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Executive coaching is the process of partnering with an executive coach to help you acellerate your growth as an executive. The role of the executive coach is to be a collaborator whose sole focus is on helping you develop the strategies and skills to make you and your start-up successful and to help you and your company accelerate through rapid growth.

Executive Coaching isn’t therapy, it isn’t mentoring, and it isn’t consulting. Executive Coaching is a partnership with an exeperienced professional focused on you developing your own performance as a leader and executive.

You should especially consider working with an Executive Coach when you are no longer measured by your personal output but by the collective output of other people.
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Executive coaches are used by the world’s best executives and founding teams to help them accelerate their personal and professional growth. The output of a fast growth company increases by 100-500% over the course of a year. That also means that the output that the CEO and the executive team are responsible for also has to increase by 100-500% in that year. High calibre Executive Coaches help you navigate that development trajectory by bringing their experience training and coaching executives of similar companies, their own professional experience, and well established frameworks and playbooks to a coaching and training program tailored to you.

Executive coaches have been used by Eric Schmit at Google, Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, Shishir Mehrotra at Coda, Justin Kan at Twitch and many others to help them accelerate up their own growth curve and become exceptional at what they do.
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There are three variables to the construction of an engagement. Each engagement is a combination of these: Payment Structure, Pre-commitment and Cadence of Sessions.

‍Payment Structure
‍Engagements can be done by the hour, by the month or as a set amount for a period of time, or number of sessions. E.g. Either $750 per hour or $3,500 per month.
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‍Commitment
‍Engagements can be monthly agreements, or can be upfront commitments to 3-12 months. Or they can be session by session.

‍Cadence
‍The cadence that you meet with your Executive Coach can be Weekly, fortnightly, monthly or ad hoc. Your engagement can also include time outside of sessions e.g. calls, texts, emails and other material reveiw.

Finding the right Executive Coach can be very difficult. The “right coach” for you needs to take into account the stage of the company you are building, what you are looking to work on, your preferences on who you learn best with, and your budget and engagement needs, just to name a few.

The best way to find a the perfect Executive Coach for you is either to do a lot of research and interview a large number of coaches, or work with an Executive Coach matchmaker or Executive Coach recruiter. These are usually free for you, and they have access to the best Executive Coaches (most of whom don’t advertise). Other options include asking your investors or peers for a recommendation.

Executive Coaching for CEOs, founders and executive teams range from $1,000-$10,000 per month or the equivalent per hour or session.

The price of an Executive Coach usually reflects the professional experience of the Executive Coach. For example someone who has been a successful start-up CEO or Venture Investor, who is now a coach, may charge $3,500-5,000 per month.

Someone who has been a serial CEO, navigated the growth journey from founder through to IPO and worked alongside the best venture funds in the world may charge $5,000-$10,000 per month.

It is important that you consider the level of Executive Coach that is appropriate for your goals so that you budget can fit the optimal Executive Coach for you.

Work with an Executive Coach is focused on helping you perform better at work. Topics that are common for start-up founders and CEOs are how to get more out of your day and your team, how to make sure you are working on the right things every day, developing your leadership and management skills, developing your feedback skills and your ability to have difficult conversations.

Having goals for your with with an Executive Coach is important to make sure that you get the most out of your investment. To formulate your goals consider why you are looking to work with an Executive Coach, and how you know the investment will be worth it. Some executive coaching match making services will help you craft these goals to make sure you only spend time working with Executive Coaches that have a high probability of being a fit.

A successful executive coaching partnership is different for each individual. That means that getting the most out of our executive coaching partnership will be personalized for you. However, there are a few things that can help increase the benefit you get. This includes having a clear idea of why you are looking to work with an Executive Coach and what your goals for an engagement are. Once you are in partnership we also recommend bringing topics that you want to work on to each session, joining each session open and ready to learn and grow and sharing openly with your Coach. This doesn‘t necessarily mean it will be comfortable every session but it will mean that you unlock the full value of your Executive Coach.

Like an athlete training in your sport, some sessions you will spend on skills that are directly applicable to your day-to-day, and other sessions you will “cross train” in topics that help lift your performance in a more sustainable way. It will increase your return on the investment of your time and capital if you come to each session ready to do the work.

