The Secret to Successful VC: Why Coachability Is a Crucial Measure of a Founder’s Chance of Success

You find a great company to invest in.

An awesome idea, passionate founder, and the right team to make it work.

So, you invest.

However, when it comes time to pivot or overcome challenges, the founder fails – potentially taking the company down, too.

If that happens, you’ll see little return on investment.

So, how can you make sure founders can pivot or overcome challenges when the time comes?

Coachability is one key factor that can help you tell the successful founders from those who will likely fail. Coachable founders can adapt to changes, pivot with ease, and overcome challenges on the path to monetization.

Before getting into how you can tell if a founder is coachable, let’s take a deeper look at the first reason it’s a crucial measure of success – the ability to pivot.

Successfully Pivoting

When you invest in a company, you likely expect the company to keep heading in roughly the same direction. But, startups often have to pivot. This can help them better align with the market, customer needs, and more.

While pivoting can be helpful to the long-term success of the company, it’s also a challenge for founders. Pivoting requires founders to think differently about their current offering, the market, new markets, modifications to the current product/service, and more.

If founders don’t have the right thought process to ask the right questions and follow the answers to obtain new insights, they’ll struggle to pivot successfully. This can lead to the company failing. And, you losing your investment.

So, during your due diligence, you should evaluate founders and key leadership for coachability. That way, you know they can pivot if needed.

Overcoming Startup Challenges

Even if companies you invest in don’t need to pivot, they’ll still face startup challenges. These can include overwhelm/time management, scaling rapidly, communicating powerfully, hiring the right team, getting in front of prospects, and more.

If your founder can’t overcome challenges like these, the company is unlikely to be successful. A startup needs a lot more than a great idea and passion to be successful. Startups also need a founder who has (or can find) the tools necessary to overcome complex problems.

To achieve the exit you envision, you need to make sure your founders and their teams are up to these challenges.

One way you can make sure founders can handle challenges is by investing in executive coaching. Executive coaching can help you find founders with the highest likelihood of success. And, it can help your current founders have the tools they need to overcome challenges.

How Does Coaching Work?

So, coachability is a crucial indicator of future success for founders. But, how exactly does executive coaching work? And, how does it help founders?

Executive coaching involves a process of asking the right questions in a structured framework. This framework is unique to the specific challenge being addressed. The goal of this coaching is to have the person being coached gain new insights. From these new insights, your founder/senior leadership can find solutions to their challenges.

Instead of telling founders/senior leadership what to do, executive coaching helps them find their own solutions. A coachable founder is someone who can use this process to find solutions.

Whereas founders without coachability are unable to go through the process and discover the solution they need – ultimately leading to failure.

How Can You Make Sure Founders/Senior Leadership Are Coachable?

You need your founders and their senior leadership to be coachable. But, how can you tell if they are?

The best way to ensure your founders are coachable is with the help of an executive coach with PropTech experience. Part of your founder evaluation process should include a session with an executive coach. After this short session, your executive coach can tell you whether the founder is coachable.

That way, you know the likelihood of your founder adapting successfully to changes and challenges before investing.

Wrapping It Up

Choosing the right company is critical to getting the most out of your investment. Coaching is an affordable insurance policy to maximize the likelihood that your investment performs as your investors expect.

And, coaching can help you have a more successful track record. That’s what investors look at when you’re ready to raise your next fund.

So, if you want a competitive advantage for your portfolio companies and your fund, you need the right executive coach. PropTech Coaching Solutions is the industry leader in PropTech coaching.

Sign up for your free coaching consultation today to see how PropTech Coaching Solutions can help you find the right founders.