1591 – The Coach in Your Pocket with Coach Hub’s Yannis Niebelschuetz

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now, it's Yannis Niebelschuetz. Did I say that correctly? Janice?

Yannis (00:01:04) - Yeah, close, close.

Josh (00:01:06) - And my best American accent again, founder or founder of CoachHub, you're found on the web at CoachHub. Thank you so much for joining us.

Yannis (00:01:17) - Thanks for having me. Josh.

Josh (00:01:19) - Originally, I think from Germany or now have been in New York for some time.

Josh (00:01:24) - But tell us about CoachHub.

Yannis (00:01:26) - Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, as you said originally from Germany, as you can hear from my fantastic accent, I live in New York now for a while, so we have big operations in North America right now. So what is coach up? Coach up is the global leader in digital coaching. So what we what we do, we have a global pool of over 3500 certified business coaches. These folks usually bring ten, 20, 30 years of experience in business and we match those coaches with employees of companies of all sizes. We match them through. The coaching itself is done through an app or through web. So it's basically you can imagine the coach in your pocket so you can work with your coach whenever, wherever you want. It's an unlimited model so you can for a full year, you have access to your coach. And we help companies of all sizes to, you know, develop their people, unleash their full potential, grow them as individuals, as leaders, improve company culture, improve company performance.

Yannis (00:02:32) - Because if you maybe remember for yourself, like if you if you've been through any, um, classroom trainings in the past where, you know, teachers going to tell you for 2 or 3 days how you should behave as a leader. We all know if you forget this, there are statistics. 80% of that content is being forgotten within two weeks. And so real behavioral change requires, you know, ongoing training, just like learning the piano. You have to practice, practice, practice. And that's what we do at scale. So a few numbers if you're interested. So we are globally 700 full time employees. We raise more than 330 million in venture capital, have offices in 15 countries. So we're truly global and help clients all across the globe to to scale the coaching efforts.

Josh (00:03:17) - Yeah, that's amazing. Congratulations on your series C 200 million. Not bad. That's some good budget to work with.

Yannis (00:03:24) - True. True.

Josh (00:03:25) - Yeah. What and so if, you know, think about what CoachHub is so it's it's a platform right that coaches any well can you explain the kind of like logistically how this works.

Yannis (00:03:37) - Yeah sure so you're right so it's basically a two sided model. So on the one hand, we do have our coaches, as I mentioned, highly vetted. Some were joking. It's harder to get into the coach platform than it is to get into MIT because we take less than 2% of our applications or of the applicants who want to join us. And yeah, we match then those coaches with with employees of of all sides. So you can imagine if if you as a business owner or CEO or in an HR department decide, hey, I want to offer coaching to my workforce, let's say it's I don't know, can be ten, 2000 thousand people, you need a solution that's scalable, unified and measurable with the same quality all across the globe. And then you come to us and say, Hey, Yannis, I want to I want to try this out. So you sign up, you get access to the platform, you upload or you register your colleagues and they go through this matching process.

Yannis (00:04:34) - And we are leveraging AI to do the matching process and then the employee can choose their coach. We have a couple of selections there, you can see videos and everything and then they can kick it off. And usually every other week you talk to your coach on the on the mobile phone, as I mentioned, or on laptop luggage, wherever you want it. And yeah, and that's that's how we really make sure people change their behaviors for for the better.

Josh (00:04:58) - Yeah. Well, congratulations on your success and how quickly you've grown. Where did CoachHub start from?

Yannis (00:05:08) - Well, originally we're from Berlin, Germany, but the majority of our workforce is global now. So we have 150 people plus in in the US alone. So we're pretty global right now. And as I mentioned, I live in New York City right now. Yeah.

Josh (00:05:24) - I mean, so like where, what was the inception like? How did you get this put together and how, how are you able to get traction?

Yannis (00:05:33) - Yeah. So maybe I can quickly share why we decided to to create CoachHub.

