Becoming a Coach with Marie Szuts: Navigating Leadership Challenges in Startups

When you get stuck out on HR island, that doesn't actually advance the business, doesn't advance your team, it doesn't advance the cause.

What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say. I think that's Ralph Waldo Emerson. That's really true.

Expanding my own range of being able to actually sit in a coaching conversation and not be directive, and instead truly inhabit the role of coach. This was incredibly interesting and valuable for me. To expand my range of human interaction in that way was so interesting and eye opening.

Coming from the startup culture and the glamorous tech world also showed in Marie's business building story. On the one hand she's operating on an, as I found, impressive business level. On the other hand she grew into her coaching iteratively, in a series of experiments. Before that, she built her network by worrying about the business of the startups she was working with. So let's start by hearing from Marie herself how being an HR leader in Silicon Valley looks.

what is before you seems like an impossible task. And so the really interesting thing comes from, how do you now start chipping away at impossible, and not just throw up your hands and say it can't be done because we already tried it.

So you just leave those phrases at the side of the road and instead forge forward, trying to figure out how can we do it in a different way. Again, that's Silicon Valley at its best.

The shadow side can be also quite real. So that's where I spend a lot of time working with leaders.

And in the next six or nine months. Because almost always a manager in a Silicon Valley startup is a player coach. So for me, coming in in the early days of Figma: what do we need to build from a people infrastructure, ground up? How do I need to make sure that I understand the sales motion of what we're doing?

But then it was a lot of meeting with other senior leaders. And meeting with ICs. When I started at Figma I was number 48 or so. Meeting with everybody and being in contact with the entire company was possible then. And super informative, because we're collectively building something.

I don't want to create an HR policy just because, and impose it on people who don't know me and don't know that I'm attached to the business. I spent a lot of time in those early days being very present with the entire team, not just fellow executives but all the way down to IC engineers. Being part of the early DNA of a startup is incredibly satisfying. I like to think about culture as a co-created project. It's not imposed from the top down. The top has a lot of effect and leverage, but culture is a co-created project, and you do that by being in contact with the entire team.

I deeply identify as a team person, as somebody who loves building teams and working with other people.

My overwhelming thought, if I were ever to do something on my own, is that I'd be alone. So lonely. Interestingly, as I was getting my executive coaching certification, I was doing so with the idea that no matter what I do, those would be useful and interesting skills.

So I did not enter into this idea of becoming trained as a coach because my goal was this. This image stuck out to me because of that idea of being on the precipice and seeing there's a path, but it goes off into the distance alone. And instead, my journey to doing coaching as a profession was more about a series of small experiments. There's probably another card that represents my journey of becoming a coach. When you ask the question, this is the one that stuck out. It was definitely ambivalent for me, both for the lonely reasons and for the question of how do you actually make

it a business? I have a family to support. This idea of loneliness, even if there was a track to follow.

So I see a sense of a trail, a path, something to follow. It's not just one big open expanse where you can choose anything, with the paralysis of choice. There is a tried and true path, and it goes off into a cloudy future. I don't think of this image as scary. There's some lushness to it, you're not in a barren landscape. Instead there's fertile ground and uniform greenness around. That future is very foggy. I'm not particularly afraid of foggy futures. In startups you don't have a ton of visibility out very far, so you get used to that. This doesn't scare me, but the image itself feels ambivalent. Is it a sunny, bright future? I don't know. There's sun behind those clouds. Or are we going into a storm? I don't know.

where you embed in the craft of coaching and develop strong relationships with your cohort members and the faculty. It was an eight or almost nine month process of intensives and interstitial work.

As part of the certification you need a roster of coaching clients, so that you are doing the work of getting better and being evaluated. You have to record certain coaching sessions and actually get evaluated by a master coach, all these kinds of things.

And you're constantly doing coaching with your fellow members, getting practice, getting over the awkwardness. You just have to do it.

And I'm also the oldest of three kids, so I have a bit of that DNA of, I know the answer, I'm going to get stuff done. And I like that about myself. It's gotten me very far.

Expanding my own range of being able to actually sit in a coaching conversation and not be directive, and instead truly inhabit the role of coach.

This was incredibly interesting and valuable for me.

