Charlotte Saulny: President and COO at Coaching.com

A candid conversation with Charlotte Saulny, the new President & COO at Coaching.com.

Your journey in the coaching landscape is about to take an exciting turn. In this episode, Charlotte Saulny shares her remarkable voyage from the early stages of the profession to her experiences with the likes of Tony Robbins and Marcus Buckingham.

One of the most touching moments is when she talks about returning to Coaching.com. Describing it as 'coming home', it's here that she's ready to make a difference in your coaching journey, alongside CEO Alex Pascal.

The certification she received from the Hudson Institute armed her with tools and insights that now stand ready to help shape your approach to coaching. Her joy in mentoring and enhancing the skills of coaches like you is tangible and infectious.

Take a listen to the full episode to learn all the lessons.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Charlotte Jordan Saulny

(interview blurb)

Charlotte: This is an amazing profession and we need to be really rigorous, not only in upskilling ourselves so we are good coaches but we also need to be really rigorous in terms of the logistical way in which we are delivering coaching.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today served as a senior executive at ADP, focused on leadership development, engagement, and content development. She was the Executive Director of Coaching for Tony Robbins, where she oversaw the sales and delivery of coaching services to over 10,000 entrepreneurs per year. In addition to all these, she’s also our new president and COO at Coaching.com. Please welcome Charlotte Saulny.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Char. 

Charlotte: Hi, Alex. 

Alex: So nice to have you in this special episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee.

Charlotte: Hey, I am delighted to be here. It’s a great way to kick my weekend off.

Alex: Same. Friday morning here in LA. We’re both in LA. So, let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Charlotte: Today, I am drinking my favorite morning Nespresso coffee, Intenso flavor and a highlight of my day.

Alex: The Intenso flavor really kind of fits your personality, I think. 

Charlotte: Thank you. It probably does. That’s a fair comment, Alex. It does.

Alex: You are hard charging. It’s a good thing. I’m drinking coffee, some cold brew, that brand Chameleon that I really like, and the people that designed the bottles actually are the same marketing company that designed our Coaching.com logo, which is kind of cool.

Charlotte: Oh, look at that. Coffee and coaching.

Alex: Coffee and coaching. Who would have thought, right? 

Charlotte: Cheers. 

Alex: Cheers. So, the reason why I say that this is a special episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee is because you have very recently joined Coaching.com as our president and chief operating officer, which I am super excited about, but you’re also a coach and have this incredible career in the coaching industry and I am so excited for us to do this episode together today.

Charlotte: Awesome. Me too. I’m not only excited to have joined the team at Coaching.com but anytime I have the opportunity to talk about coaching, it’s a good day so I’m happy to be here.

Alex: It’s one of the things that I’ve always loved about you is just how passionate you are about coaching and, today, you’ll be able to guide me and our listeners through this journey that you’ve been in for the last two decades. I guess there’s going to be a lot of questions that I probably should have asked you throughout the interviewing process that I’ll get to ask you today. I know a lot of your career, but I think when we started talking, we get tactical into things that we want to do together so I am actually super excited to get to know some of the ins and outs and more details of your career. What better setting to do it than Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee?

Charlotte: Perfect. I love that. So what do you want to know, Alex? 

Alex: So, take us back to the beginning. How did your career get started? How did this journey and adventure into coaching all began?

