Zander Woodford-Smith Of Business Coach Academy: Lessons I Learned From Last Year To Take Our Organization to the Next Level in 2024
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Brand Recognition and Message: I’d like to see our brand become more widely known, with our core message reaching a broader audience. In this scenario, my role would have evolved to focus on spreading this message rather than being caught up in the minutiae of day-to-day management.
This series aims to discuss the experiences and lessons learned by top executives over the past year, and how these insights are shaping the landscape for change and innovation in 2024. The past year has been a time of unprecedented challenges and opportunities, requiring adaptive leadership and innovative strategies. We believe that sharing these experiences can inspire and guide others in their endeavors to drive positive change in their organizations and industries. I had the pleasure of interviewing Zander Woodford-Smith.
Zander is the CEO of Business Coach Academy, a company dedicated to helping experienced executives use their experience to build a part-time (and eventually full-time) business as a prestigious business coach. He has worked with FTSE 100 executives and coached Olympic athletes and coaches. His previous performance coaching company, Stryv, grew to 22,000 customers, and he is 2x runner-up of the B1g1 Global Impact Awards.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share a little about your background and what pivotal moments led you to your current position as an executive?
Thank you for having me! Let me tell you a story. When I was ten, something big happened. My mom, who owned a business, worked so hard that she got really sick. I was taken to the hospital to say goodbye. But she fought hard and survived. After that, she couldn’t work like before, so she had to learn how to make her business run without her. It took time, but she did it. She sold her company and became a super successful business coach, helping others not to work themselves sick.
Her story inspired me to make the most of life. I chased my dream of playing tennis professionally. I trained hard in Spain and the U.S. But then, I got injured. So, I went to college. After that, I hustled my way into a startup, where I worked with big-time CEOs and Olympic athletes. For three years, I soaked up everything about transforming lives and businesses.
But I wanted to help more people, not just the big shots. So, I left and started my own company, Stryv, which grew to 22,000 customers. Many were coaches and entrepreneurs who wanted to use the tools I created with their clients. That’s when I joined forces with my mom. We set out to train the world’s best business coaches. Our goal? To empower business owners to avoid the tough times my mom faced and succeed in their businesses.
What were the early challenges you faced in your career, and how did they shape your approach to leadership?
When I first started out, there was a big challenge I faced: I wasn’t great at talking to my team. You see, I grew up mostly on my own. My mom was always busy running her business. As a lone tennis player, I got used to doing everything by myself. I didn’t think I needed to tell people what I was planning or how things were going. I thought sharing would slow me down, or they might not get it.
But boy, was I wrong! Keeping everything to myself meant that I was the only one working on big projects. And no matter how hard you work alone, a group can do more together. I learned I had to trust others and, even more, hire folks who were better than me at certain things. Instead of having people just do what I said, it was about letting them take charge of their areas. That’s how I changed my leadership style. It made everything better. We could all pull in the same direction and do more together. It was a game-changer.
We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one that you made that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?
I’ve made a mistake that has taught me a LOT. Here’s what happened: I needed an operations manager for my company. So, I hired someone fast because they seemed to understand the vision like I did. But here’s the catch — I basically hired another version of me. And since I have a hard time with things like communication and following a plan, you can guess what happened next. It was a disaster, especially because it was right before our big annual event.
This new hire, who was supposed to help me avoid my own mistakes, ended up making them worse. They were with us for just a few weeks, but during that time, everything got tougher instead of easier. And that’s when the light bulb went off for me. I needed team members who were ahead of the game, not just people I could tell what to do. I needed folks who could take charge on their own or even say, “Hey, I’ve got a better idea.”
From that mistake, I learned to hire people who could bring something new to the table, not my own mirror image. It’s changed the way I build my team, and it’s been a huge step forward for us!
As an executive, how do you define success, both personally and for your organization?
As an executive, I think success is kind of like going on an exciting hike. You have a beautiful mountain to climb. It’s not just about getting to the top — it’s about how fast you trek and enjoying the journey.
Let’s break this down. It’s not enough to say success is about making progress, like Earl Nightingale suggested. It’s about the pace, too. If your goal is to boost profits by $10 million in five years and after one year you only make an extra dollar, that’s not really feeling successful, is it? You want to feel like you are moving forward quickly enough.
And then there’s the idea of a “worthy ideal.” This part is tricky. I’ve seen it over my career — lots of folks, even big-company leaders, don’t really know what their true goals are. They’re super busy, working long hours, raising families, and trying to hit targets. So how can they figure out what’s truly important?
