(2022) Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Startup Coach
Coaching for startups can drastically impact a startup founder and her path to growing the company and reaching profitability. This article provides everything I've learned building Sparrow into a trusted source of mentoring and coaching for startups. Here's our happy clients.
Table of Contents
What is a startup coach?
What is the role of startup coaches?
Is getting a startup coach worth it?
Will I bet a good fit for a coach?
Which startup coach is best for me?
Closing thoughts.
Coaching sessions have been proven to help founders drastically improve their decision-making over time through various aspects of their company journey including business development, sales enablement, customer development, marketing, growth and most importantly operations.
As Sparrow, our advisors have helped founders gain clarity with:
refining their business model to reflect real world results
finding creative ways to optimize conversation rates
focusing on scalable customer acquisition channels, etc.
As an example, our startup advisor, Mohammad who scaled 2 companies to a cumulative annual revenue of $13mm+, shows you how to build your growth funnel and scale your acquisition channels through SEO, content marketing, Google/Facebook/Instagram Ads, etc.
Additionally, Sparrow also has a LEANSTACK certified coach, who has helped several founders push through their barriers and make incremental changes in their professional lives. LEANSTACK is a continuous innovation platform that helps early-stage entrepreneurs find repeatable and scalable business models.
What is a startup coach?
A coach helps a founder and their teams improve their performance across different kinds of initiatives. They generally provide frameworks to plan and think through, in order to achieve your desired results through their coaching sessions.
Coaches generally do not have have subject matter expertise on topics like Google Analytics, but rather are able to help you plan through problems and guide you to your own solutions. They may:
Question your reasoning through "obvious" decisions you took
Push you to tackle issues that you may be uncomfortable to bring up in the beginning
Help you think through your barriers to executing on high-level / tactical tasks
In summary, think of yourself attending a one-on-one session with someone who has helped similar people in your position succeed and avoid costly mistakes. Analogies include experienced University professors or baseball coaches - they've seen the most pitfalls their students have had and can help you bypass them to success.
What is the role of startup coaches?
“Bill [Campbell] looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections.
Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.”― Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
In the quote above, Eric talks about Bill who helped to build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies - including Google, Apple, and Intuit, by coaching their leadership and executive teams.
If you want to make the most out of your time with your advisor / coach, I recommend this detailed article that lays out 8 effective tactics you use. It's title-agnostic, so it can apply to any kind of mentor or coach or advisor.
How coaching can help you.
The power of coaching lies in the coach's the ability to offer a different perspective, one unaffected by being “in the game.” Generally, coaching for startups may include the following components:
Vision
Defining a vision of your desired outcome and how it will affect your short and long-term goals. E.g., reaching a specific target for your startup's Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and whether it will require hiring additional employees.
Current State Assessment
Providing an objective and honest view of the current state of affairs and using a systematic approach to analyze and identify actions that will move the needle forward.
Patch to Clarity
Using frameworks and effective thinking models, your coach will help you take the thousand-foot view and zoom out of your tactical problems, so you can see (a) where you are (b) what goals you actually need to hit and (c) how to effectively reach your destination. Be mindful because different coaches can be their own methods of helping you accomplish this.
Accountability
Guiding your and your team leads/managers to commit to actions to be executed, and set metrics that will be used to evaluate progress objectively. Establishing accountability of you and your key team members to perform the actions they are responsible for.
It's important to note that throughout all these steps, they generally remain a guiding figure and less of a tactical, hands-on person as you work through your challenges.
Is getting a startup coach worth it?
The decision to bring them on to mentor you and your co founders will depend on your answers to these questions:
The What - Are your current roadblocks under your control? Are you aware of what your short-term and long-term goals are and what is stopping you from acting on them?
The Who - There's many coaches who may be a "okay" fit, but you should seek to find your best fit. My personal tactic here is to dig into a person's past experience and see if they've worked with similar people in my position. Reaching out to their past clients to see if the coaches are as good as they claim to be, is also recommended. And don't be shy to ask for a 30-min discovery call with them prior to committing. I've spent 6+ months vetting our startup advisors for SaaS, bootstrapped and venture capital backed founders, so I know it takes time to find the right fit for yourself.
