The Coaching Nobody Thinks to Ask For
A lot of founders and SME management teams may never have experienced 1:1 coaching, let alone coaching for their team or partnership.
That means you wouldn't think to ask for it. You can't request something you don't know exists.
Some VCs and PE backers have got ahead of this. A growing number provide or suggest coaching to founders and leadership teams as standard support alongside their investment, treated with the same seriousness as a go-to-market plan. The thinking is straightforward: the relationships and people at the top of a business are the foundation everything else is built on. Future-proof that, and you're protecting the investment itself.
But it's easy to hear that as "Something's wrong. I need fixing" as opposed to what it really is – a strengthening third party.
How to reframe coaching as the support it really is…
- Nobody arrives at CEO, or at running a business, already knowing exactly how to do it. It's not a skills gap, it's that the job itself has never existed for you before, in that company, at that stage, under that pressure. Coaching helps that transition stage for you and the business to settle.
- Someone stepping into the CEO seat right after the founder steps back. On paper, it looks like a handover. In practice, it's a minefield of the legacy and influence the existing founder still holds, relationships beyond the org chart and the unwritten rules often lived in the founder's head. Coaching supports those subtle transitions for you and the team.
- Being on the top team can be a heavy job under the watchful eye of a board or investor. A good coach doesn't remove that weight, but they're one of the only people positioned to be in it with you because they're not tangled in it themselves.
So if coaching does get raised for you or your team, the more useful question isn't "what's wrong with us?" It's "what's this moment actually asking of us, that none of us have had to do before?"
In my experience, coaching earns its place best when it's introduced by listening to the business first, not applied as a blanket fix. It tends to matter most around a few specific moments: when leadership capability genuinely needs strengthening, when someone's stepping into a role the business or they haven't done before, or when a business is moving through real change or growth and could use a perspective that isn't already caught up in it.
Starting the conversation
You don't need a formal programme or defining moment to begin. Usually, it starts with naming what you're noticing; a pattern, a tension, a transition, rather than announcing "we're getting coaching." If it's been raised by a board or investor, ask what they're seeing, rather than assuming the worst. Most coaches will offer a short, informal conversation first too, so you can tell if it's the right fit before anyone commits to anything, and this is usually an icebreaker to your relationship and how you want the coaching process to be.
None of that is about being broken. It's about not doing the hardest parts alone.
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