Charlotte: Love it. Well, I didn’t start off thinking that I was ever going to be in the coaching profession. I’m not sure many coaches do, in honesty. I started off studying law, so my intention was to become an attorney. Seemed to suit my personality, argumentative, loved a good debate, really wanted to make a difference in the world, and slowly realized that the law was really a wonderful profession but that it didn’t really afford me the opportunity to help people be better or get better. And after I completed my formal education, I was educated in England, I moved to the US and, quite by accident, fell into a leadership development company where I first discovered coaching. And, at that point in time, this is back in 2000, Alex, so long time ago, at this time, coaching was a fledgling profession. The ICF was just sort of being imagined, there were maybe 10 or 20 books on the coaching profession, and it was really sort of in its infancy, but I had the opportunity to learn a lot about this incredible profession and read all these books as I worked for this leadership development company and discovered that coaching was this incredible vehicle for helping people achieve their goals, for helping people discover the best of themselves, and I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with it. And it really created the foundation for my career. And I went on and I, as you know, I worked with Tony Robbins and Tony, at that time, had a huge coaching practice. I mean, a hundred coaches worldwide, delivering, gosh, 10,000 coaching sessions a year. Some really incredible coaching work being delivered by his organization. And it was all really life coaching. A lot of it was life coaching. So, when I left Tony Robbins, I was really excited to start working for Marcus Buckingham and had the opportunity to grow the coaching practice there, amongst other things, and stayed with Marcus until, as you know, ADP acquired our company in 2017. But the through line of my whole career has been coaching. My passion has always been coaching and I’ve had the opportunity not only to be a coach and a practitioner of coaching but to lead a coaching practice and to help organizations build internal coaching practices. So I think I have had the opportunity to know what it is to be in the coaching profession from different lenses and that’s, I think, set me up for success and I think it’s also set me up to hopefully add value at Coaching.com so that’s why I’m super excited to be here.

Alex: It’s great to have you and thank you for that overview. One of the things that you didn’t mention, as part of your experience at The Marcus Buckingham Company is that you were also working on creating technology to go hand in hand with the programs, which is so relevant to what we do at Coaching.com.

Charlotte: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, many of our listeners I’m sure will be familiar with Marcus Buckingham and the incredible work that he has done in the strengths field and one of the things that we were really committed to doing at The Marcus Buckingham Company was to find and to figure out a way to help scale strengths within organizations. And, inevitably, that meant that we needed to create a technology and software solution that enabled us to help team leaders better coach and manage their people from a strength-based perspective. So, in my role at TMBC, I had the opportunity to work very closely with coaches to develop very meaningful coaching content that would live within our technology and that would help team leaders be able to coach their team members more effectively. And that was one of I think the most powerful things we did as a company to really help sort of scale coaching, scale strength within organizations.

Alex: One really cool thing about your journey is that your first job, you mentioned leadership development company, but it was really at the first version of Coaching.com that was different than this iteration but how cool is it that 20-some years later, you come back to the company where you started it all. You worked on the original Coaching.com as part of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Charlotte: I did. I did. And I mean, honestly, Alex, and you and I have sort of talked about this briefly but it’s serendipity for me. I mean, part of what was so attractive around coming to work at Coaching.com was just this sort of serendipitous feeling of coming home. And after our conversations and feeling that we were really aligned around what you wanted to do in the world with Coaching.com and the impact we could have, after meeting the team and the incredible people that we have working here, and then feeling like I was coming home, that was amazing, because, of course, as you said, I worked for Ken Blanchard and Ken Blanchard Companies were the original sort of people to start Coaching.com and that was the first job that I had in the US was working for Coaching.com. I worked for Scott Blanchard and he and his team had an incredible idea around bringing coaching into enterprises at scale and they built an amazing technology and they had an amazing vision and it was an incredible team and it was an idea that was before its time. And, unfortunately, the company closed and the incredible assets that were created were rolled under the Ken Blanchard Company, but it was a wonderful time and it was — I will forever be grateful for that time in my life because it introduced me to coaching, and so when this opportunity came around and when you bought the domain and you rebranded CoachLogix as Coaching.com and then you acquired WBECS to bring in this incredible educational component, wow, that was huge. It just felt like, wow, I have the opportunity to come home and to bring coaching to the world in a new way and sort of finish my story at Coaching.com, if that makes any sense.

Alex: It makes a lot of sense and we love having you here because it is so hard to find someone that has all the different elements of experience that can really help company kind of where we are, your subject matter expertise, expertise scaling an organization from an operational perspective, the cultural feat. I mean, there’s so many things that need to happen, you may find someone that has a couple of those but then maybe you don’t get along as well or — it’s hard to find someone from my perspective that, you’re bringing in as an operating partner in the business and I think you and I have always just gotten along really well. We were talking about this the other day. You and I are having a lot of conversations these days so you are, in your official kind of week 2 or 3 here and we’ve been working for a couple months kind of prepping, but we were talking about the first time we met and I had to go back through my emails and it was just about this time 10 years ago. So, it was about June 2013 and I had just left CCL about a year and a half before that and I was building up the first iteration of CoachLogix and we have a friend in common that used to be the managing director of the CCL campus in San Diego, Debbie Zaleschuk, and she put us in touch and I visited your office at TMBC in Beverly Hills and we had a great time and I remember just thinking, what a boss, it’s like she owns it, I love it. So we had some good conversations and I think we were like super early on and the technology wasn’t really ready but it was nice that we kept in touch over the years and, as synchronicity would have it, really, I’m sitting here in Beverly Hills today so I lived in San Diego back then and now, you and I work out of Beverly Hills together, which is it all kind of comes together, it’s incredible, and it feels magical.