To expand my range of human interaction in that way was so interesting and eye opening. And again, I did not set out to say I want to leave this behind. I genuinely thought I'll still be in house, but I will now just be using these skills in a different way.

I know the answer. And having this concept of unconditional positive regard. That doesn't mean I'm going to say yes to you, or let you get away with your own victim narrative, but it's a really different psychological stance than the outcome driven, we've got to get it done.

It's very spacious. It's sitting with, and being able to ask questions, and really emptying out expectations of the answers, and following what is happening here, with this exquisite presence. And also this concept we talked about at Hudson, of heat: bringing the heat for a client who may really be stuck in something, and doing so in a way that may feel challenging to them, but still keeping a confident and compassionate stance. Because that's different from feedback, and there's some emotional stuff in it. Those are some of the key skills. You can learn about them

theoretically, and then you've got to practice them.

And then you can learn some more theory. It's adult layered learning, going deeper and deeper. Coaching feels like a lifelong profession. One of the most important tenets in terms of making it as a coach is that you really have to be a continuous learner and figure out how you're going to invest in your own growth and self knowledge.

And what does this coaching school mean when you say bringing the heat for the client?

But unconditional positive regard doesn't mean that for everything you say or do I'm like, yes, yes, great, yes. That's just a yes man bobblehead. Instead, how am I using my coaching discernment to find these moments where

you may not see a thing yet, or a contradiction, or a place where you have gotten to, it's everybody else's fault.

And so it's the courage and the candor to be able to say, can I stop you there for a second? What I'm noticing is this. Or, what I'm feeling here is this, this is the effect you're having on me. And again, saying that not because I'm judging it or I'm mad at you, but because I'm now giving you a different kind of data, and it may be data that's challenging. It's a little hot for you. Because coaching relationships sometimes can be misunderstood as quasi therapy, or a place where I just go to dump my bucket and vent the entire time. But that's the junk food of human

interaction. If I don't give you some way to push back, you'll never find the places where you're contributing to the problem. It can feel a little hot in the moment. That's what we mean by heat. It takes some courage, and a lot of self knowledge about what's happening here.

I'm noticing I'm triggered about this, and how am I dealing with that.

I was so used to moving quickly, running things and multitasking. This was in the summer of 2022. I was thinking, I need to slow things down. I had just finished my coaching training and was keen to practice and not let those skills go. I said to myself, I'll do a couple of small experiments.

I'm sure I'll go back in house later this fall, but for now this seems fun. I remember framing it as a series of small experiments. One of my big objections to becoming on my own would be loneliness.

Because of my coaching training program there was this subgroup of us, and we're still very close today. They're an incredibly important resource for me, both practically, hey, does anybody know how to do this type of thing,

but also from a deepening of the craft. So go into coaching supervision, keep up with people you were trained with,

make friends with those people. I know that you at metaFox are creating a community of coaches. This is so important, so that

you can unpack some of the harder things that happened. Because if you don't have those opportunities, the likelihood of you deciding this is super hard and not financially feasible right at the beginning, and ending prematurely, because it feels too isolating, too alone, too overwhelming.

It was actually quite incredible, and it allowed us to have people internationally who wouldn't otherwise necessarily have participated in the program. That core group is one I'm still close with today, and I have done projects and collaborations with different members. Now you're also tapped into other people's networks.

This is a key part of business development as a coach, being networked, not shallowly but deeply. When you start your coaching business, you've actually started your coaching business years before. Those people who you've worked with, who you've connected with, who you've done good work for and with, are going to be, at least at the start, but quite possibly ongoing, a source of connections, clients and cool stuff to do.

It's a pretty stressful financial model. Especially at first, when you're maybe doing some experiments.

I was like, let's see what happens. This was a company where I had been for a long time, done great work, and I was still in touch with the leaders. Quite genuinely, I felt that there was utility in being able to say, okay, I'm a coach and I understand how this company works, but I'm not part of it.

I have some context here, but I'm not part of the machine. And it was very important and very clear that when I negotiated with the client, I was working with each individual person as the client.

That was the relationship. Any information that was to be shared would come from the client to the customer, not from me. This was not, I get to report back about weird stuff.