Executive coaching can be one of the highest ROI investments you can make in the development of yourself and your company. The best way to think about your budget for executive coaching is to consider the value that an Executive Coach may be able to deliver and divide it by 10 to get to your ‘no brainer’ pricing. E.g. let’s say in the first month you want to work with a coach to reduce the amount of time you procrastinate on tasks so that you can spend more time working on the strategy of the business and managing your team.

Let’s say your salary is $150,000 and you spend 20% of your day stuck in the day-to-day that could be spent on the strategy. That will mean that you are better investing that $150,000 and having the effect of shifting your focus onto higher leverage problems and opportunities for the team, lifting the overall deliver of the team by 25%.

Let’s say you have a team of 5 with a total payroll of $750,000 and assume that right now ~25% of everyone’s time could be used more effectively if you spent more time strategically setting the team up for success. So 25% of $900,000 is $22,500 in potential savings. So your no brainer pricing would be $2,250 per month.

Executive coaching covers a wide range of support, so it can be the right fit for a lot of circumstances. However, there are some circumstances where executive coaching isn’t the right fit. If you are suffering from a mental health event, or experiencing a great degree of mental distress, then a therapist may be a better fit. On the other end, if you are looking for a purely tactical advisor to tell you exactly how to solve your problems or chase your opportunity then executive coaching may not be the right fit. However, if you are looking to improve your performance, and looking to get more out of yourself, executive coaching could be a high leverage investment.

There are many ways that you can find an executive coach for your team, including asking your investors or fellow operators for recommendations, googling, or trawling twitter for the many posts asking for recommendations. Or you can work with an Executive Coach match-making service like Co Lab which will send you a high signal list of vetted coaches personally matched to you goals.

Executive coaching is focused on helping you perform to your best while running your start-up. Therapy is focused on you living a happy and adjusted life. Lots of high performing founders have both a therapist and an Executive Coach, to help them be high performing and adjusted both at work and outside of work.

You can make the investment in Executive Coaching at any point along your founding and operating journey, however the optimal point to get an Executive Coach is the day you’re no longer being primarily measured by your personal output, but by the collective output of other people. We recommend this level of scale because that is when you start to have compounding high benefits (or costs) from your actions and decisions.

There are three key areas to consider when you are looking for an Executive Coach.

First is that the Executive Coach deeply understands the conext you are operating in. This can be either because they have been in your shoes before, or they have supported many people in your shoes beofre.

Second is that the Executive Coach is a great Excutive Coach and not just very experienced or believe they know how you should do it. This is where we see the majority of Executive Coach mis-hires: where you conflate the advisory skill set with the coaching skill set. Coaching is focused on helping you work out the answer for yourself, not telling you how to do it. Advising is telling you how to do it. Lots of experienced operators who step into coaching give into the temptation to just advise, instead of truely coaching.

Third is that you feel a high degree of chemistry with your coach. This is not experience your Executive Coach should have, but it is a feeling you should have in relation to the Executive Coach. From our experience matching 100s of founders to Executive Coaches, the chemistry fit between you and the Executive Coach is the biggest variable for success.

Executive coaching is focused on helping you perform to your best while running your start-up. Mentoring is focused on a wide range of topics from how you integrate work and life to advice on how you should run your Go-To-Market strategy. Executive coaching is a very specific focus on helping you accelerate towards your goals running your Start-up.

Executive coaching is focused on helping you perform to your best while running your start-up. And most importantly on helping you discover your own answers on how to do this. Advising is focused on solving specific bespoke problems for your business from the perspective of the advisor. The key difference between executive coaching and advising is the perspective on who is the keeper of the answer to the question.

Our coach collaborators are world-class operational and leadership coaches. They have all previously been former c-suite of fast-growth companies, former venture partners at world-class VCs and/or academics at the world's best universities. Examples include former venture partners at Khosler and Redpoint Ventures, former CEOs and C-suite executives from unicorn companies, and founders with multiple successful exits. On top of that, they all have deep experience coaching individuals and teams at a similar stage of growth and opportunity, including for the c-suite of Plaid, Clearco, Segment, Notion, Linktree and other similar companies.

Three easy steps to get your perfect executive coach.