Business coaching

Founders we’ve worked with

Clients include Actionstep, Ask Bosco, Clearview, NearForm, Orthene, Pego, Qualio, Smaller Earth, Sunday and Time Etc.

Why founder-CEOs need business coaching

You can already see the next stage: a company scaling towards £50m, with a leadership team strong enough to carry more of the work.

The company isn’t a start-up any more. Revenue is real, customers stick, and the team has enough shape for proper ownership. The work now is to upgrade how the company makes decisions, how the leadership team steps up, and how much of your week goes on the work only you can do.

The pressure hasn’t vanished. Decisions, people, cash, and priorities can still find their way back to you. But the bigger reason to do this work is the future you’re trying to build: a company with more value, more options, and less dependence on one founder being in every room.

What changes when business coaching works?

Good business coaching makes the company easier to run. Not just clearer in your head for a week. Easier to run in the way the business behaves when you’re not in the meeting.

• Fewer decisions wait for you.
• The leadership team owns outcomes, not just tasks.
• The quarterly rhythm gets sharper.
• Cash, hiring, and strategic trade-offs are visible before they become emergencies.
• Your calendar moves back towards the work only the CEO can do.

For some founders, that creates a company ready for sale. For others, it supports a raise, a refinance, a chairman transition, or simply a business that can keep moving while you spend more time in the market.

What is business coaching for a scaling founder-CEO?

Business coaching at this stage isn’t advice for a founder looking for a cleaner to-do list. It’s work on the operating habits that decide whether a company scaling towards £50m and typically towards 250 team members keeps depending on the founder or starts building real enterprise value.

1. Redesigning the founder calendar so business-as-usual takes 2 days a week and 3 days go on building the next stage: vision, markets, senior hires, major deals, and capital.
2. Upgrading the leadership team without assuming you need to replace it. This is the Horsepower Gap™. The same people may be able to get you there, but only if their capacity, judgement, and ownership step up with the company.
3. Installing operating cadence and metrics so quarterly priorities, weekly meetings, dashboards, and accountability show what’s broken before the customer or the bank tells you.

This is strategic business coaching in the practical sense: decisions, people, cash, cadence, and the founder’s role. A useful session isn’t the measure. The measure is whether the company needs less of you to keep making progress.

Business coaching vs CEO mentoring vs life coaching

The terms get used interchangeably and shouldn’t be. They sit at different levels and solve different problems.

Business coaching is operational. It’s about the company: the team, the strategy, the execution, the cash, and the way decisions get made. A business coach challenges your thinking, tightens your operating cadence, and keeps you accountable to the plan you set.

CEO mentoring is positional. It’s about you in the role. The founder transition, the leadership decisions only the CEO can make, and the question of who is advising you. A mentor has been in the seat themselves and tells you what they did when they faced your problem, in their company, with their team.

Life coaching is personal. It’s about you as a human. Meaning, balance, life choices outside the business. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just a different category, and it doesn’t move the business.

At Monkhouse & Company you usually get coaching and mentoring blended in the same engagement. Dominic has been the CEO and is now the coach, so the conversation can move from the business problem to the founder decision and back again. We don’t do life coaching. We don’t do HR astrology. We don’t do “the answer is within you”. Your business problem usually has a specific answer based on what has worked in similar companies, and a coach who’s seen the pattern should tell you.

Who business coaching at Monkhouse & Company is for

You’re likely the right fit if:

• You’re scaling towards £50m, typically towards 250 team members
• You want to get back to the work only you can do: vision, markets, major deals, and enterprise value
• The leadership team is good, but the next stage needs it to carry more weight
• You can see the next level, but the operating rhythm, decision rights, and accountability are not yet strong enough for it
• You want optionality: raise, refinance, sell, become chairman, or simply spend more time on the work that creates the most value
• You’re willing to do the work, not just buy a neat framework and hope it sticks

The clients who move fastest have already proved the model. Product works. Customers pay. There is a team functioning. Now the work is to build a company that keeps making progress while the founder spends more time on the future of the business. Different stages need different work:

Stage	30 to 60 people	60 to 150 people	150 to 250 people
Main pattern	The founder is still the default escalation route	The leadership team is present but not yet carrying enough weight	The organisation needs structure, succession, and sharper decision rights
What’s needed	Operating cadence, first senior hires, and cash discipline	Leadership team capability, founder calendar redesign, and the Two-Day-Week CEO Blueprint	Strategic focus, board rhythm, succession, and exit-readiness
Coaching focus	Founder habits and the first layer of leadership	CEO plus team: accountability, rhythm, and sustaining culture under load	Vision, value creation, CEO-as-investor, and making the company less dependent on you personally
Wrong move	Hiring a COO to compensate for unclear priorities	Trying to scale without upgrading the leadership team	Staying in operations past the point of utility

If your business is somewhere in that 30 to 250-person journey, this is where business coaching at Monkhouse & Company concentrates.

Why Dominic Monkhouse on business coaching

Dominic scaled Rackspace UK from 4 people to 150 and £30m ARR, then did it again at Peer 1 UK: 0 to 120 people at the same revenue level. Two businesses, the same hard lessons twice.

That matters because this work isn’t generic encouragement. Dominic was a CEO first. He knows what it takes to build the strategy, leadership team, and execution rhythm for the next stage.

Since founding Monkhouse & Company, Dominic has worked with more than 200 founder-CEOs. Twelve clients have gone on to substantial exits, including Wirehive, ClearVision, and QCS. Read the Clearvision case study.

The clients who moved fastest weren’t the ones with the sharpest strategy decks. They were the ones who changed how they operated as a CEO and built leadership teams capable of making progress when they weren’t in the room. Dominic’s framework for that is the Two-Day-Week CEO Blueprint.

Frequently asked questions about business coaching

How is Monkhouse & Company business coaching different from EOS or Vistage?

EOS is a single methodology designed by Gino Wickman; it’s strongest for £1m to £10m businesses where the founder needs a complete operating system from scratch. Vistage is peer advisory: you sit in a room of 10 to 14 other CEOs and a chair facilitates.

Business coaching at Monkhouse & Company is one-to-one, with leadership-team time included. It’s built on a six-methodology stack rather than a single framework, and concentrated on founder-CEOs scaling towards £50m and typically towards 250 team members. If the business is doing under £1m, EOS may be the better answer. If you want peer pressure from other CEOs, Vistage may be the better answer. If you want a coach who has run two £30m businesses and brings the methodology stack to your specific situation, that’s us.

How much does business coaching cost?

Low-cost hourly coaching exists. This isn’t that. Monkhouse & Company runs the Scale-Up Business Coaching Programme. Current options are £4,000, £7,250, or £11,750 per month, depending on the level of planning, CEO coaching, and leadership-team support required.

What’s the difference between a business coach and a business mentor?

A business coach challenges your thinking and your operating cadence. They are usually trained in a methodology and held to it. A mentor offers guidance based on their own lived experience: what they did in your situation, in their company, with payroll on the line. CEO coaching and CEO mentoring are different things. In this engagement, you get both blended around the decision in front of you.

How long does business coaching take to produce results?

We look for useful impact in the first 90 days: clearer priorities, better decision rhythm, stronger ownership, and one or two constraints removed from the business. The aim is that the first quarter creates value equivalent to the fees. After that, every improvement is effectively free forever.

The work keeps compounding when the leadership team keeps using the rhythm, the scorecards, and the decisions made in the room. You should feel the business getting easier to run, not just leave a session feeling clearer for a week.

Do you work with clients outside the UK?

Yes. We work with founder-CEOs from all over the world when the fit is right. Planning days usually happen at The Management Lab in the New Forest; CEO coaching and follow-up work can run by video. If you’re London-based, business coaching in London runs the same way.

Is this CEO coaching, business coaching, or executive coaching?

The labels often blur. Monkhouse & Company sits at the intersection: the engagement blends CEO coaching and CEO mentoring for the founder-CEO, plus business coaching for the leadership team and operating system. It isn’t generic executive coaching for FTSE 250 senior leaders. That’s a different category aimed at a different audience.