Why every CEO needs a coach

Not every CEO needs a coach, and the industry does itself no favours by claiming otherwise. What is true is narrower: every CEO needs at least one relationship with someone who has no stake in their answers. For some that is a coach. For others it is a former boss, a peer group, or a very direct chair.

I make my living from this work and I still think the universal claim is nonsense. Here is the version I can defend.

What the claim gets right

The underlying observation is sound. The CEO job removes honest feedback in a way almost no other job does.

Everyone reporting to you has a career shaped by your opinion of them. Everyone above you on the cap table has money riding on your performance. Your partner at home absorbs the cost of your bad quarters. By the time a company reaches any real size, the CEO is surrounded by people who care about them and cannot afford to be fully straight with them.

That gap is real, it widens with scale, and it does not close on its own. The CEO burnout data is what it looks like when it stays open for years. Left alone it produces the same three outcomes: decisions made on managed information, blind spots nobody names, and a founder who finds out too late that the people around them saw it coming.

So the need is genuine. It is the prescription that gets oversold.

What the claim gets wrong

"Every CEO needs a coach" is a sales line dressed as a principle. It skips the part where the CEO might already have what they need.

I have met CEOs with an old mentor from two companies ago who calls them out without hesitation. CEOs in a small peer group of four who have been meeting monthly for nine years. CEOs whose chair is genuinely willing to be unpopular. Those people have the function covered. Selling them coaching would be selling a second copy of something they own.

The honest test is not "do you have a coach." It is: who in your life can tell you something you do not want to hear, and lose nothing by doing it?

If you can name that person, and they have actually done it in the last six months, you are fine.

Where the substitutes fall down

That said, the substitutes fail in predictable ways, and it is worth knowing which failure you are exposed to.

The old mentor tends to give you their answer rather than improve your thinking. Useful when your situation resembles theirs. Less useful when it does not, and they will rarely tell you which case you are in.

The peer group is strong on pattern recognition and weak on follow-through. Nobody in the group is accountable for whether you did the thing. Groups also drift toward comfort over time, because everyone has to come back next month.

The direct chair still sits on the body that can remove you. There is a floor below which candour does not go, and both of you know where it is.

The partner at home carries the consequences of your answer. That is the least fair person in your life to use as a sounding board, and the one founders lean on most.

A coach's only structural advantage is that none of the above applies. No vote, no equity, no shared payroll, no dinner table. That is the whole argument for what a founder coach is.

What I would actually say to a CEO

Rather than the universal claim, four situations where I think outside help earns its cost.

You have stopped saying the true version out loud. You know what you think about the co-founder, the raise, or whether you want this in two years, and it has not left your head.

You are the bottleneck and your fixes keep failing. You have delegated twice and taken the work back twice. That pattern almost never resolves without someone watching it happen.

Your calendar has not matched your priorities for months. Usually not a time problem. Usually a decision you have not made.

Something is being paid for by your body or your family. You noticed. The plan is to sort it after the next milestone. There has been a next milestone for three years.

If none of those describe you, save your money and revisit in a year. There is a longer version of this test in do entrepreneurs need a coach, and a ten-minute version in the founder burnout risk quiz.

Why I hold this view

I built six companies over fifteen years. I burned out in 2019, and in February 2020 the machine stopped.

The part worth telling is what happened two months earlier. My board asked me how I was doing. I said I was doing great, things were moving fast, and then I described feeling like the pilot of a jet fighter who is not in the cockpit but hanging onto the wing, looking in at controls nobody is holding. I said that in a board meeting. Nobody followed it up, including me, and we moved on to the next item.

They were not negligent. A board asks that question once and accepts the answer, because pressing it would mean opening something none of them had the standing to close. That is the shape of the whole problem. Plenty of people asked me how I was over those years. Not one of them had it as their job to keep asking.

That is the gap I now work in, for 67 founders and CEOs across 13 countries. But the lesson I took was about the gap, not about coaching specifically. If I had had a blunt friend from a previous company who called every month and refused the first answer, I think I would have been fine.

Common questions

Does hiring a coach signal weakness to a board?
In my experience boards read it as the opposite, and several of my clients came via their chair. If your board would read it badly, that tells you something about the board worth looking at separately.

Can a peer group replace a coach entirely?
For some people, yes. Peer groups give you pattern recognition and company. What they rarely give you is someone tracking whether you followed through, and someone willing to be unpopular with you alone.

Is executive coaching the same thing?
Similar craft. The difference is usually who pays. Company-funded executive coaching has a quiet ceiling on what can be discussed, because the payer has an interest in the outcome.

What if I try it and it does not help?
Then stop, and be suspicious of anyone who makes that hard. A three-session paid trial with a clean exit is a reasonable ask and a good coach will offer it before you do.

The short version

Every CEO needs somebody with nothing to gain from their answer. Not every CEO needs to pay for that person. Work out whether you already have one before you go shopping.

More on the role in what is a founder coach. If you want to talk it through, see how I work.