The way you learned to lead has reached its expiration date.

How does the coaching process actually work?

Todd builds a customized coaching program for every person he works with — there’s no standardized process to install. But the questions tend to be the same six.

1. 1What is actually happening?
2. 2What pattern is the leader bringing to it?
3. 3What is that pattern costing the business, or the relationships?
4. 4What truth, decision, or conversation is being avoided?
5. 5What structure, conversation, or behavior has to change?
6. 6What are you willing to commit to doing?

Insight into behavior, behavior into operating structure. The insight has to turn into different behavior, and the behavior has to turn into something you can actually run without him.

Am I the right coach for you?

My best client is an established entrepreneur, founder, CEO, or second-generation owner who has already demonstrated they can succeed — and has reached the point where working harder won’t solve the problem.

Here’s what it usually looks like. The business has gotten too complex to run on founder instinct and personal heroics. Revenue is meaningful; profitability, cash flow, or predictability isn’t. You know you need to delegate and you can’t release control, or trust it, or watch someone do it differently without stepping back in. You put off the hard conversation until frustration comes out as anger, withdrawal, rescuing, or an overcorrection nobody saw coming.

Somewhere along the way your identity got entangled with how the business is performing, and you got the success without the peace you assumed would come with it.

Often there’s a specific event pressing on it — a turnaround, a growth ceiling, a succession, a leadership transition, a partnership conflict, or a personal reckoning. The business is asking you to become a different kind of leader, and you can’t make that transition by installing another system, reading another book, or going to another conference.

If that’s you, the question worth sitting with isn’t whether you need a coach. It’s what you already know needs to change and haven’t done anything about.

Who this isn’t for

This isn’t for someone who wants me to fix their team while leaving their own leadership unexamined. It isn’t for someone who wants validation more than truth, who keeps asking for a plan without implementing the last one, who wants a prescribed system instead of coaching built around them, or who treats paying for coaching as a substitute for doing the work. It’s also not a replacement for therapy or clinical mental-health treatment.

None of that makes you a bad leader. Usually it means the timing is wrong, and timing changes. But I’d rather tell you that now than take your money while you spend a year fighting the exact work you hired me to help you do.

I won’t take responsibility for your growth.

My job is clarity, safety, challenge, accountability, and opportunity. Your job is deciding whether you’re willing to grow. I’m not the fixer — I help you see what you couldn’t see, tell yourself the truth, build your own solutions, and follow through.

You being part of the problem is the good news. That’s not an indictment. That’s agency.

You get me between the calls.

You’re not buying two scheduled conversations a month. You’re getting a thinking partner who will look at the email, the financial report, the job description, the comp plan, the performance plan, or the decision while it’s happening.

It’s the 7am Tuesday text before you send the email you’ll regret — someone who knows your context, won’t just validate you, and can help you unspiral before you act.

More on access between sessions, and what coaching costs →

I am not your first coach. I am usually your last.

Most of the people I work with have already tried the systems, the programs, and at least one other coach. Those things weren’t useless. They just never got underneath the leadership pattern that was quietly producing the same result every time.