I define success in two parts: achievement and fulfillment. Achievement is the measurable stuff — profits, customers, market share, and the impact you have. But remember, a lot of these goals are just numbers we make up. The second part, fulfillment, is how we feel about what we’re doing every day. It’s about loving your daily work and how the company is reaching its goals.
Instead of vague mission statements or dull quarterly numbers, I’m all about ‘Strategic Intent.’ It’s a phrase from Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. It means having a guide that’s both inspiring and specific. It’s about setting goals that fire us up and are clear enough to follow. That’s the kind of success that lights me up — where we’re all climbing that mountain together, fast, and enjoying every step.
So in our specific case, that would be how many coaches we have, how many clients they have, and the change in their client business and lives. I love hearing when one of our coaches gets a new client, but nothing lights me up with a feeling of “Yes, we’re doing it” like when one of our coaches shares how their clients lives have been impacted. Either by more profit, less working hours, getting home for dinner with their kids, or their health being sorted out. That’s the true success for me hearing how they have been empowered.
Reflecting on 2023, what was the most unexpected challenge you faced, and how did you navigate it?
In 2023, we hit a wall. Our growth just stopped. It was like we were running in place, and it got so tough that we almost decided to give up. But you know what? I remembered that persistence could be my superpower.
I realized I didn’t have all the answers. Trying to fix things alone wasn’t working. I felt like I was running out of energy and new ideas. That was the wake-up call. I needed a fresh perspective and some new energy to revitalize our vision.
So, I set out to find someone else who could be passionate about our company’s growth, just like me. We needed a person with skills I didn’t have. Eventually, we found that person. It was a big step, but we decided to share a slice of our income with them.
This move wasn’t easy, but it was necessary. Bringing in this new expert changed the game. They brought in fresh ideas and solutions I couldn’t see. It was about teaming up and sharing success to get past that unexpected roadblock. And it led us forward again.
What was a significant risk you took this year, and how did it turn out?
“This year we decided to go all in. We took a big leap and offered a part of our company **and a significant cash compensation** in exchange for top-notch expertise, despite our limited cash flow at the time. This was about bringing in someone who could shake things up with new ideas for our marketing, sales, and services.
At first, it felt like a gamble. The sales didn’t pick up right away, and I won’t lie, we were nervous. But then, things started to click. We nailed down our messaging, reimagined our offers, and something amazing happened by January 2024. We moved from reaching out to people ourselves to launching paid ads. Our cost of getting new leads dropped like a stone. And just like that, we had our best month ever.
But we didn’t stop there. We brought on a head of operations too. They’ve been streamlining our business in ways we never could have alone. It’s like we’re gearing up for the big leagues now.
Even with all the challenges we’ve faced over the years, this moment, right now, feels like it’s all been worth it. We’re more pumped about our business than we’ve ever been since day one. It was a risk, sure, but as they say, no guts, no glory. And now, it looks like we might just be on the path to glory.”
How has your company’s mission or purpose affected its overall success? Can you explain the methods or metrics you use to evaluate the impact of this purpose-driven strategy on your organization?
Our mission — to empower entrepreneurship and build better businesses — has been like a compass, guiding our journey. It’s what drives us to create the best training program possible for business coaches. But we’re aiming even higher. We want to make business coaching so valuable that everyone sees it as a must-have because we truly believe in the difference it can make.
At first, we were so focused on perfecting this top-notch program that we didn’t have enough coaches to spread the word and do the work. It was a bit like crafting a hit song without having enough musicians to play it.
We’re using clear goals to measure our impact. Here are our targets:
1. Train 1,000 top-quality business coaches.
2. Ensure these coaches are supporting 10,000 businesses.
3. Track the collective profit increase these businesses experience thanks to our coaches.
4. Monitor the improvements in quality of life for those involved — both coaches and clients.
By hitting these benchmarks, we’ll know that our purpose-driven strategy isn’t just a feel-good story; it’s creating real, tangible success for entrepreneurs and their businesses. And when we see those numbers — 1,000 coaches, 10,000 businesses helped, profits soaring — that’s when we’ll celebrate our mission becoming a reality.
Have you ever faced a situation where your commitment to your purpose and creating a positive social impact clashed with the profitability in your business? Have you ever been challenged by anyone on your team or have to make a tough decision that had a significant impact on finances? If so, how did you address and reconcile this conflict?
Yes, we’ve definitely faced tough times where our mission to positively impact society seemed at odds with making a profit. There were moments when it would have been easier to fall back on a previous business model instead of pushing forward with our current mission.
Sales were tough, and profitability felt like a distant dream. To keep our vision alive, we sometimes had to take on side projects for immediate cash flow. But we always returned to our long-term goal. Every bit of money we made, we poured into courses and programs to improve and grow. It was all about learning — how to make a better product, sell it, market it, and handle everything in between.