It was effectively like 10 individual relationships. Could I report on aggregate trends? Sure. But we did 360s as part of the coaching engagement, and those results were not sent to the company unless the client chose to share them with their boss. Establishing clear boundaries felt very important to me, so that I could be doing genuine coaching, not company spying.

The through line for all the different clients I've had is that they're leaders in transition in some way. Maybe they've just been promoted. Maybe they were interim and decided to take the role. Maybe they want to be the 2.0 version of themselves as a leader.

It came through my previous business contacts. The venture capital networks here in Silicon Valley are also a really important source of clients. So knowing the VC talent partners, or the people there who have access to a lot of different portfolio companies, making sure that you're on their radar.

Their job is to know who's out there and what they're doing. So they get asked.

you meet them and make friends with them. And now, doing the work that I do in terms of teaching strategic HR, and being exposed to teaching a lot of these leaders, I get to meet a lot of people. And still staying connected to the HR world, through conferences, other types of workshops or encounters, retreats, this kind of thing.

And then, as you start to do work with clients as well, they can become a source of referrals. But none of it came through cold marketing, or I posted a thing on LinkedIn. It was all through people.

And a few of you have asked me, Tobi, can you actually ask more about social media? It's not that I'm deliberately avoiding that topic, but at least in these examples of Hélène and Marie, it's the power of referrals, from the network and from previous clients, that has helped them to actually find new clients.

Marie also mentioned how important it is for her to connect with other coaches, to stay sane and to learn from others' experience, to have that sense of community. And she also mentions the coach community that we are building at metaFox, and that you can find on metafox.eu/community. Occasionally we share some insights there, but most importantly it's a peer to peer network, so you can bring up your own topic as a coach or facilitator, or also simply follow along on the topics that other people bring up.

This can be getting input on a facilitation method, recommendations for events, or even feedback on your website. And with that, let's get back to Marie and her business development.

It's indirect business development, but much more interesting and sustainable to me. The connections from that lead to interesting conversations and collaborations that feed back into potential clients. From a revenue standpoint, one on one clients are definitely the higher price point per client, so that's the biggest. Then group coaching is probably low down there, because I decided not to make it a juggernaut part of my business. And then there are these other projects that are going to have different financial implications.

What do you do? Can we work together?

Power of Enough, that really talks about the idea of satiation and what wealth is. Work with a financial planner to know what you need to make. Establish an anchor client. There's a whole bunch of stuff about rates that we can talk about, but let's say the first bucket is financial. Second bucket is business fundamentals. If you don't identify as a numbers person, I'm just a people person, stop that. You've got to get over that. Numbers are a learnable skill, and if you're going to be a solopreneur you've got to actually get at least conversant in them. And there are totally ways to do this. If you identify as being really bad with Excel and you don't know how to read a P&L, there are places to learn. And again, this idea of thinking like a business person, to me it's about establishing good business hygiene from the start, even if you're doing just experiments. And specifics on that, what do I mean by business hygiene: track your hours. If you want to be ICF certified, make a spreadsheet and do it as you go. Get in the habit that once a week you do your business admin.

Decide what the pieces of collateral are that you actually must have. Good coaching programs will also have a module on, here are your contract templates and stuff. But don't overdo it. What are the pieces that you need to have? How are you going to invoice people? Figure out your tech stack. Do the minimum viable that you need, but consider an accountant, a bookkeeper.

What are the time saving things that from the get go, Calendly saves you a lot of time going back and forth with calendars. Do you need seven other tech tools at the beginning? No, you don't. Start with that, and then create a decent website. This is a little bit in the new business thing too. We live in an age where a website does establish credibility. There are so many amazing templates out there, you don't need to do a lot of design, but have a decent website. Clean up your LinkedIn or your social media.

Have a presence that makes you look real. So that's business fundamentals. Community: don't allow yourself to become isolated, do coaching supervision groups, tap into those other communities, participate with gusto, be active. New business development

is the fourth bucket. Pursue generosity and networking. Give freely, help others, connect with other coaches, even if you identify as an introvert and think you don't have time for this. It's got to become a sustainable habit. My experience has been that generosity always serves. Diversify your projects and your client fishing pool. Don't just have one client, because if they go away you're starting from scratch. Not all your eggs in one basket.

