For sponsors
You are commissioning this for somebody else
You are commissioning coaching for someone else, and you will be judged on whether it worked. Here is what we need from you, what you get, and where we will push back.
01What we need from you
Four things, and one of them is patience
An honest brief, including the parts that are awkward
If there is a performance concern, tell us. Coaching commissioned as a soft alternative to a difficult conversation fails, expensively, and takes the coachee's trust with it. We have declined engagements over this and would again.
Forty-five minutes for three-way contracting
You, the coachee and the coach agree the shifts and the reporting boundary together. This is the highest-leverage forty-five minutes in the engagement.
Access to stakeholders
Eight to twelve half-hour conversations with people around the seat. You help us choose them and then stay out of them.
Patience through month three
Stakeholder-visible change typically appears between months three and five. Engagements killed at week eight are killed just before they work.
02What you get
Concretely
- A named coach with a published credential, not a "network resource" assigned later
- A signed one-page Working Contract you helped write
- A mid-point three-way review with an explicit continue-or-stop recommendation
- A closing Impact Readout, themes only, that you can take to your own leadership
- A single point of contact for contracting, scheduling and invoicing who is not the coach
03Where we push back
Before you buy
- We will tell you if what you have described is a structural problem that coaching cannot fix. Roughly one enquiry in five is.
- We will not report on the coachee beyond the boundary, whatever the pressure. Knowing that in advance is part of what you are buying.
- We will recommend stopping at the mid-point if the work is not moving, and we would rather refund than run out a contract.
04Procurement
Paperwork, answered in advance
Nathan handles all of this and is not a coach, which means your vendor process and your coaching relationship never touch each other.
Contracting
Our standard MSA or yours, plus a per-engagement SOW. Signature to first session is typically two weeks.
Insurance
$2,000,000 professional liability, $1,000,000 general liability. Certificate of insurance naming you as additional insured on request.
Tax & invoicing
W-9 on file, Minnesota LLC File No. 07214883. Invoiced 50/50, net 30, PO number carried on every invoice.
Security review
No access to your systems is required or requested. Notes in an encrypted US-hosted store, three-year retention, then destruction.
Assessment ethics
Instruments are used for development only, never for selection, promotion or termination. Results belong to the individual.
Volume
5% from the third concurrent engagement, 10% from the sixth. Applied automatically rather than negotiated.
Chemistry call
Send us the brief, including the awkward part
If there is a performance concern behind the request, tell us. We would rather design something honest than sell you an engagement that fails in month four.