Yannis (00:05:41) - So it all goes back more than. Unfortunately, I have to say, 15 years, when I had my first company that I co-founded with my brother, who's also my co-founder right now. We were fresh out of uni and we founded a first company. And guess what? You learn all kinds of things in uni. You know, you read books, you write papers, but what you don't learn is how to lead others and definitely not how to lead yourself. So we were around 30 employees when kind of everything exploded, You know, we were completely lost. Strategy processes, conflicts were starting to arise and also conflicts with my brother, who, you know, is not only my business partner, but also my best friend. And, you know, over the time we got in so much trouble and in so many internal conflicts that it was you know, the whole relationship was was was jeopardized at some point. And then somebody recommended a coach to us. That's 15 years ago. Right? So we were pretty much early adapters in that.

Yannis (00:06:44) - In that phase and this guy changed everything. So how we interact with each other, how we prioritized, how we dealt with our emotions and yeah, so that's, that's, that's basically what sparked the, the initial passion for coaching. Um, we both worked at other companies in between, and then we met five years ago in Dublin. I worked for LinkedIn in Dublin and the headquarters and we, we walked the rainy streets of Dublin and we, we told ourselves, Hey, we are entrepreneurs. We want to build things. We want to build good things and we mean good in two and two senses. And it's, you know, the one part is obviously the commercial. You know, viability has to be a big market. You know, we have to make money at some point and all these things. But also we said we don't want to set up a new company that just, you know, sells technical stuff without a huge impact on on the individuals who want to change lives, want to change, hopefully a little bit society as well through coaching.

Yannis (00:07:49) - Then we said, hey, this is our all passion. How can we bring our passion for coaching, um, and marry that technically with, with technology and yeah, that's, that's the beginning. And we started off in a living room basically, so we had a two geeks and a computer in our living room and we just, you know, worked very, very hard. Um, and we, we reached out to clients. We, we called them, we, we, we had, you know, we got a lot of no's for, for, I would say at least a year. And we were about to give up many, many times. And we said, hey, this is not working. Clients don't want it, Screw it, let's do something else. Let's go back to our corporate jobs. And I'm really, really, you know. I would say proud. But maybe we were just lucky that we didn't give up because at some point we had this turning point where one of our first business angels from a prior business joined us and said, Hey guys, this is a great business model.

Yannis (00:08:45) - I want to join. And since then, you know, the rest is history, basically.

Josh (00:08:49) - Yeah, yeah. Well, and so today you have how many coaches in the platform?

Yannis (00:08:55) - 3500.

Josh (00:08:56) - Oh, my gosh. And do you have room for any more?

Yannis (00:09:00) - Well, we do. And we take applications, so they're on our website. There's an application link where people can can join us. And you can also see the the prerequisites we do have like certifications, minimum hours of coaching, work experience and so on and so forth. But yeah, absolutely. We always are on the lookout for great coaches.

Josh (00:09:17) - And what are the advantages to the coach. So let's say it might be a coach that's just been working independently. You know, they've had their own personal brand, so they start aligning or leveraging the CoachHub platform. How does their like how does that impact their professional life?

Yannis (00:09:34) - Oh yeah. So I mean, obviously we're very closely aligned with our coaches and I speak with them myself personally also when I travel a lot.

Yannis (00:09:42) - So I meet our coaches and they just love us and they say, you know, often they, they, they do coaching because they love to do coaching. What they don't love is to do sales. They don't like to cold call. They don't like to do all the ropes of the technical things that you need to get into a large company. They don't want to know all the admin, they don't want to do the billing, they don't want to do the, you know, the whole scheduling everything because it's everything. What we, you know, we take that off their plate, right? And they say, hey, I joined coach up and all of a sudden I have like 3 or 4 coaches that I can work on now for the next years, and they just love it, right? Because it's so easy. It's there's no strings attached. They're they don't have to pay anything to go onto our platform. So it's really huge win win for the coaches.

Josh (00:10:28) - Yeah, that's fantastic. So what is the so when you go to CoachHub and I want to kind of address the prospective coach and let's say they're listening to our conversation and they doing some research and they're like, okay, I'm in.

