FIT TO LEAD
Founder Coaching to scale your leadership, your team and your company to the next level
Enquire about Founder CoachingWork With A Founder Coach Whose Hindsight Becomes Your Foresight
Unique blend of coaching and mentoring focusing on 3 areas:
1 The Self
2 The Team
3 The Company
I will help you solve today’s problems or make the most of today’s opportunities
- How to delegate when no one does the task as quickly or as well as you
- Figure out who the right people are to hire and how to attract them
- Satisfy the need to feel less alone and anxious
- How to solve a fall out with your co-founder
- Choose between the various strategic options
I will also help you solve tomorrow’s problems and make the most of tomorrow’s opportunities too
Because I’ve been on multiple scale up journeys myself, I know what pitfalls lie ahead and what transitions you will need to make to become the CEO.
- How to manage experts who know much more than you do
- Face up to the difficult conversations
- Create a culture by design rather than by default
- Make the switch from one-to-one to company-wide communication
- How to unleash the collective intelligence of your team
Scale yourself ahead of the scaling up of your company
Why You Need More Than a Coach
Wisdom Not Short Term Fixes
Every founder's journey is unique
There are patterns to the issues that come up but everyone’s founder journey is unique. There is no one playbook. You need a bespoke approach. You need access to wisdom, not the easily accessible Google answers.
Easy to get stuck in the weeds
Because what you are doing is really hard and complex. You can easily get overwhelmed in the short-term game. I am in it for the long-term with you. I’m there to help you take your head out of the weeds, to give you foresight and create value not only for today but also tomorrow.
And why you need more than a coach…
Because if I see you going down a dodgy looking path I will not passively sit there and let you run on without a challenge. I will not tell what to do but I will share my experiences and the multiple others perspectives I have gained from 25 years in the startup and scale up space.
Working with me you get a coach, a mentor, an advisor and a thinking partner. Together we can co-create success.
Founders Who Benefit Most From Fit to Lead’s Coaching
Seed/Series A to Exit
You have created something with substance. Your business is growing fast. You have brought investors on board. But with success comes pressure and responsibility. You’re trying to keep up, doing more of what you’ve always done. You know there must be another way but you don’t know what that looks like.
Confident and humble
The founders who benefit the most from my founder coaching are the ambitious ones, driven to succeed, who know they don’t know it all and want to learn but have the confidence to do it their way.
Committed to transition from Founder to CEO
You are prepared to invest the time and effort to expand your leadership skills. To put in place the road map to accelerate your transition to CEO.
Sustainable peak performance
I coach the ‘whole’ person. I don’t think you can separate the professional and the personal. To help you reach peak performance sustainably I use my PERMS Energy Framework – maximising your energy holistically.
First-time Entrepreneurs and Serial Entrepreneurs
The conversations are often different depending on whether you are a first-time founder or a serial entrepreneur. A multiple founder has more clarity about their superpowers, awareness about what they don’t want to do and who to team up with but only if they have been a learning machine. Experience is worthless if all you do is repeat what you learnt the first time round.
Common Scale Up Challenges We Help Founders Navigate
Get the Right People On the Bus
Hiring the right team members sounds simple but it is very hard to do – and most don’t do it well. How much rigour should you put into your hiring process? The answer is lots! If there is one skill above all others to lead you to success: it’s the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. Together we will co-create a rigorous hiring process.
Making The Tough Decisions Quick Enough
Whether it’s firing one of your team members (which no one likes to do) or shutting down a project which is failing, making quick decisions has been shown to be correlated to venture success. If I could make £1 for every time I have heard ‘I wish I had let go of so and so earlier’ I would be a billionaire! Learn time-tested tools, frameworks and techniques to create better decision making processes and radically improve your probability of success.
Give Me More Time
Time management issues come up with every founder I coach. Are you solving everyone else’s problems because it’s quicker to do and you can’t help jumping in? Are you spending too much time on inconsequential and/or reversible decisions? I can give you the short-term fixes but where I have seen transformational changes on time management is digging into the root causes such as your psychological attachment to being in control and your fear of letting go.
All I Seem To Do Is Deal With People’s Issues
Welcome to the scale up! Getting the right people on the bus is the first hurdle, but retaining and developing the right people is the second hurdle to jump over. People’s issues may be because you have the wrong person or simply you have them in the wrong seat or maybe it’s something to do with your leadership style. Thriving founders are not just task focused, they understand relationships are a key differentiator in their success. As your founder coach I will help you develop the skills around how to get the best out of your team members.
Do I Have To Keep Repeating The Same Messages?
The quick answer is yes, you do need to keep communicating the same messages. Whether you like it or not you need to become a full-time communicator. Clarity of your vision, your strategy, your roles, your goals, your purpose and your values is critical to your company’s success. And communication is the key to that, ‘speak your truth with clarity and passion’ (Aristotle). I will help you find your founder’s voice. I will coach you to deliver your messages in 10 different ways so that they cascade down throughout the company.
When Are People Going To Realise I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
Imposter syndrome is very common. As a Founder Coach you know this, because due to the confidential and the non-judgemental nature of the coaching conversations you hear the truth about founder’s fears and anxieties. But imposter syndrome is not a disease, it might be your superpower! It may signal ambition, high standards and that you are reaching for a new challenge. We will together figure out the root causes of your self-doubt and create bespoke strategies to navigate it.
What does a typical founder coaching programme look and feel like?
It will depend on your needs but assuming we have had the chemistry call and we both believe the fit is good, the relationship may follow this methodology…
1. Discovery
We discuss your needs, your challenges, problems and where you are at on the scale up journey. Depending on the context we may undertake psychometric assessments, bespoke questionnaires and/or 360 degree interviews with your key stakeholders to provide invaluable insights into where best to focus the coaching!
2. Design Your Programme
Based on those discussions and findings we co-create an initial six-month bespoke coaching programme.
3. Build Your Skills
The real work – and rewards – start here. We will get straight into what matters most for you and do it in a way that works for you. The sessions last between 60-90 minutes and are usually 2-4 weeks apart depending on your needs.
4. Check-Ins and Reflection
We will continually reflect on how well the coaching sessions are working for you, and make changes to the approach if required. We hold onto the coaching programme lightly as often new challenges come up and we need to course correct!
5. Six-Month Review And Beyond
If you have completed various assessments and questionnaires at the beginning we will repeat them to check-in on the ROI of the coaching. We will review how you have progressed with your goals and set a new set of goals for the next six months NB most of the founders I coach go beyond the initial six months
Mark Coaches Founders Backed by Global-Leading Investors
What Our Clients Say
You can read as many books as one has time for but that is a poor substitute for a live coach with deep practical knowledge in business leadership introducing these concepts and techniques at the right time in our business growth journey.
Mark is a gifted individual. He brings experience, perspective and humanity to every conversation.
Mark’s combination of being a business coach and a business angel, with many years of working with entrepreneurs, is a key reason I chose him. Mark has a highly connected, insightful, and inquisitive style of coaching. Mark is in equal measure a skillful enabler, an empathetic coach, an astute mentor, and a results-focused partner to his clients.
The time I spend with Mark is invaluable and energising. He is helping me become the leader I want to be, to look at challenges from different perspectives and to think more strategically. He is helping me develop this strategic muscle and to help me help my team become the best they can become.
Let’s Discuss Your Needs
You might have an immediate challenge you want to solve. You may have been thinking about getting a coach for a while. Wherever you are at, I encourage you to set up a chemistry call with me. I am always happy to talk to founders and have an open discussion about whether you are ready to fully engage with coaching.