Personalized Coaching Brought to Your Workspace: Our Investment in CoachHub

Building a company is not an easy feat. It’s a complex interplay of uniting a team behind a shared vision or strategy and putting the right organizational structure in place to ensure successful delivery on this strategy. First and foremost though, building a company is people’s business.

How the people in your team work together — both individually as well as collectively — will ultimately drive the success of your business. And this is exactly where a lot of things can go wrong: failing leadership, conflict at the workplace, the inability of employees to manage their time and responsibilities effectively. The list of potential issues in the workspace is endless.

Against this background, it becomes easy to understand why organizations turn to executive coaching as a solution. Instead of letting everyone ‘figure it out’ themselves, targeted one-on-one coaching has proven to be a highly successful method to make companies run better. From an investment point of view, coaching is even a smart thing to do, as research conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers has shown that the median return on investment in executive coaching is 7x the company’s initial investment.¹

Yet, when you take a closer look at how coaching efforts are distributed across organizations, it becomes undeniably clear that the focus so far has been on supporting top-level management. A staggering 89% of executive coaching efforts across organizations has been offered to C-suite, SVP, VP, and director-levels, while only 11% of the coaching efforts are allocated towards lower-level management all the way down to the individual employees.²

The team at CoachHub is capitalizing on exactly this opportunity by helping companies make coaching accessible to employees at all career levels. The platform matches individual coachees with top tier coaches and launches them into a cadence of bi-weekly one-on-one coaching sessions. In addition to that, coaches are supporting their coachees with micro-learning blocks. Small pieces of content that they can work on at their own pace throughout the month. All this for a fixed price per month per employee.

The coaching sessions are focussed around two main themes — ‘Grow as a Person’ and ‘Inspire as a Leader’ — and are designed to help coachees with topics ranging from personal productivity and time-management to authentic communication and dealing with conflict. The content for the micro-learning blocks is supported by the scientific advisory board of CoachHub, consisting of thought leaders on people development and organizational design.

The beauty of the platform is that it’s the first solution that makes personalized one-on-one coaching truly scalable for organizations — whether they want to enroll 5, 50, or even 500 (or more!) employees into the coaching program. CoachHub’s digital platform makes it easy for companies to onboard new coachees, while at the same time it provides the company’s leadership team with aggregated and anonymized insights on the coaching experience and impact. Moreover, with the continuously expanding base of highly vetted coaches all across the globe, CoachHub ensures that it can be a great partner for companies at all scales and in all geographies.

When we look at the broader market opportunity for CoachHub, the timing for such a platform is extremely favorable:

• It is widely understood that a one-size-fits-all approach to Learning and Development doesn’t work. Yet, organizations lack the tools to effectively offer employees a personalized experience. Research by McKinsey has identified that technology platforms and applications are the most significant enabler for future learning, and CoachHub clearly plays into this trend.³
• At the same time, global corporate spending on training is on an all-time high with a staggering size of USD 366b (2018). Up to 39% of this budget is spent on external suppliers, including executive coaching service-providers, ensuring a huge addressable market for CoachHub.⁴
• Moreover, as 78% of organizations believe that in the course of the next few years they will centralize/streamline executive coaching under fewer vendors, there’s a great opportunity for CoachHub to become the leading platform facilitating this change.⁵

Needless to say, the vision of the company to bring coaching to employees at all career levels got us very excited. However, what really made us push forward, was the prospect of working with founders (and brothers!) Yannis and Matti Niebelschutz. Ever since we started working with the team late 2018, we have been very impressed with their ability to turn their vision into reality. Driven by their previous experiences as serial entrepreneurs — where they gained valuable commercial, operational and product experience — they have built out CoachHub as a high-paced organization stacked with talent.

Even though the company has only been launched in 2018, more than 100 well-known companies, including major corporations such as Generali, Cargill, numerous listed companies, and innovative tech start-ups such as SoundCloud and HelloFresh, are already using CoachHub.

At Speedinvest, we are extremely grateful for being part of the CoachHub journey. Together with our co-investors Holtzbrinck Ventures, Partech Ventures and a range of prolific business angels, we hope to support CoachHub on their mission to make coaching accessible to employees at all career levels.

References:

¹ Final Report of the ICF Global Coaching Client Study 2008, PricewaterhouseCoopers & Association Resource Center Inc.
² http://www.coachsource.com/drupal7/2018/05/02/2018-research-chapter-1
³ Elevating Learning and Development — insights and practical guidance from the field
⁴ https://trainingindustry.com/wiki/outsourcing/size-of-training-industry/
⁵ https://coachfederation.org/blog/21025-2