Josh (00:10:44) - How do I get into how do I how do I get into the platform? Like, what do they click on? What do they do?

Yannis (00:10:49) - You mean as a coach?

Josh (00:10:50) - Yeah, as a.

Yannis (00:10:50) - Coach, as a coach, you'll find a link on Coach App.com. I think it's in the top bar. And this was in the in the lower part of the website where tests apply as a coach. And then you just have to put in a few things, your application information, then we take it from there. So then usually somebody from our coach relations team will reach out and then we'll take it from there.

Josh (00:11:11) - Yeah. And what types of companies should be connecting with CoachHub so that they can get what they need? I know you've I mean, you've worked with the biggest brands out there, you know, and the planet, DeBeers, Coca-Cola, there's a pretty significant Lacoste, TDK know, I'm just kind of going through Bron. I'm seeing a lot of, a lot of companies I'm familiar with.

Yannis (00:11:40) - Yeah, yeah. So it's true. I mean, we work with a lot of very large enterprise companies and you can you can check out there's we have a section on the resource part in the top navigation bar. We have videos of companies and actually employees of those companies sharing their coaching experience and how much this has changed their lives in their careers. So it's very inspirational for whoever's interested and, you know, having a look at that. And but yeah, we work with companies of all sizes, so we're also very small companies to say, Hey, we think our small team of five people, we should we should get coaching. We believe in coaching and we should we should, you know, we should go for it. And, you know, as a matter of fact, is that only easier with culture? Not only is the quality higher than than, you know, your regular coach around the corner, but we're actually also cheaper than if you went with this coach you just Googled and so it's it has only benefits of of at least checking out what we're doing.

Josh (00:12:37) - Yeah. So I see a lot of like organizational employee experience, culture, leadership, executive coaching, performance and talent. You serve nearly every industry here that I can see. Are there any that kind of coaching categories that are exceptionally popular or you say you might say are trending right now?

Yannis (00:13:00) - So our our coaching philosophy is that our coaches help you as an individual to to grow and you basically you pick the topic and the coaches facilitates helps you on your journey helps you accountable to to attain your goals and and so we have a model that you know covers two parts. So it's first growing as a person. So for yourself like the your own topics that you want to work on and then inspire as a leader, how do I set the vision for my team? How do I motivate? How do I work with my team? And trending topics are, um, we actually have a section on our blog and the recent blog post surfaced that, you know, the topic of wellbeing, mental health is still very much top of mind for many it's conflict management.

Yannis (00:13:50) - So internal conflicts that may be also arise due to this whole work from home and the remote situation where you cannot just have a coffee or drink with somebody, you want to, you know, just get something, you know, off your chest. And and then time management, the classic is still, still very, very popular.

Josh (00:14:07) - Yeah. Well, Yannis Niebelschuetz, again, congratulations on the remarkable growth of CoachHub. Again, the website is CoachHub. So again, either of you are a certified coach. Obviously go there and you can click on learn about the platform and the application process. And then certainly leaders of all stripes, it looks like you could just pretty much browse and they can indicate, Hey, here's what we're looking for. And again, using the the platform itself and again, the matching technology that can help get them great coaching candidates. Brilliant. I love it. Janice has been fabulous having you as a guest. Thank you so much for this conversation. Anything else that folks should know about coach or platform or what you would recommend kind of those next steps be.

Yannis (00:15:01) - Well, check out our website. Coach comes with plenty of content. We have use cases with videos, we have statistics with white paper. So everything's for free obviously. So familiarize with the If you're not convinced of coaching yet, check out what impact coach you can have on yourself and your organization. It's really mind blowing and yeah, just just browse and feel free to, you know, consume some of the content.

Josh (00:15:26) - Yannis Niebelschuetz Founder CEO of CoachHub thank you so much for joining us.

Yannis (00:15:30) - Thanks Josh it was a pleasure.

Josh (00:15:37) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for the thoughtful entrepreneur and Facebook. I'd love even if you just stopped by to say Hi, I'd love to meet you.

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