The Why - Why a coach? Why now? Have you consulted your own network of experts about your specific issues? If so, why do their responses feel inadequate to you?
The How - Do you understand in-person or Zoom? Do you like people who talk directly at you about your issues? Or, perhaps you prefer someone who takes a lighter approach?
Will I bet a good fit for a coach?
The traits that make a founder like yourself coachable include honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning - even if it means unlearning things. A great coach doesn't focus on building consensus. Instead, they help teams find the best possible idea towards getting close to their goals.
Think back to when you first started your new job and needed your manager's oversight and guidance to do your tasks correctly. If you weren't open to learning to see things differently and putting aside your ego, perhaps you wouldn't have been the most coaching or teachable employee in the organization!
Which startup coach is best for me?
Depending on where you are in your startup's progression you may need different kinds of startup coaches. Coaches love organized clients, so you can use our pre-read template for sharing with them prior to your calls - as this lets them know what you want to talk about why.
Here are some startup stages and what kind of advisor / coach might be best fit:
Stage 1: Ideation, MVP and launching startups
Recommended Advisor: Mike Slaats (Founder of Upvoty, scaled to $23,500 MRR). Previously founded and sold $1M ARR startup.
At this step, founders generally need help adjusting to their own startup life and learning how to validate their business ideas, build an MVP, pivot and iterate till they reach steady demand. The knowledge necessary here for an entrepreneur should come from those who've built companies from zero - and Mike's the perfect person for that.
Stage 2: Going from MVP to Product-market Fit.
Recommended Advisors: Amar Ghose (Founder of ZenMaid, scaled to $1.8mm ARR), Mohammad Kamla (2x exited founder, scaled to cumulative $13mm ARR).
This is generally where most founders need guidance because there are 19 ways to scale your company (reference from book - Traction) but learning how to systematically test acquisition channels, measuring their effectiveness and using them to attract more clients may take a lot of time for first-time founders.
With an advisor / coach, you're able to shrink time needed to absorb new information and hack your learning curve, as you'll be getting it straight from those who've successfully done it before.
"Standing on the Shoulders of Giants."
- AKA, learning from the masterminds with a specific expertise.
Stage 3: Fundraising and Scaling towards Acquisition.
Recommended Advisors: Braydon Batungbacal (sold 4 of his own tech startups), Rick Deacon (Y Combinator alumnus, raised millions in funding), Trevor Longino (scaled 13 startups to $2mm ARR, each).
At this step, founders have usually demonstrated enough traction to either raise funds for expanding or acquisition. Ideally you would speak to two kinds of advisors at this phase. The first type will help you understand how they can start approaching investors and pitching to them effectively. The second type helps you make sense of the 20 moving parts of your growth funnel, sales and operations so you're able to keep increasing your revenue profitably as a late-stage startup.
You determine what you need.
I find that the growth advice that was helpful at $10,000 MRR - $50,000 MRR, are drastically different from the kind of guidance / coaching you'd need at $150,000 MRR+. And this is why the mentors you need to consult with, must have that level and complexity of experience to take you beyond your current state!
BUT - don't let these labels and "stages" determine exactly whose advice you need. You must always browse the pool yourself to see (a) what kind of person you emotionally mesh with and (b) what about their backgrounds / expertise you value very much, to understand who can help you. At Sparrow, I'll personally sit down with you to figure this out together.
Executive coaching
For those outside the entrepreneurship space, it may be that you're a CXO at an enterprise-level company and may need an executive coach. Please be mindful as the advice in this article may not be tailored to what you and your organization need at this time. I recommend this Harvard Business Review piece which lays out some dangers of blindly opting for executive coaching.
VC-Backed Startups
If you're a founder who has raised funds from an angel investor or venture capitalists, they may be very open to giving you their mentorship on topics they're confident about. But there will come a time where receiving feedback from specialists, advisors or coaches becomes necessary for you to get effective advice. And that's where Sparrow will fly you to new heights. Pun (:
Closing Thoughts.
I genuinely hope this article helped you make sense of what kind of individual you may need to approach to go from Point A to B in your professional life. If you'd like to have a one-on-one chat about finding your ideal startup advisor or coach, I would love to talk to you on Sparrow.
I sincerely wish you the best.