That's how a business person thinks. We talked about this, your business begins long before you actually start your practice. Thoughtfully add things to your toolkit that you think will open doors for you. For example, if you want to work with a corporate client, they often want you to have 360s as part of it, so decide how you're going to do 360s. But don't get every other certification or tool. It's really expensive, time consuming, and it distracts you from actually using them. Pair up with other coaches, find somebody who's certified in Enneagram and somebody who's certified in something else. If you need that now, you know who you can call.

And then, if it turns out all your clients need that particular thing, yes, go get certified yourself. But you can see this theme of take bite sized chunks, and do so consciously. So that's four of our buckets. We talked about the financial bucket. We talked about business fundamentals.

We talked about community. We talked about new business development.

This is what is sustainable for you from a brain and growth perspective over time. I just said a lot of words.

I like that. Is there a story to one of them that maybe you didn't have on the radar initially, and then there was a lesson in which you learned it for yourself?

bookkeeping, where I was convinced, oh my god, this is so simple, I have QuickBooks, I can totally do it myself. I spoke to a woman who, interestingly, she and I have been friends since we were three years old. We ended up following interesting paths, but she went much more the finance way.

She's a CFO now. And I was having a conversation with her and saying, can I just pick your brain for a second? She said, Marie, there's a reason this is actually a profession. Yes, there are aspects that are simple. And also, no. Is this the place you should be spending time? Go interact with an expert for whom it will be incredibly easy and will probably take an hour of their time, and then you can move forward. If you're stuck in a doom loop about your website, knock it off. You still need one,

and you can totally do it cheaply, but do you need to do it? So it's finding these different ways where you get out of your own way. And particularly with these details, they can assume outsize importance. It's not that they aren't important, but you've now overplayed them, so short circuit that.

I have come to the conclusion that I want to charge people for engagements, as a chunk, as opposed to hourly rates and invoicing monthly. That means a lot to me, because it creates a sense of partnership. You and I are on the same team.

And you're not hemmed in by the idea of, should I call Marie? No, it's going to be on the clock. If it becomes a barrier to us interacting, that is in the way for me.

I have a kind of all access plan. We have our scheduled meetings, but then I'm available separately to do coaching as needed. I see coaching rates that range super wildly.

If I know that somebody is being supported by their company, I'm not going to gouge them, but I am going to charge them at the top of my rate scale, between $20,000 and $30,000 for a six month engagement.

I deliberately leave space in my portfolio to take on people who are either fully pro bono or at some reduced nonprofit rate. And that's the sliding scale. The criterion for me then becomes whether somebody is funding it entirely themselves. If money is the only thing between us working together, I'd like to figure out how we can creatively make it work, without losing my boundaries or becoming resentful. I think it's important that people feel a financial investment in coaching, and a real impetus that this is an investment they're making in themselves. So I don't think it's inappropriate to charge real money to do this work.

Let's say you talk with this person on a weekly basis. That ends up being 800 dollars per week. How is the rhythm?

engagements. I don't think it's about being at their beck and call, the CEO calls and you jump. You can still have a life. But when they are engaged and have an amazing day and they want to bank why it was amazing, and they call you and unpack what's happening, or the converse, something happened and they actually need to come down from it, that means they're really thinking of you as their team, and you're locked together in this intensive learning experience for six months where it's top of mind. It's not just something like, oh, every two weeks, what did I do, and now I'm talking to you and I'm feeling behind. They're genuinely thinking. So that also, I think, is an important financial component of it.

When they feel like they're paying for this, you want to use it. Humans and psychology and money are so weird, but there's a lot packed in.

And that's how I've chosen to set up my practice. You can totally do it a different way. But it does mean that you need to actually charge enough that you can have the correct number of clients, so that you are available.

You could have six clients and have it be an incredibly intensive load, or you could have 10 and have it be less of a load, just depending on what's actually going on.

Six to 10 one on one engagements, and then there's also the one to group and the one to many buckets, basically.

It is still valuable to have some learning of that type, so that people are speaking the same language and can deepen their overall knowledge in service of their goal. That backbone of pre-work or exercises, I've created those on the back end.

And then the group coaching encounter itself involves typically six 90 minute sessions. There are then interstitial possibilities for lightning round coaching with me.

