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Impactful Coach
Episode 32Becoming a coach32 min

Entrepreneurship in the coaching industry: Making of the LINC Personality Profiler with Dr. Ronald Franke

with Ronald Franke, Geschäftsführer (Managing Director), LINQ GmbH

Auch auf Deutsch: Unternehmertum in der Coaching-Branche: Das "Making of" des LINC Personality Profilers mit Dr. Ronald Franke

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Show notes

On this 'Making of a Coach', Tobi meets Dr. Ronald Franke, the co-founder behind the LINC Personality Profiler, to trace how a psychology student became a coach, researcher, and entrepreneur. Next to a deep dive into the personality and coaching, the conversation unfolded as an entrepreneurial journey through the coaching industry - from cultural research to launching a B2B tool now used by 5,000+ coaches running 40,000+ assessments a year.

Along the way, they unpack where personality assessments fit into real coaching versus debriefs, and why type-based tools fall short of trait-based approaches. Originally recorded in German and shared here via AI transcreation, this coaching podcast doubles as a candid playbook for turning expertise into a scalable tool.


Key Learnings:

  • Use a trait-based approach (e.g., Big Five) to link coachee goals to personality patterns; when it fits, bring the LINC Personality Profiler into leadership or team topics to speed insight without replacing coaching.
  • If you build services around personality assessments, validate willingness to pay with small experiments and an MVP before scaling digital products.
  • For revenue stability, go B2B: certify as a provider, package debriefs plus coaching for HR and leadership development, and track success by the implementation rate of agreed actions.


Resources:


Episode Chapters:

00:00 Opening: Why Personality Assessments Matter

01:00 Meet Dr. Ronald Franke And The LINC Personality Profiler

03:00 From Psychology Studies To Coaching And Research

05:00 Culture Research To Product: Early Tests And Pivots

06:00 Choosing Coaches Over HR: Finding The Initial Niche

12:00 Building Products, MVPs, And What Actually Sells

17:00 Beyond The Tool: HR Solutions And B2B Services

20:00 Big Five Model In Coaching: From Debrief To Real Change

29:00 Internationalization And What’s Next

Transcript

Full transcript, edited for readability. Every timestamp jumps the video to that moment.

Tobi: Have you ever used personality assessments in your work as a coach, or maybe as an end user in a coachee role? I'm a huge fan of such assessments, as they give us a common language to talk about preferences, behaviors, and how we are different from other people. On last week's episode of the Making of a Coach we got to know one of the most popular professional assessments in Germany right now, the LINC Personality Profiler. It's used by more than 5,000 coaches, running over 40,000 assessments per year, and it's going international these days. So on this episode I was super excited to unpack the entrepreneurial story behind this success. I'm meeting Dr. Ronald Franke, one of the founders of LINC. Tobi: Before this conversation I had planned to dig deeper into personality psychology and the Big Five model that they're using, but I found Ronald's entrepreneurial story so interesting: how he did a coaching education next to his studies, how he went into research, started a company, didn't really succeed, and eventually then combined his coaching practice with his research and entrepreneurial work and made the LINC Profiler a success. We had the original conversation of all of this in Tobi: German, so if you speak German, click next and listen to the original. But for everyone else, we will just follow here with an AI transcreation. Stay tuned, it really works surprisingly well. And what came out of this is not so much a coach story, but really a masterclass in entrepreneurship inside the coaching industry, told through Ronald's story. So let's hear from him.

Read the full transcript

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