TL;DR: if you're a CEO or senior decision maker at an EA org I'd like to invite you to apply for our pro bono business coaching service. If you know somebody who could help connect EA orgs and business coaches/mentors please point me in their direction.
I'm the COO (Chief Operating Officer) at a business coaching practice in London. Over the past year I've been running a few EA side projects to try and use some of the influence I have at work to direct money and resources towards EA causes.
As a company we now donate a proportion of our profits to GiveWell charities and I've given presentations and worked individually with our CEO clients in London introducing them to basic EA concepts and supporting them in setting up giving pledges.
The next thing I want to try is providing pro bono coaching/mentoring to leaders at EA organisations.
Some reasons why we might be able to help...
- We coach clients on productivity, goal setting and accountability but also practical business skills like management, operations, recruitment, culture, negotiation, marketing, ... etc. which I think could be relevant to many EA orgs as they grow
- Each of our coaches have a decade plus of experience either in senior management positions at large organisations or founding and growing successful companies themselves
- All our coaches have gone through rigorous coaching certification as well as coaching, between them, thousands of CEOs over the past decade
- As a coaching practice with a team of 8 people we have a back office team and various different programmes that we've developed over the years. As well as 1-to-1 coaching sessions we do things like weekly group accountability coaching, workshops on specific business topics, coaching for emerging leaders in organisations and an entrepreneurs' book club. I'd be open to offering places at any of these free of charge to the right people.
If this sounds interesting to you and you would like to talk to one of our business coaches please fill out an application form at the bottom of this page.
If you know somebody who might benefit please forward them a link to this post or the application/explainer page on my website.
If you can put me in touch with someone who has a clever way of connecting coaches/mentors and EA orgs that I haven't thought of please let me know. (I've reached out to a few meta-EA organisations by email this morning but I'm sure there's others I'm not aware of or situations where I won't get anywhere without someone first making an initial introduction.)
If you have any feedback or advice on anything I've written above please let me know in the comments or via private message.
Thanks so much.
Great initiative! The time is definitely ripe for something like this and it's wonderful that you're pivoting your business in this way.
I have one concern, namely that the things you and your clients appear to be optimizing for are growth and revenue/profit. Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with this but I worry that the expertise and skills of your coaches might deviate considerably from what EA leaders want to be optimizing for (e.g., different measures of impact over very long timelines and in epistemic terrain that's very messy). But ultimately, this is an empirical question and I wouldn't be surprised if what you offer is already valuable and my concerns are more important slightly down the line. Did you have any leaders sign up and do you collect feedback from them?