For several years, we accumulated debt to fuel our mission, believing in a bright future that always seemed just out of reach. I personally went into £150,000 of debt to fund our dream. It was a hard road, but now it’s paying off. We’ve managed to clear the debt, we’re experiencing our best months ever, and all those struggles are finally turning into victories. Addressing this conflict between purpose and profit meant staying true to our mission, continuously improving, and believing that persistence would eventually lead to success.
Could you list the top five things you’ve learned in 2023, with specific examples of how these lessons impacted your decisions or strategies?
1 . Hire people smarter than you are. Last year, I finally hired people who were better than me in the domains we needed them to be. A new chief revenue officer who’s much better at copywriting, outbound sales teams, offer creation, and content. I also hired a head of operations to make things run smoothly and a new SEO expert to grow organic traffic. It’s a huge difference having people who increase the brain power of the organization instead of simply coming to you to ask what to do next.
2. True leverage requires a team. No matter how hard you work, you can’t outwork having multiple people do the job. Even if you create automations and other things, you could have multiple people creating that many things. You need to be able to find and recruit and keep top talent so the business is not limited by the skills of the leaders.
3. Focus on the constraint of the business ruthlessly. It’s easy to look busy, be busy, and do a lot of things that feel like growth, but if they are not fixing the constraint of the business, you may have added more potential to grow, but you still wont grow. It’s like adding another 100 kg of leg strength to improve your deadlift, but your grip strength is the problem. You have to be ruthless. When we didn’t have the sales calls we needed, first we needed to get leads, then we needed to fix how to get them on calls (which we 4xed within 2 weeks), but we were only able to do that because we had the throughput from the lead generation. Then it’s improving the sales call further (we just made another hire in this area, which goes back to points 1 and 2).
4. When it gets easy, go hard. When something hasn’t worked for so long and then it finally starts to work, it can feel like you want to enjoy some relief… But you never know how long opportunities are going to last, so you absolutely have to push it like crazy when things start aligning. At any point, ad platforms can change, the economy can change to make your offer obsolete, or a new technology could shake things up. Once we started having the best months, the money went back into expanding the team, fixing the constraints further, and increasing marketing spend. You have to make the most of the opportunities.
5. You must do what is required, not just your best. If you are doing your best and it’s not good enough, then you need a new approach. You need to change. I was just trying to learn from people who had done it and implement the changes in my business myself. What was required was to relinquish control and an income/ equity piece to move forward. I didn’t want to do it, but it was required. Before that, if you had asked me, I would have said I was trying my best, but there was a different approach that was needed.
How have these top five lessons from 2023 changed your outlook or approach for 2024?
The lessons from 2023 have revamped my playbook for 2024. Instead of asking myself, “What do I need to learn to fix this?” I now ask, “Who has already mastered this and can bring that expertise to my team?” It’s a shift from being self-reliant to team-reliant.
This simple change in perspective is already transforming our business dynamics. Information and decisions are flowing directly to those best equipped to handle them, bypassing me, which prevents the clogging that happens when everything depends on one person. I’m no longer the bottleneck.
Moving forward, I’m focused on scouting and recruiting these change-makers — the ones who’ve been down this road before and know all the shortcuts and pitfalls. It’s about assembling a dream team where each member is a specialist in their domain, ready to conquer the specific challenges we face.
Embracing this new outlook means that for 2024, our strategy is built on collaboration and collective intelligence, not just the vision of a single leader. We’re poised to be more agile, more innovative, and, most importantly, more effective in achieving our grand vision.
In terms of innovation and adaptation, what’s one change you implemented in 2023 or plan to do in 2024 that you believe will be crucial for the future of your business?
In 2023, the change that really set us apart was not only bringing in new talent but also equipping them with what I like to call “superpowers.” We invested heavily in integrating AI into our operations. This isn’t just any AI, though — it’s powered by a centralized knowledge base that accumulates company data, client testimonials, founder stories, and more.
Imagine giving everyone on the team a crystal ball that held all of our collective wisdom — every success, every lesson learned. That’s what this AI represents. It allows team members to access this vast pool of knowledge and enhance it with their personal expertise.
What makes it so powerful is the collaboration it fosters. Everyone can contribute to and pull from this shared resource, providing feedback in real-time. It’s like having an ever-evolving playbook that’s specific to our company.
Looking ahead to 2024, we plan to deepen this integration. As the knowledge base grows, our AI’s insights will become sharper, enabling us to move faster and stay ahead. It’s not just about having the best people anymore; it’s about giving them the best tools. This tech-forward approach is crucial — it’s the jet fuel for our rocket ship, ensuring we continue to innovate and lead in our industry.