Charlotte: The stars have aligned and it feels — I personally just feel so grateful, Alex, because it’s always great to feel like the accumulation of your skill set can be leveraged in a very meaningful way somewhere. So, when you came to me and we started talking about the potential of working together, it was so wonderful for me because I could see how my cumulative experience could lend itself to your vision and I don’t think everyone’s lucky to have that in their lifetime so I just feel very lucky and blessed to be here.

Alex: Same, and you have an incredible track record of working with incredible thought leaders and heads of companies to kind of help them enable the vision so I’m just feeling incredibly lucky to have you. One of the other things that I really like about your background and I’ve mentioned already is that you’re actually a coach yourself. So, I know that you went through the Hudson coach training program in Santa Barbara. So, how was that experience? How was your process to think like, “Gosh, I wanna get this certification”? What was that process like for you?

Charlotte: Yeah, it was a long time coming. So, funny story, when I first started working for the first Coaching.com, I was very blessed that Scott and Madeline paid for me to go through training at New Ventures West with James Flaherty and that was an incredible coach certification program and I learned a lot about coaching and I certainly had the opportunity to practice coaching, but at that point of my life and my career, I was really more focused on being a business leader of a coaching business because after I got certified, I moved to Tony Robbins and so I didn’t really have the opportunity to work as a practitioner in the way I would have liked to. So, fast forward, and as you say, I had the opportunity to go through Hudson very recently. End of January 2020, I went through the first component of their program, which is an incredible in-person experience called Life Forward. And, from there, after completing that experience, I completed their certification, which is a year-long program, which at that time was delivered virtually because, of course, the pandemic had just hit. So, I had the opportunity to learn and to practice coaching in a new kind of way and, as you know, Hudson’s model is extremely robust and it really focuses in on how to manage change and transition in your life and in the lives of your clients. And, of course, everyone is going through change all the time so the model is very, very applicable and very, very useful, especially in today’s world. And for me, that experience of really grounding into a model that helped people identify where they were in a cycle of change and what they could do to support themselves and others was very powerful. And so it was a great experience for me. I still feel very connected to my Hudson family and to the incredible coaches that come from there and I certainly think that lens of what it means to be a coach and the challenges, frankly, Alex, with managing a coaching practice as a coach, some of the things you run into. I think that’s very helpful and will certainly help me not only here in my role at Coaching.com but hopefully elsewhere as I support people in their coaching practices.

Alex: I can see that longing throughout your career to kind of go back to that practitioner lens after running companies and being a coaching practice leader. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think they use like the integral model from Ken Wilber, right?

Charlotte: They do. They do. And James Flaherty was extraordinary. I don’t think he teaches any more but that is absolutely the model that they use and very heavily based in Ken Wilber’s work, yeah.

Alex: Yeah. I remember that many years ago, when I was just first getting started in coaching, I was looking at coach training schools and I remember, that obviously caught my eye because I’m a big Ken Wilber guy. Love Ken Wilber. One of my favorite thought leaders or thinkers, really, of all time. Just fascinating. 

Charlotte: Yeah.

Alex: Fascinating man. Let’s go back to — so you left Coaching.com and how did the opportunity to work with Tony Robbins come about? And such an interesting thing that Tony was having such high kind of volume coaching back then when coaching wasn’t really necessarily a thing. I mean, he’s such a legend as a motivational speaker, as a coach. How was your experience from going from Coaching.com to starting to work with Tony? What was the initial connection? Take us through the process of you jumping on board with it.

