There is a credential most business coaches lead with: certification.
Certified by a franchise network. Certified by a coaching association. Certified by a six-week training program someone built and sells. The certification is offered as the qualification — as if a curriculum someone completed in a hotel ballroom is the same as a decade of actually running a business.
I am not certified by any of those organizations, and that is deliberate.
I think the qualification that matters is different. I think it looks something like this:
- Has this person ever sat in your seat?
- Have they ever had to make payroll when the cash position was tighter than they wanted to admit?
- Have they ever fired someone they liked, or hired someone who turned out to be wrong, or walked into a board meeting with bad news and had to lead the room anyway?
- Have they led a real turnaround? Negotiated with lenders?
- Lost a major customer and had to figure out the next move with the team watching?
- Navigated a lawsuit?
- Stood in front of employees during a hard quarter and given them a real reason to keep going?
That is the qualification. Everything else is theory.
When I served in combat, the people I trusted were not the ones with the most coursework. They were the ones who had been through it before — who knew what fear sounds like in someone’s voice, what fatigue does to judgment, what discipline looks like when things have gone sideways. The same is true in business.
I have answered yes to every one of those questions — not from a curriculum, but from the seat, with real money and real people on the line. Most coaches have lived one or two of those moments. I have lived all of them, and my M&A advisory work across Goldman Sachs and Milliken spans hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions. I do not say that to brag; I say it because prospects deserve to know what real qualification looks like before they hand someone their business.
