Coach: Leland Franklin
Founder, Kenshō Leadership
Focus: Executive Leadership Coaching
Employees | 0
Revenue | $10-15k/month
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Introduction
(This is a condensed version of the podcast interview which is coming soon!)
We asked Leland to introduce himself and his business and tell us how he became a coach.
He responded, “So I actually had an idea. If you're open to it, I've been working on something with my coach that goes beyond the resume. I've never actually spoken this out loud anywhere or actually recorded it. (If you want to check it out, watch the podcast interview :) )
I was born and raised in Hong Kong. I lived there for 16 years. And in Hong Kong, you go to the same school from, I guess, K through 12th grade. I remember this feeling of, “This is the same routine over and over and over again.” And I asked my parents, “Hey, can I change schools?” They said, “Yeah, sure, we'll put you in a different school in Hong Kong.” And I said, “Actually, can I change everything?”
“I'd love to go to a boarding school around the world. I want to go be my own for a while.” And they're like, “Wow, that's crazy. And we support you.” So, I ended up going to a boarding school in California which was a horse school. I share that story because when I look back on my life, I see that I really seek novelty and adventure. I used to be quite shy and hesitant. I always looked before I leaped. And it's interesting how, in that time, I began to transform my life.
I tried bungee jumping, and eventually, I tried jumping out of planes, and it just became this thing where feeling that fear and going anyway was something that I really, really liked doing because fear had stopped me in a lot of aspects of my life. And I ended up becoming a skydiver for 11 years. One of the common misconceptions people had was, “You must be fearless. You jumped hundreds and hundreds of times.” No, the fear is there every time. My brain still says, what the hell are you doing? When that plane door opens, it's acting anyway.
My Coaching Story
I share that because it's been such a good metaphor for this whole journey of becoming a coach. The idea of taking the leap when you're not sure how it'll work out. So, coaching is my fourth career. I've been in tech for about 15 years. I started off as a technology consultant. If you've seen the movie up in the air with George Clooney, traveling 90% of the time. It’s an awesome life when you're in your mid-20s.
I actually burned out from that job, and took off three months on leave because I had to recover. And that's when I decided to try new things; that's when I started skydiving, and I saw that people were wearing these little cameras on their heads. Then, I had the crazy idea to go and work for GoPro. I ended up becoming their first program manager for firmware and software development. We went IPO about a year later, made a bunch of really bad leadership decisions, and the company came crashing down. So, I feel like I got to experience the full life cycle of a company. In about four years, I got a chance to manage a team there for the first time. I made a lot of mistakes. I had the best boss in my life. I had the worst boss in my life. And I tried to be the best boss that I could be.
Why Did You Start Coaching?
After about four years, I decided to do some soul-searching. I reflected, “Well, okay, I love education as a mission.” So, I moved to a K through 12 education technology company, and I got to manage our partner engineering team. While it was a great mission, I was miserable.
While I was there, I developed an informal mentoring relationship with our chief people officer. Her name is Debbie Cohen, and I like to describe her as a combination of Mary Poppins and Yoda. She pulled me aside and said, “Leland, I can tell that you're not happy here, and you're really good at pretending that you are, but I can tell you're not. I don't think this is for you, but the thing is, your team loves you, your peers love you, and leadership really likes you. Have you ever thought about becoming a professional coach?” I was like, “sports coaching?”
“No, no, there's this thing called professional leadership coaching. I think you should look into it. And over the next few weeks, over a series of what I like to call nudges from the universe, I enrolled in my first coach training course at the Co-Active Training Institute, or CTI. And while I was there, I got voluntold to come up in the middle of the room on the second day and was coached by the head instructor for 12 minutes in front of maybe 30 people. And that 12 minutes completely reframed my relationship with uncertainty.