Charlotte: Yeah. So I think I found the job online and I applied to it. I mean, there was no connection. I didn’t even know who Tony Robbins was but they were looking for a director of their coaching division and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. I’ll put my hat in the ring for that.”

Alex: In San Diego. 

Charlotte: In San Diego, yeah.

Alex: And it was such a vortex of energy around coaching. It’s kind of wild.

Charlotte: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So I applied for the job. I went, I interviewed, and managed to land myself in that position, and, as I said, it was a really huge coaching practice. And working for Tony was an incredible experience. You’re right, he’s an amazing motivational speaker and I’ve never seen someone who can command a room in the way that Tony commands a room. I mean, he can keep 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 people in a room for hours at a time and keep that energy level high and keep people engaged and it’s just extraordinary to witness. It truly is. And he is a genius when it comes to content. So I think the benefit, certainly for me and having worked with him, was really being exposed to so many incredible pieces of content that were really focused primarily around how to manage your psychology to support your success, especially imagine super early on in my career, that’s an incredibly valuable learning to have is to learn a bunch of tools where you can manage your psychology, you can shift your perspective. There’s so many things that you learn to do and that I learned to do as a result of working for Tony. And that’s how I got the job. As I said, I was there for five years. We developed multiple coaching programs that were very focused on particular topics, so while we did sort of what we would call in the business free form individual coaching that really met the clients where they were at and really helped them achieve their goals, we also did what I would call content-based coaching programs where there was a set number of sessions and there was a set objective and there were certain pieces of content that you would cover in each of these individual coaching sessions. So we built several coaching programs on different topics, such as time management, health and vitality, entrepreneurship. This was a really great way to give people access to coaching who maybe hadn’t heard of coaching before and weren’t quite comfortable signing up for sort of a free form coaching engagement but would be comfortable signing up for something which had a little bit more structure and a little bit more content in it. And so, in working at Tony Robbins, I was able to really participate in the development and design of a variety of different coaching programs that would meet the needs of our clients and learned a ton about what you need to do to move people to action in a meaningful way. And, I mean, that’s a very big part of coaching. So, there for five years, and I think probably one of my most favorite things about working with him was not just the opportunity to learn content and learn strategies, but also the opportunity to mentor coaches, to really listen into the polls, listen in to them coaching and be able to provide input and suggestions around what they could do to further enhance their impact. That was just really meaningful to feel like I was adding value to coaches and helping them get better.

Alex: Sounds like an amazing experience. And then, from there, how did you decide, okay, it’s time to move to a new gig and how did you find Marcus? 

Charlotte: So, I think the thing that was sort of frustrating for me around working at Tony’s was that I was really interested in moving into the corporate space and the coaching that we delivered at Tony’s was really more of a business-to-consumer model where we were delivering coaches to entrepreneurs or individual consumers. Amazing work, amazing impact, but I was really interested in how do you take coaching to the enterprise, which sort of goes back to my Coaching.com roots, like how do we bring this into organizations so we can help people in their world of work be more impactful? And that wasn’t the business model that Tony had and there wasn’t the opportunity to really move into the kind of corporate space that I wanted to move into. So I decided it was time to leave and it was really by accident, actually, that I met Marcus. I met Marcus, interestingly enough, through a very dear friend of mine who still works at the Ken Blanchard Companies, a friend called Vicki. You’re right, there’s like this vortex circle but Vicki introduced me to Marcus and I met him in LA in Beverly Hills, of course, because, of course, that’s where all good coaching things happen and he was looking for someone to help him create content that could be sold into organizations that was focused on helping people identify and leverage their strengths in the workplace. Of course, I had done content development at Tony’s and I was very passionate about strengths, like it intuitively felt right to me, it felt in alignment with what I had experienced is helping people be at their best was to help them play to their strengths so I was very aligned with the concept and the notion and I really liked what he was trying to do. And so I worked with him, Alex, on contract for probably about six months to just really feel each other out and sort of explore what was possible, and oversaw the development of that content, how to pull the team together to develop some of this content. And then, it’s funny, he never really wanted to be in the delivery business, he wanted to develop content and then offer it to enterprises to use but, of course, the second you do that, enterprises go, “Oh, that’s great content. Who’s gonna deliver it?” And so, suddenly, you have to think about, okay, who are we going to bring on to deliver this content in a meaningful way, which is when we started bringing coaches in to The Marcus Buckingham Company and the rest is history. We sort of built a coaching practice and a training practice based around strengths, but that’s how I got into it. 