You have to set norms. You have to create a container. You have to do that pretty fast, if you only have six sessions with a group of people who have probably never met before. So the first session is really a lot about that. What do we actually want to do? And then in the intervening sessions we co-create what topics we're going to do as part of that backbone. I find that really important, even though I have a lot of ideas about what's probably relevant. I don't publish an agenda ahead of time, because in a group coaching engagement I want it to mean something to the people who are there. What's top of mind for them?

That's what we spend a lot of time in that first session doing. For the inner critic, maybe one of the sub-topics is imposter syndrome, or maybe it's finding my voice. But I don't know that about this group until we figure it out together. From that first session comes the rest of the agenda of our time

together. I'm very quickly able, with all the material that I've prepared, to Lego that into place.

And then we carry on. Typically that's every other week, so there's enough time for people to do experiments and things like that. By the end, this is now a group of people who these folks have been vulnerable with.

There are often lasting relationships that come out of that.

They learned things not only by working on their own goals, but by seeing other people work through their goals.

And there are just beautiful moments of peer coaching. We actually talk about the idea of coaching behaviors, as opposed to advice behaviors.

And in a meta way, everyone is also learning and practicing this idea of being themselves a coach, and being coached by others.

Now I'm really genuinely thinking about these different lines of business as part of my portfolio, to create the holistic outcome that I want to have. And again, it's this beating the drum of business person. You make it show up by putting the building blocks in place and then running towards it.

I like the way it intakes data. I like the way it showcases the data. I find that it really opens up a lot of coaching conversations, as opposed to, here's your evaluation, which is not particularly useful. That was necessary for me to work in a corporate environment coaching a number of people. That was a requirement of what the corporation wanted, there was a 360 component. So I needed to have a tool to do that. I picked the best one, the one I thought was most aligned with my coaching philosophy, because it's not interesting to me to check a checkbox.

So I do use that quite a lot, where that feels appropriate.

It's always something that's on offer for my individual coaching clients, regardless of what their company thinks.

For some people, if they're brand new to a role, they're not ready to do that yet, because there's not enough data from their colleagues that would feel supportive. So that's one sector. I do use it a lot when, within the coaching conversation, it becomes clear that there is a bit of a blind spot about what your direct reports think and what your manager

thinks, and we could suggest a way that we could get some data about this.

What are my tendencies vis-à-vis communication? How do I input information into myself? How do I output information to others? It's very illuminating in terms of team dynamics and how people can flex their own style to be more effective communicators and team members.

So it's a very inspiring message, as opposed to the idea of, here's a laundry list of things that are wrong with you.

That one I find particularly helpful if I'm going to be doing something that is more in the, let's use this as an entrance into a larger group of people, and then some of them may be plucked out to do coaching.

But now they have a similar vocabulary with one another about how we want to work as a team.

There is no bad style. It is merely a way to understand what your natural inclination is towards giving information. For example, if you are the D style, that indicates a sense of dominance, of being fast paced, of being outspoken, but still connected with people. If you're the I style, it means that you're more accepting and warm, and so you're less likely to talk in bullet points. If you're the S style, you are a little bit more reserved, a little more steady. You like information ahead of time.

If you're the C style, you are very data driven. That's what's going to sway you, as opposed to the big story.

In this circle you draw a picture and show where everybody on the team's dots are, and instantly people get a sense of, oh, that's why it's so hard for us to make decisions.

To get things done. Or to work with clients, because the entire team may be S's but all of the clients you're working with are D's. It provides this very visceral and instant sense of the diversity of styles, and people start to get curious about, God, things would go a lot better if I didn't spring a report on an S and ask them to interact with it right now.

If I sent that to that person an hour before, that meeting goes 150 times better. So it's very simple, but it's very practical right away. And that's what I think is also useful for teams: they instantly feel like they get some unlocks, and there are very concrete things that you can try and modify that pretty much always have instant results.

What is the shadow side? A strength overused becomes a liability. It's an entrance point into curious questions about yourself.

How did you build this culture?

And now I'm going to go do something else, I'm going to go do business now. Your garden is going to get overgrown real fast. I also like the culture metaphor in the sense that there are lots of different kinds of gardens.

That's a good clue for you about what kind of company and what kind of culture you should go work for. And again, this idea that it's a co-created project.

