June 2026

What Business Coaching Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)

The best athletes in the world all have coaches. So do the best founders.

This past weekend I was at a swim meet at the University of Texas watching my daughter compete. I struck up a conversation with a young man who had just finished his economics degree and was about to start the graduate program. He asked me what I do.

When I told him I was a business coach, he nodded politely and then asked the honest question: what does a business coach actually do?

I pointed to the pool deck. The swim coaches were right there, working with athletes who were already talented, already trained, already competing at a high level. Their job wasn’t to teach someone how to swim. It was to take that talent and help turn it into results. Better starts. Cleaner turns. Smarter race strategy. An outside eye that sees what the swimmer can’t see from inside the water.

That’s what a business coach does for a founder or business owner. You already know how to run your business. You’ve built something real. But when you’re inside it every day, moving fast, carrying a lot, it gets hard to see clearly. That’s where an outside perspective changes things.

He got it immediately. Most people do once you put it that way.

What gets murkier is what business coaching actually looks like in practice, because it varies a lot depending on who’s doing it and how.

Most founders I talk to picture a therapist, a consultant with a process and a deliverable, or someone who mostly listens and asks how that makes you feel. It’s none of those things. At least not the way I do it.

The work is simple. We figure out what’s actually going on, what needs to happen next, and how to get there. That might mean untangling a priority problem, naming the real issue underneath the one you came in with, or sitting with you through a decision that keeps getting pushed off because no one has quite said the true thing yet.

Most of the founders I work with aren’t stuck because they lack effort or intelligence. They’re stuck because they’re too close to it. Moving too fast. Carrying too much to see the situation clearly. A good outside read changes that.

Part of this work is human. We celebrate wins together and sit with the hard moments too. That matters. But encouragement without honesty isn’t really support. The most useful thing I can do is tell you the true thing, help you think it all the way through, and move the work forward.

If the same problems keep coming back, decisions feel harder than they should, or you know something needs to change but can’t quite name what, it might be worth a conversation.