. I was told at eight that I would never amount to anything. Kept in at break to practise reading. Made to read aloud to the class by teachers who knew exactly what would happen. I carried that sentence into every room for twenty years, and it cost me time I am not getting back.
Yours probably is not dyslexia. But you know exactly which sentence I mean, and you probably know who said it to you.
Why a coach is not enough
What you actually need is a fractional COO.
Because almost nobody’s problem stops at you.
The confidence thing and the operational thing are the same thing.
A leader who has gone quiet in their own meetings usually also has a process that lets decisions queue behind them. A founder who is dreading a pitch usually also has a story about the business that has never been written down properly.
A coach works on the first half and leaves the second half exactly where it was. You go back on Monday and the process is still queuing decisions behind you.
A fractional COO works on you, then fixes the business.
Think of it as a GP for your business. You call a GP when something’s wrong and you can’t say what. You get the sounding board, and you get someone who then goes and unpacks the operation with your team, in the business, without being on the payroll.
Leader first. Then the team. Then the process. That is the order, and it is the order a coach cannot follow, because a coach stops at step one.
The difference
Where a fractional COO is different from an executive coach.
Most coaching is pure questions. The coach never tells you what they think, on principle, because the answer is supposed to come from you.
Sometimes that is right. Often it is maddening, and it is why founders quit coaching after two months.
I ask the questions. I also tell you what I think. If you are about to do something daft I will say so, and if you have earned it I will say that too. Calls you out when you need it. Talks you up when you have earned it. Then we clear it.
I can do that because I have run the job. Seven years at J.P. Morgan, graduate to Vice President. Over three thousand people trained, in rooms and on stages, plenty of them people who knew more about the topic than I did. First UK hire at Vena Solutions, no territory and no pipeline, so I built the region from zero. Interim COO of a stuck agency, three times the revenue in six months. A technology business built from nothing and closed on my own terms, which took more courage than building it did.
I have sold, hired, fired, launched, scaled and closed, and lived with what happened next.
I am not from your industry, I am not on your payroll, and I am not attached to how it has always been done. That is the only reason you can believe a word of it.
Be honest with yourself
Who this is for.
Founder-led businesses, pre-start-up to £100m, any industry. Other than that, it is about how you want to work.
- If you want to be agreed with, I will be annoying within a fortnight.
- If you want a document to put in a drawer, we will both be disappointed.
- If you want someone to blame for a decision you have already made, I am the wrong hire.
How it starts
Twenty minutes. Video, phone, a walk, a coffee shop.
No fee, no deck, nothing to prepare. You talk. I listen. Then I tell you what I actually think is going on.
A plan comes afterwards, built round what we discussed.
Steps, outcome, duration and cost on it. Sent over, tweaked, signed off. I do not spring proposals on people.
I will say so on that first call.
And I usually know who is the right person instead.
Before you book
The ones people ask.
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. Nothing is a daft question and none of it will offend me.
Is this coaching or consulting?
Do you have a coaching qualification?
How long does it take?
What does it cost?
Will any of this get back to my board?
What if I do not know what the thing is?
Related: when your team stops telling you the truth, how the work runs, and what actually moved.
Where to start
You have been going round this on your own for long enough to know it is not working.
Twenty minutes will tell us both whether it is a coach you need, or a fractional COO.