If you run the company, who coaches you?

Whatever support exists inside a company, almost none of it points at the person running it.

If you have a team, there is some structure for developing them, and you are part of that structure. If you have a board, its members sit on other boards and compare notes constantly. If you have investors, they have partners across the hall to test a judgment against before it ever reaches you. If you retain a lawyer or an accountant, they have professional bodies, peer review, and someone senior to phone when a case gets strange.

Plenty of the people inside those structures don’t feel well supported, and whether a company’s support actually works is a separate problem of its own. The narrow point here is that the structures exist at all, and that every one of them was built for somebody other than you.

If you are early enough that you have none of that, you are further from support than a bigger company’s CEO, which is the opposite of what most people assume. You are doing every job yourself, and maintaining your own judgment is the one that never gets its own time.

So who do you have?

For most founders and CEOs the answer is nobody, and it’s worth noticing how strange that is. The person carrying the most concentrated decision load in the company is the only one with no structure for maintaining the quality of their decisions. We wouldn’t design it this way on purpose. It happens because you are busy building everyone else’s, and yours can wait.

Do founders need a coach?

The straight answer: no, not all of them, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. This applies equally to CEOs who didn’t found anything, and to founders who have never called themselves a CEO. Plenty of people in both jobs do well with a strong peer group, a trusted former boss, or a co-founder who tells them the truth. What the job needs is the function, whoever provides it: a recurring, confidential space to think out loud with someone skilled, who has no stake in pleasing you, where the subject is you rather than the product.

Coaching is likely to help when some of these are true. You’re at a transition where the old approach stopped working, whether that’s the first executives hired, the first real scale, or the first crisis. You keep circling the same problem and can’t break the loop, which usually means the obstacle is somewhere you can’t see. The decisions have got heavy and there’s nowhere to put them down, because everyone around you is either reporting to you, invested in you, or worried about you. Or you’re carrying it alone and starting to feel it, and “it’s lonely at the top” has stopped being an abstraction.

If none of that is you, save the money. I mean that. If some of it is, don’t let the title put you off. Hiring a coach means putting one structure in place for the job that has none, and it happens to be the job where the quality of the thinking reaches furthest into everything else.

Finding out whether that’s true for you takes one call and costs nothing. Book a free intro, bring something real, and judge the hour on what it produces.