Key takeaways
- The founder is usually both the strongest asset in the company and the load-bearing wall standing in front of the thing that needs to change.
- Hire a COO when the founder can name three decisions that person will make without him. Coach first when he cannot, because the hire arrives into the same bottleneck and leaves inside a year.
What founder coaching works on
Founder coaching is not general leadership development pointed at a founder. The subject matter is different, because the founder is usually both the strongest asset in the company and the load-bearing wall in front of the thing that needs to change.
Three subjects come up again and again. The first is the calendar: a founder whose week is full of decisions other people should be making has a delegation problem that no productivity system will touch. The second is the gap between what the founder says is delegated and what he will actually let stand without intervening. The third is what happens to a decision he has already made and keeps reopening, which costs the company far more than the wrong decision would have.
Work starts with a free call, then the Bottleneck Diagnostic at $1,500, which deliberately looks at the founder alongside the business rather than treating one as the client and the other as the case. Continuing work, where it is warranted, usually runs with sessions every second week, scoped from what the diagnostic found.
Founder coaching or a COO hire
Owners frequently consider a senior operations hire at exactly the moment they should consider coaching, and the two are not interchangeable.
- Hire when the job is clear, the authority to do it is real, and the founder can name three decisions the new person will make without him
- Coach when the founder cannot yet name those three decisions, because the hire will arrive into the same bottleneck and leave inside a year
The second case is common and the failed hire is read afterwards as a recruiting problem. It usually was not. A founder who has never written down where his authority ends will keep taking decisions back by reflex, and a capable operator will not stay for that.
Where the finding is that a role genuinely is missing, we define it, including what that person must be allowed to decide alone and what the founder has agreed not to overturn. Where the missing piece is the layer beneath the founder rather than the founder himself, that is management coaching, not founder coaching.