Alex: It’s a great story. Such a cool career. So, everyone’s career is an adventure and you go from one thing to the next but I think one of the things that I really enjoyed as I kind of get to learn more, I got to learn more about your career is just that common thread around coaching and content and packaging and delivery, and I know a lot of people in this industry, so a lot of people have kind of those kind of similar common threads but yours is pretty unique and the companies that you’ve worked with, what a cool, fascinating journey and I love how that piqued your interest in like, well, maybe I should now look into getting — you went through New Ventures West in the early 2000s and then how that kind of led you to, again, think about putting your practitioner hat on and then, as you were maybe getting ready to do more work on that area, I was like, “Char, I think you have to join Coaching.com.”

Charlotte: I know. I never fully get into practicing it.

Alex: Yeah, I’m sorry for all the would-be clients that are missing out on working with you but, hey, what we do has so much impact, it’s just the scale of technology and platforms is just in a different level and that’s what I get super passionate about and I know you do as well. If you help coaches be better coaches and if you help coaching be more efficient and more effective by leveraging technology, the impact that you get from that is just exponential and really that’s what we do here. We help coaches upskill their game with incredible access to thought leaders, thought leadership programs, and we also have the software platform that enables scale. I never talk about this in the podcast but I think it makes sense today since you’re joining us as our president and COO and I think a lot of our listeners today are probably people that listen to the podcast a lot, probably follow Coaching.com so it’s nice for us to kind of talk a little bit more about that. So, is that something that gets you excited, like instead of being a practitioner in this stage in your career to put your COO hat on and kind of focus on scale for others?

Charlotte: For sure. Listen, I mean, being a business leader and leading teams is a huge passion of mine. So, coming to Coaching.com enables me to not only be able to lead good people and coach good people but it also allows me to have a greater impact in terms of bringing coaching to the world. And you and I have shared this or talked about this, Alex, but, for me, I am so passionate about helping coaching scale and bringing more access to coaching, more visibility to coaching and to the coaching profession, but I’m not interested in scaling bad coaching. So, for me, the combination that Coaching.com offers, this incredible platform which really enables the delivery of coaching services at scale, is frankly not anywhere near as interesting to me without that educational component because I want to make sure that the coaching services that we are scaling are exceptional coaching services and that the coaching that people in the world are receiving is excellent coaching. So, that combination of being able to enable coaching and, frankly, to help coaches deliver coaching in a seamless way, because, listen, this is an amazing profession and we need to be really rigorous not only in upskilling ourselves so we are good coaches but we also need to be really rigorous in terms of the logistical way in which we are delivering coaching. We can’t just take notes on a notepad and put it in a hard file, like we need to be professional in our delivery of coaching services and the way in which we are managing our coaching practices. That’s vital. If we want this profession to be looked at as a serious profession, we need to deliver it in a way which is serious and consistent and attracts quality and ensures that we’re driving to certain outcomes and results. So, the platform, I think, is very important for individual coaches in terms of how they are perceived by their clients and in terms of the quality of coaching that they deliver. The platform’s massively important in that respect, but then the educational component, the professional development component, really encouraging coaches to continue to upskill, that’s huge. We have to be able to continue to provide that. So that’s why it’s exciting to me, it’s that delicious combination, one or the other, not enough; together, meaningful.

Alex: Love it. And when you’re talking about scaling low-quality coaching, it reminds me of the opening jokes in my favorite movie, it didn’t age too well because the director is problematic but art is art and the actual joke in the movie is beautiful. Annie Hall is my favorite movie of all time. Obviously, Woody Allen didn’t age too well. I guess he’s aging well but you know what I mean.

Charlotte: I get it.

Alex: So he opens up by saying that there’s these two women having lunch at a Catskill Mountain resort and one of them says, “Boy, the food here is really terrible,” and the other one says, “In such small portion,” and then he goes to say this is essentially how I feel about life, this is essentially how I feel about, well, we shouldn’t scale low-quality coaching, right?

