As a business moves from validating an idea to selling a product or service, the risks, pressures and needs of its founder can change significantly. At our latest NCME meeting, coaches Rachel Stockey and Les Gill explored how coaching needs to adapt at the start-up stage, to support everything from managing growth and funding, to navigating team dynamics and protecting the wellbeing of the entrepreneur.
Moving from an idea towards a functioning business brings a new set of challenges for founders. The focus shifts from whether a problem exists to whether customers will actually pay for a solution. Teams grow, funding becomes increasingly important, and decisions made in the early days can have much bigger consequences.
So what does this mean for coaching? At the latest Network for Coaching and Mentoring Entrepreneurs (NCME) meeting, Rachel Stockey, Head of Entrepreneurial Skills at King’s College London, and experienced mentor, coach and fellow of the Association of Business Mentors, Les Gill, shared their experiences of supporting founders through this stage.
Coming up in this article, you’ll find out more about what they discussed, including:
- What changes when an idea becomes a business – and how coaches can help founders shift their focus from developing an innovation to building a credible route to market.
- What happens when founders start selling – how the move from customer discovery to real-world sales can increase the sense of risk and rejection.
- How growth can change the founder’s role – from navigating new team dynamics and shared decision-making, to the need for different coaching approaches.
- Why the person behind the business matters – including how coaching can create space for founders to protect their wellbeing.
Turning innovation into a business
The start-up phase marks an important transition towards the real world. “Innovation doesn’t exist on its own,” Les explained. “It has to have a supply, and it has to have a customer. I don’t often find an innovation that can go to market on its own. It has to be adapted into something.”
As such, Les believes coaching must become more aligned with “how to manage the growth of the business, not necessarily the growth of the technology.”
The “energy” behind many conversations Les has with founders at this stage centres on funding. Les describes his approach as the “three layers of the cake”: circling back to the business plan, then the roadmap, followed by funding. “The aspiration is to have the crock of gold that we can go and spend and get on with it,” Les explained. “But it’s really hard work to get non-dilutive funding.”
He believes founders need to understand what they actually need, where it will take the business, and what they will deliver in return. This can help them avoid overestimating how much money they need, and underestimating how long it will take to reach the next milestone. Coaching can therefore help turn a general need for funding into a more considered business case and better focus.
Supporting the transition to selling
One of the clearest characteristics of the start-up stage is the shift towards the marketplace. “It goes from validating your problem – checking this is a real problem that lots of people are facing, to actually selling the solution that you’ve come up with,” Rachel said. “The change from validation to traction.”
That transition changes the emotional stakes for founders. “The level of jeopardy in your business jumps up,” Rachel explained. “You’re actually selling something real to real people, and that brings with it the possibility of rejection.”
Rachel has noticed that founders may therefore remain in the customer discovery phase longer than necessary. Coaching can provide a space to move through the discomfort, and remind founders that not everything changes when they start selling.
“They need to stay close to their potential customers and they still need to be checking and validating their assumptions the whole way through,” Rachel said. “That reminds them there will still be some familiar stuff they can anchor to.”
Navigating the side effects of growth
Growth also changes the way a company operates. Les explained that in the earliest days, communication is often informal and intuitive. As more people join the organisation, that approach becomes harder to sustain. “As you grow to a scalable level, it goes beyond intuition and it gets far more process driven.”
This can be a difficult transition for founders who are used to having direct control over how things are done. “Not all initial founders can cope with the level of constraints as they mature,” Les said.
In companies with multiple founders or a growing number of decision makers, the role of the coach can also evolve. Les described working with a seven-founder organisation where coaching has taken place both individually and collectively.
“I’ve found it very useful to open difficult conversations up into the group, as opposed to just trying to deal with them one-to-one,” he said. “So we have a group understanding, and then discuss how the individual is going to work within that framework on a one-to-one basis.”
There are also practical tools and frameworks that coaches can draw on depending on what the founder needs. Rachel uses Assumption Testing and the Business Model Canvas (BMC) to surface and test assumptions, and Future Pacing to work backwards from a desired future and identify dependencies. Les also uses the Not-To-Do List to help founders step back from day-to-day demands and identify what is genuinely mission critical. He also uses TAM, TOM and SAM to help founders sense-check their market opportunity and turn ambitious growth claims into a more credible story.
Looking after the human
As the stakes increase, coaching also needs to keep sight of the person behind the business. “Coaching is such a unique space for an entrepreneur where there’s no one with any vested interest in a room with you, that you can speak really honestly with,” Rachel said.
Founders may use that space to discuss confidence and imposter syndrome, but also overwhelm, burnout, financial pressures, and the personal impact of running a business. For Rachel, this led to her training as a Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) instructor, to bring more of this understanding into her work with entrepreneurs.
“In the early stage of your business, you are the business. So if you’re not well, your business is not well,” she explained. Rather than imposing a standard definition of wellbeing, Rachel encourages founders to identify their own warning signs.
“I try to get them to do some self-reflection around ‘how would you know that you weren’t okay?’” she said. The aim is to build these conversations into coaching before there is a crisis. “It reminds them that they are human as well as an entrepreneur,” she said.
For Les, a simple tool such as The Jelly Baby Tree can provide a less intimidating way to open up a conversation about how someone is feeling. But coaches do not need to solve every problem themselves. “When we get to the edge of our capabilities, training and skillset, we need to signpost to others who have got the training,” Les said.
Rachel described using group coaching to bring together founders at similar stages who are not direct competitors. At the end of these sessions, founders often say it’s “a version of therapy for them”, Rachel explained, because they have heard others facing the same challenges.
Practical steps: how coaching can support the start-up stage
Here’s what coaches can focus on to support entrepreneurs as they move into the start-up phase.
- Help founders move from validation to traction. Selling to real customers increases the stakes, so coaching can help founders navigate the fear of rejection.
- Keep customer discovery alive. Starting to sell does not mean assumptions no longer need to be tested, and this can anchor entrepreneurs to more familiar territory.
- Focus on the business as well as the innovation. Help founders focus on their route to market, value proposition, roadmap, and funding needs.
- Adapt the coaching approach as the team grows. Individual coaching may need to be complemented by facilitation and group conversations.
- Create space for peer connection. Other entrepreneurs can provide a valuable source of reassurance, practical experience, and shared understanding.
- Look after the human. Build conversations about wellbeing into coaching, while recognising the boundaries of the coach’s role and signposting where specialist support is needed.
Supporting the next stage of growth
The start-up stage brings greater opportunity, but also greater jeopardy. As founders begin selling, building teams, and raising money, the business becomes more complex and the consequences of decisions become greater.
Coaching therefore needs to evolve alongside the business: helping founders move from validation to traction, navigate growth and team dynamics, make better strategic decisions, and look after their own wellbeing. Ultimately, supporting a start-up means supporting the person running it, giving founders the space, skills, and perspective they need for whatever comes next.
Authors: Professor Harveen Chugh and Victoria Nicholls