The Founder Portrait
Most founders start working with a coach and spend the first month explaining themselves. Where they’ve come from, how the business works, what they think the problems are. It’s useful, up to a point. But it’s slow. And it relies entirely on how the founder sees themselves, which is often the least accurate picture available.
The gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you is nearly always where the most useful work is. And it’s almost always invisible to the person living it.
The Founder Portrait closes that gap before we start.
WHAT’S INVOLVED
A focused conversation with you and a small number of confidential interviews with people who know how you lead. Colleagues, clients, partners. People who will be honest because what they say stays between us.
It takes a week or two, not a month. And it happens before we start the coaching sessions, so nothing is lost to discovery when we could be working.
WHAT YOU GET
At the end of the process, I put together a Founder Portrait summary. A direct, honest account of what we found: your strengths, your patterns under pressure, the behaviours that are serving you and the ones that are quietly costing you.
It becomes the route map for our work together. When we sit down for the first session, we’re already orientated. We know what we’re working on and why.
WHY IT MATTERS
Coaching is only as good as the clarity you start with. Most people come in with a version of the problem that turns out to be three layers away from the real one.
The Founder Portrait gets us underneath that, fast. By the time we begin the weekly sessions, I know how you lead, what’s driving the decisions you’re making and where the work needs to focus. You start with momentum rather than building towards it.
If you’re curious what the Portrait would say about you, that’s a good sign you’re ready for it.