Charlotte: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Alex: It’s a great joke. If the food is so terrible, why would you want a larger portion?

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Alex: I agree wholeheartedly with you and I think the coaching profession is in a really interesting inflection point where just — let’s think about just coaching and technology. When I started CoachLogix, there was really no coaching and technology, it was really coaching and there were a few platforms that were essentially glorified spreadsheets primarily being driven by the coaching companies that have the need to create a technology, some sort of technology to essentially kind of help their operations. Coaching businesses are primarily operationally driven businesses. So I was working in CCL and that’s where the idea, I was like there should be a platform for this. And fast forward a decade and it is hard to imagine coaching now and into the future without it being actually delivered through technology and technology has really wrapped itself really around everything. Like Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world, and when you’re looking at coaching, there’s really the symbiotic relationship between the delivery of coaching services and technology. But it opens up so many different pathways within the field of technology of how coaching is sourced, managed, delivered, evaluated, and we’re really at the initial stages of that so there’s so much cool and exciting work to do so I think pathways that we’ll use to scale coaching into the future are emerging now and this ongoing conversation in AI, how can AI help coaches be more effective, some people are focused on how AI can replace coaches, not interesting, I think, to me and I know to you as well and probably most people listening in is how do we enable technology and AI to help coaches be better and that’s the world that we’re operating under right now and a lot of the cool work that we’re going to be doing kind of falls within the context of that accelerating and evolving field that is coaching.

Charlotte: Absolutely, and I think, Alex, that it’s going to be a real journey for us as we think about how we leverage technology to deliver coaching in a really meaningful way and how does the technology, like where’s that line between the technology and the human and how do we have that balanced because I think the technology is a phenomenal tool and it will help us scale and I know that you and I are both always really committed and interested in ensuring that we aren’t losing that human component. So, AI, I think, is extraordinary and I know that you are passionate about how do we leverage AI in our platform to help coaches be better coaches? How do we leverage AI to do some foundational work that will save time and create efficiencies? But I know that you and I are both not really interested in that space of how do we use AI to replace coaches and so I know that it’s going to be an interesting journey as we figure out how to leverage all of this fantastic new technology and new AI to support the coaching process without it detracting from the very essence of coaching, which is really about connecting human beings together and creating space for people to discover and learn and grow and become their best selves. And that’s going to be a fun, nuanced thing to manage.

Alex: Absolutely. I want to focus now on the audience that we’re serving, because I’m guessing if someone is like almost 40 minutes into this conversation, they probably care about Coaching.com, the ecosystem, WBECS Summit so I’m assuming the listener knows about our ecosystem and kind of wants to learn a little bit more about your vision for the work that we’re doing together. So, in this special episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, I want you to tell our audience a little bit more and I think you were already alluding to that with your previous comment, but what got you excited about joining the organization? What are some of the things that you want to focus on as we embark in this journey together to help coaches and coaching be all that it can be and be all that they can be in the years to come as we enable coaching at scale with high quality education programs and technology?

Charlotte: Well, Alex, you and I have talked a little bit about this. We are blessed and fortunate that we have so much opportunity around how we can make a difference in the world as it relates to coaching. We have great education, we have great software, focus what should our priority be. In terms of what I’m most excited about in relation to Coaching.com is I feel as if this combination of a technology which enables coaching plus education or plus professional development really is an equation that is going to set us up for success. And, for me, being able to focus on building a presence in the enterprise space where we can help enterprises manage their coaching practice in a meaningful way, so looking at large enterprises that have internal coaches and external coaches who need a platform that can enable that business, that’s very, very exciting to me because there’s so many coaching providers out there that do a wonderful job at providing coaching services. What I love about Coaching.com is that we don’t have coaches that we hire, we support an incredible community of coaches but we’re not hiring coaches to deliver coaching services. We really want to enable enterprises to be able to manage their coaching services in a meaningful way, in a way that gives them data around the impact of the coaching that they have in their organizations, and give those enterprises access to our extraordinary community of coaches so that enterprises that have mature talent functions, that have people within their organizations who can make smart choices about the coaches that they want to hire, have that flexibility to do it in the Coaching.com ecosystem. That’s exciting to me, that sort of that combination of empowering enterprises to manage their coaching practice however they want to construct it, not needing to use our coaches because we don’t have coaches but, at the same time, being able to access this incredible community of coaches at Coaching.com. That’s powerful for me. So, for me, I think, certainly, the next few months being really focused on how we can help enterprises in that respect. The other thing that I’m so excited about, Alex, and you know this is we have incredible content partnerships with some incredible content providers and really helping both enterprises and individual coaches in our coaching community get access to this extraordinary content that is going to help them coach better. Enterprises want qualified good, strong coaches. Coaches want really great content to help them be better and more qualified. So this really continuing to foster great content partnerships so we can bring good content to both the enterprise and coaches, great stuff. So those are the two things that I think I’m most excited about.