As a leader, how do you foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement within your team or organization?
As the leader of a company that teaches business coaching, we naturally value growth and learning. But it’s easy to ignore our own advice — like how a plumber might have a leaky faucet. To prevent this, we take a dynamic approach to continuous improvement.
We challenge our team to push a little further each month or quarter. It’s not just about hitting higher numbers; it’s about enhancing their roles through automation, simplification, or taking on new, challenging actions. This push forces them to either expand their skill sets or seek assistance and learn something formally.
Think of it like a workout routine. If you keep lifting the same weight, you’ll stay the same. But if you increase the weight gradually, you get stronger. Our team’s ‘weights’ are the responsibilities they manage and the goals they achieve.
It’s this environment of gentle yet constant pressure that encourages our team to grow. It’s an adaptation to an ever-accelerating business world where formal learning pathways are replaced by real-time, on-the-job skill development. This approach ensures that as our business evolves, so do our people, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Looking at the broader industry landscape, what emerging trends do you think will be most influential in the coming year?
In the coming year, I foresee two major trends reshaping the business landscape.
Firstly, the surge in independent work will continue to rise. More and more people are realizing that traditional job security is a relic of the past. The statistics speak volumes: belief in the security of independent work has skyrocketed from 30% in 2011 to 70% in 2021. With ongoing uncertainty in the world, I predict this number will only grow. Experienced professionals, in particular, might opt to leverage their skills independently rather than start over in a new job or career path.
After experiencing the flexibility and autonomy of working from home during the pandemic, many people have now returned to traditional office environments. However, as the dust settles and routine sets in, I anticipate a growing nostalgia for the work-from-home lifestyle. The question, “Why do I have to do this in an office?” will become increasingly common as individuals seek to reclaim the autonomy they once enjoyed.
This desire for greater control over one’s work environment dovetails with the trend towards independent work. It’s not just about the type of work people are doing, but also how, when, and where they’re doing it. The will to design one’s own work-life balance is gaining traction, and we can expect a significant push for more autonomy and flexibility in the coming year.
In summary, alongside the wave of people moving towards independent work due to perceived greater security, the longing for the autonomy that came with working remotely during the pandemic will likely fuel this shift even further, influencing the broader industry trend towards a more autonomous, flexible work culture.
Secondly, there’s a growing recognition of the value of coaching in the corporate and SME sectors. As competition intensifies and the pace of change accelerates, standing still means falling behind. Businesses need coaching to not just keep up but to surge ahead. Coaching equips individuals and teams with the tools to adapt quickly, think strategically, and maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly fast-paced world.
These two trends highlight a broader shift towards agility, personal empowerment, and the need for continuous development in both individual careers and within organizations. Companies that recognize and embrace these trends will likely be the ones leading the charge in the future.
If you and I were having a conversation one year from now, and we were looking back at the past 12 months, what specifically has to happen for you to be happy with your progress?
If we were to sit down a year from now and reflect on the progress made, there are a few key achievements that would really stand out for me:
1. Tripling Our Coaching Numbers: I’d be thrilled if we’ve managed to triple the number of active coaches in our network. This would indicate not just growth but also that we’re making significant strides in upholding our mission — to empower entrepreneurs and businesses through top-tier coaching.
2. Annual Recurring Revenue: Hitting an ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) on track for £5 million would be a huge success. It’s a clear indicator of financial health and sustainable growth, showing that the value we’re providing is truly resonating with our customers.
3. Operational Efficiency: For me to be happy with our progress, the business should be operating smoothly without my daily involvement. This would mean our team is empowered, processes are efficient, and the company is thriving under the collective leadership and initiative of our talented staff.
4. Brand Recognition and Message: I’d like to see our brand become more widely known, with our core message reaching a broader audience. In this scenario, my role would have evolved to focus on spreading this message rather than being caught up in the minutiae of day-to-day management.
5. Coach Success Rate: Lastly, I would measure our success by the prosperity of our coaches. It would be incredibly satisfying to see over 80% of our active coaches who are diligently following our system earning upwards of £10k a month. This metric would signal that not only is our training effective, but also that we’re truly elevating the standard and financial success of business coaching as a profession.
Achieving these goals would not just mark a successful year but would also set a strong foundation for the future, ensuring that we are on the right path to making a lasting impact in the world of business coaching.
How can our readers further follow your work or your company online?
BusinessCoachAcademy.com or search Zander Woodford-Smith on Instagram or Youtube.
This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com
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