There should be a fair number of gardeners. Maybe there's one master gardener plan, but legitimately there are lots of people out there, and things happen surprisingly, just like in a garden. If you go out to your garden and there's a flower you didn't plant, maybe it blew in, what do you do about it? That's actually culture too. Do you pluck it out, is it a weed? Or do you say, oh, how cool.

Let's get more of that. Let's propagate it. Or let's put a little stone there that says, this is a cool flower. There's this element of both organic growth and intentional growth, this sense of collective gardening, subjective preference, and the constant culture built in these small micro interactions.

You can't just go see your garden once a quarter. You can do a once a quarter big mulch, and that's fine, but if you haven't paid attention all the way along, it's going to surprise you in bad ways. Creating culture in the companies I've been at

involves these micro interactions of, if I can have a vulnerable conversation, if I can demonstrate taking feedback, especially when it's clumsily given, as a leader that really changes the tenor of the conversation for other people. If I can say, whoa, I really messed up and I made this mistake,

then instead people are like, oh wow, that mistake sucks, but let's figure out now collectively how we can have safeguards for it not happening. All of those things are contributing to this culture of, what happens when something goes wrong here?

What happens when something goes right? What happens when we're not sure if it's good or bad? What do we do about it? Trust is built in teaspoons, is another metaphor I think about a lot. Lots of tiny interactions add up to how people are going to make decisions and how they're going to behave.

And so, in addition to making coaching fun for the rest of your life, it expands your capacity to be a coach for many different kinds of people, when you are pursuing that level of integration on your own.

Continuing to work yourself with a master coach, don't stop just when you're done with your program. Maybe there are seasons for it and it comes and goes, but that's part of your toolkit as well. You'll learn so much from working with people who've been doing this for a long time.

And then you survived it. You got fired, and the world didn't end. For me, being in those positions where I was thrust into a position of authority, that was very early on. I was hired as the web editor and was a lowly peon.

And then I was suddenly in charge of the print magazines and had no business being there. So I can relate to that as it's happening, and not get caught up in the idea that the world is going to end.

Actually, I have some lived experience that it won't. And then also experiences of trauma. Again, we aren't therapists, and I think there's a very important distinction between being qualified to work with trauma and not. But again, having lived experiences.

So for me, in 2023 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a total surprise. It was caught early, but it was completely out of the blue.

This was in the midst of me really building my coaching practice, and at a young age I was now traversing this health question. For me a cancer diagnosis is an opportunity to say, what am I doing with my life? Do I feel purposeful? Should I get out of the rat race? Am I spending the time I want, in this limited time on earth? I really strongly felt that the profession and the things I was doing totally passed the cancer test.

I was very convinced that what I was doing was impactful, did feel purposeful, did feel fun, did allow me to be with the people I wanted to be with and to choose who I wanted to spend time with. So again, it's not like I would wish getting cancer on anybody, but now that's part of the fabric of my experience. And of getting older.

Being a parent, having aging parents, these are all life experiences too. I didn't read about this stuff in a book. Life has a lot of curveballs. And just the gravitas of having had life experience, having reinvented my career several times, there were moments of deep despair throughout that.

Everyone's going to find out I'm a total fraud, when I took over the people leader space from being a content executive. My family's going to starve on the street. Totally nuts, but catastrophic thinking, multiple times through that washing machine of reinvention. That has a big effect on how I'm able to center myself and be in dialogue with people at different points in their life.

And with these closing words on the meaning of developing people, my conversation with Marie comes to an end. If you say, wow, this journey of finding business clients is also what I'm currently trying, I can also recommend our second episode with Hélène Feuillat, who shares a rather European perspective on a very similar problem space.

At least I could see many parallels between the two of them. And in order to connect with Marie, you can simply go to marie.coach, or of course find her on LinkedIn. And if you want to follow Marie's recommendation of connecting with a community of peers, of other coaches and facilitators, you can join the metaFox coach community on metafox.eu/community.

Currently this is a simple WhatsApp group, but it might evolve later in the course of this year. And already next week we will probably get out the next episode of the Making of a Coach. If you enjoyed this one, share it with a friend and follow us wherever you listen or watch. I'm Tobi from metaFox. All the best on your journey.

Bye bye.