Alex: That’s amazing. Yeah, I get excited just hearing you talk about that. Really cool. Anything else you’d like to add on your career, your journey, the journey you had?

Charlotte: No. I think simply to say that this next chapter is the most exciting chapter yet for me and I’m so looking forward to getting to know the coaches in our community. I’m so thrilled, Alex, that you are so committed to the individual coach experience. Because enterprise coaching, that’s great. We want enterprises to have fabulous, successful coaching practices, but the only way that we can do that is really in helping coaches be amazing and so I love your commitment to the coaches and the coach community and so just really excited for what’s next and I suppose the only question or anything left that I have to add is when are we going to next meet for coffee in person?

Alex: Yeah. I mean, we’re going to have to do it pretty soon and it will probably happen next week and we’re kind of starting to work together a few times a week in person in our new space here so it’ll be wonderful. 

Charlotte: And I have one more question. I have one more question for you, I’m going to cut you off.

Alex: Yes, take over as the host. No problem at all.

Charlotte: As the host, right? I know. Hey, listen.

Alex: Michael Bungay Stanier did that where he introduced me to my own podcast and we were laughing about it and I know a lot of people found that hilarious, so here we go again.

Charlotte: Well, I love it. Well, I suppose I’m going to put this out there. If you were to look back in a year’s time and tell me what it would look like for me to have been successful in this role that you have hired me to do, what would have happened? And now you can say this to the whole world and they can hold me accountable to it. 

Alex: Thank you, Char. Putting me on the spot to then put you on the spot. I love it. I love it. Yeah, I mean, I think we’re at that stage in the growth of the company where operational excellence is a must. I’m not an operator, an entrepreneur, I’m an organizational psychologist. I think I’ve had a very definite vision and I think a very powerful strategy to kind of scale the business. I’ve always had our values very well aligned with being very customer centric. So, as we’re working through the process of kind of bringing you in, the operational excellence is certainly an area that we are in need of to take us to that next inflection point of growth and I think some of the refinement around our ecosystem so that it makes sense to people. I think a lot of people that have been part of the WBECS ecosystem for a long time or CoachLogix and Coaching.com, they understand kind of how it works but a lot of people are confused, let’s say, around that distinction between pre-summit and Summit or we call it full summit for a year so really kind of thinking about what are some of our flagship programs, what do they mean for coaches, how do they meet you where you are in your coaching career, how do they enable you to be a better coach to get new business, just clarifying the message and the value of what Coaching.com brings, I think that’s going to be very important. And I think we already run some of the highest quality programs out there but continuing to focus on continuous quality improvement on the delivery of the programs and the partners we work with and continue to improve the software, the capabilities, the reliability of our platform, our ecosystem are going to be key. And, lastly, think just really identifying really what is our culture at Coaching.com? We’re getting close to 100 employees worldwide. What are our values? What’s our culture like? I think there’s pockets of different cultural values that we ascribe to but I think we’re at that time in the trajectory of the company where we really need to come together and clarify our vision, our mission, our values, and I think you’re the right person to help me and partner with me to enable that for us. So how’s that, Char? Is that good? Some things you want to be accountable for over the next 12 months?

Charlotte: That’s pretty good. Well, I will endeavor to be accountable to those and all of that is exciting and good stuff and so bring on the next year.

Alex: Love it. Thank you for joining me today. Perhaps we’ll do another one of these at some point soon but we’ll have coffee in person probably next week so thank you for joining us in this special episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee.

Charlotte: Thanks, Alex.