A vision of Democratizing Coaching

This personal article is dedicated to all the great people at CoachHub. Every single day you are putting tremendous efforts into building something meaningful together and making a positive impact in the world. I know too often your great passion and utmost valuable contribution seems unseen. In full gratitude, the following thoughts are honoring you and expressing my direct, unedited thoughts to you.

The spark ??

More than a decade ago, as a first time entrepreneur and manager, I happened to find myself in a situation completely overwhelmed. I was coming fresh out of university, started together with my brother Yannis our first startup, and all of sudden I had to manage a team, our management, investors and most challenging of all - myself. Fortunately, as a young member of Entrepreneur's Organization, I was introduced to coaching and pointed to my first coach (Thank you, Klemens, you opened my eyes). My coach has helped me gain clarity, organize myself and to get back on track. Ever since, coaching has guided me through challenging times. It ultimately helped me to become a better manager, success entrepreneur and loving family dad. Coaching enabled me to stay balanced and pursue on my personal and professional growth path. It has become clear to me that coaching has the power to change our lives for the better. It can help an individual to overcome her challenges and unleash her personal growth journey, it can help managers to become better leaders and it can transform the way entire organizations collaborate. Coaching has the power to unleash the best version of ourselves.

A bold dream - Democratizing Coaching ?

As fate would have it, little over three years ago, I was visiting my brother Yannis, who was back then living in Ireland. I had just resigned from an adventure into consulting and Yannis was manager at a tech giant. Being entrepreneurs at heart, for both of us the time has come for a new purposeful entrepreneurial endeavor. While walking through the rainy streets of Dublin, we were discussing and reflecting what mattered for us and what made impact in our lives. We realized how often it was our coach who guided us towards the right path. In fact, it was Yannis' coach who sparked the idea of inviting me over for a visit. We began wondering, why so few people had access to this powerful tool called coaching. We asked ourselves: What if one day coaching would not just be exclusively accessible to top executives, celebrities and olympic athletes? What if we could make coaching available to everyone? In the course of our walk, we developed the vision of building an organization that is fully committed to bringing coaching to people of all career levels around the world. We called it the “Democratization of Coaching”. We soon realized that this big vision implies a fundamental transformation of the traditional learning industry and a 100x growth of the existing coaching market. Most importantly, it is deeply purposeful and highly motivating as we strive to change millions of people’s lives to the better. Eventually, this vision became the foundation of an organization called CoachHub and it is guiding us ever since this rainy day in Dublin.

Building a good company

People of all career levels - Explore the greater you!??

Since the very day that sparked the idea in us, it is equally important to us to build a GOOD company. An organization that is committed to combine positive economical impact with a true purpose, rooted in the deep belief that you can do well while doing good. At our first Christmas dinner, with just a handful of colleagues in December 2018, my brother Yannis found great words to describe what we are aiming for: “Imagine in several years from now, imagine a world in that coaching is available to everyone. Imagine how we can help turn the lives of millions of people and those around them to the better.”. We understand that the coaching market is highly fragmented and today for many people it is still hard to find the right coach. We understand that budget spent on Google Ads is not a valid quality criteria for coaching. We understand that taking a coach also comes with a financial investment and most individuals rely on their employers for support. We understand that the democratization of coaching is a long journey and it will take many years. Yet it is the right thing to strive for, because often those people who can afford a coach at least, are the ones who can benefit most from coaching. It is the only right thing to bring coaching to everyone, from executive level to management, to individual contributors across the entire workforce.

Unleash the transformation of your organization ??

At my time in strategy consulting I have seen many, to be honest most organizations around the world facing rapid change and struggling to successfully transform. It can be technological, agile or cultural transformation or keeping pace with increasing demand for new formats of talent and leadership development, digitizing working conditions or supporting employees throughout a global health crisis. Fact is, the 21st century is the People Age. In this new era, our people are our biggest asset and key to successful transformation. While people enable the transformation of their organization, it is coaching that enables the people like nothing else. Today, the organizational impact of coaching is scientifically proven and broadly recognized. With CoachHub we help organizations to truly implement coaching at scale. We embrace the highest quality standards, global consistency, compliance, support and scientific measurability and deep integrations within existing learning and development ecosystems. By doing so, we allow for global company-wide use cases and flawless scalability across borders and career levels. We know most organizations are facing great challenges. We are there to support and sustainably transform teams and entire organizations into better versions of themselves.

Conversations that matter ??

Most friends of mine who are coaches - and I believe it is fair to say most coaches in general - love to coach. I understand supporting people with their biggest challenges, the deep impact and a coachee’s full gratitude are highly rewarding. At the same time many great coaches are struggling to market themselves, to find the right number of coachees they would like to support, to cope with digital technology and security and to perform the many side-topics like travel, invoicing or collections. We aim to create an environment in which our coaches can thrive to do more of what they love and to have less inconveniences - we aim to build a sustainable community of expert peers. As we digitize coaching and bring it to employees who have never experienced it before, we help rapidly grow the coaching market and create new opportunities for our coaches. In fact, more than 95% of CoachHub coachees have never experienced coaching before. It is our ambition to create a community with constant opportunities to learn and exchange for everyone. Our vision is to build true long term partnerships with our coaches and to help them to build on their passion for coaching and to expand their coaching profession.

We do not deliver coaching to make money. We make money to democratize coaching.

Doing well while doing good ??

Even before we coded the first lines of code or won our first clients or coaches for our platform, Yannis and me aligned on one preprequite: We want to build a good company. That's why we created the idea of CoachHub4Good, an initiative supporting charities around the globe through coaching. A community of our most honorable and passionate coaches voluntarily coachs charity workers supporting people in need, including colleagues in difficult geographical regions like in South Sudan or Syria. Today, hundreds of volunteer coaches are supporting this initiative. Over 100 CoachHub employees are volunteering in their personal time. These deeply passionate contributions have affirmed us to go the next steps and to codify our committment to do good, social and environmental responsibility and diversity and inclusion into our CoachHub pledge, which will be initiated in the coming weeks.

When dreams come true ??

You may ask what it means to Democratize Coaching for Employees of all Career Levels Worldwide. The answer lies within yourself. Close your eyes. Imagine a world where you have access to coaching. You manager has. Your entire team has. The new trainee and your peer abroad has. Anyone throughout the entire organization has access to coaching. Now open your eyes: This is what democratization of coaching means. This dream is already true for our 200+ colleagues at CoachHub, from C-Level to intern and in any of our locations or remotely around the globe. As Gartner predicts, over the next few years, more and more organizations will follow. First slowly, then boldly, until finally any larger organization has implemented coaching a scale throughout their workforce. That day we know, our dream has come true.

Final words of gratitude

Huge shoutout to all the great people at CoachHub, who day for day go the extra mile. You are overcoming the biggest challenges and boldly persevere to turn this vision into a reality. It is your inspiration, passion and love that is turning mere words on a screen to life. It is an honor to collaborate with you on this rewarding path. I cannot wait to celebrate our next milestones together. Stay healthy, keep dreaming!