In Chinese culture and perhaps others, you never leave a job without having something else lined up. Are you crazy? And this reframe allowed me to not only accept the idea of the unknown but actually embrace the not knowing. That weekend, I put in two weeks' notice from my high-paying tech job. And I said, “Hey, I want to give this thing a shot.” I realize, as I look back, that I've loved coaching the entire time. The best days and weeks for me at my corporate and startup jobs were helping someone else grow or succeed.
How Did You Find Your First Coaching Clients?
So, I started by talking to people that I already knew at the companies that I had worked at. People that I had some good relationships with, people that inspired me. I shared what I was up to, and I said, “Listen, I'm just starting out. I'd love to practice some of my coaching. Are you open to having a coaching session with me?” Most of them said yes. One led to two led to three. And it kind of kept going.
For the first few months, I just coached people for free, people that I knew from work. And I cannot overstate the value of that for me, because this whole idea of, “I'm a baby coach, I don't know what I'm doing,” is so prevalent and understandable, and yet it's so untrue. The skills that I think are fundamental to coaching are what most coaches have been doing their entire lives, so this whole” I've only been doing this for a few months” is such a misnomer.
Coaches, you already have so many of the ingredients.
For me, this practice helped to strengthen my belief in myself and my skills because I'd see the impact. They’d go, “How do I get more of this?” And I’d say, “How about next week?” And you're thinking, holy crap, these conversations are actually having an impact. My whole life, I've been rewarded for having answers. I think that's part of the leadership model we have: knowing the answers, being the go-to person, and being able to solve the problem.
There is nothing wrong with that. But in my view, what the world needs now and going forward is leadership that comes from asking better questions and getting input from others. And so, a lot of my job is asking questions and calling people out.
I really owe my coaching certification program for how it all started. Part of the certification process was getting five paying clients, even if that meant just $1 per session; they just had to be paying clients. I reached out to this really inspiring person who’d believed in me early on, and I said, ‘Listen, I need to start working with some paying clients, and I’d love for you to be my first.’ Honestly, I was too nervous to name a price, so I asked her to decide, ‘What’s this worth to you?’ She thought about it and said, ‘How about $55 a session?’ And I said, ‘Done!’
She became my first paying client, and I was beyond grateful. We worked together for about a year and a half, and I learned so much from her. That was the true start.
The second client came from someone I didn’t know before. I’d learned she was the founder and CEO of a company focused on children’s education—a truly amazing mission. At the end of our second lunch, I felt a little bold, thanks to the program’s encouragement, and said, ‘This might be a bit awkward, but I’d love to coach you. I’m not sure exactly what that would look like, but what do you think?’ I think it was $500 monthly for 6 months with weekly sessions. So, about $125 a session. It felt like a scary number. That was one of the biggest mind-blowing moments for me because I've never been the CEO of anything. I've never been a VP of anything.
This happened in the first four months after I said yes to being a coach. And overnight, I went from okay. I'm Leland, and I'm coaching a CEO in a paid engagement. What is going on? And if I can do it, anyone reading this can do it, too.
Don't be limited by your experience. If there are people you want to work with and you feel intimidated, just keep going. I’ve learned that the higher up people get in leadership, the more lonely it is. I’ve been told that the value we bring as coaches is the perspective of an outsider. You’re not on the payroll saying, “Yes, boss, that’s a great idea.” An outsider can say, “You talk about valuing transparency, but in your all-hands meeting, you didn’t talk about that thing that was really hard or that failure. What’s going on there?”
Calling people out is a muscle that I’m still building, and it’s one of the most viable things that people have told me they love; calling people out on their bullshit.
And there's no one else in their life usually who's doing that for them.
What Does Your Coaching Program Look Like?
I've pretty much had a single offering that's taken different forms, which is a one-on-one coaching partnership with me. And I've experimented a lot. I've done 6-month programs. I've done 3-month programs at the shortest. It's always been some type of partnership with me. I love it.
I am open to exploring other things. 80% of my business revenue has come from one-on-one coaching. About 20% of my revenue has come through working with a company called Hone, where, as a contractor, I run leadership development classes for people managers.
So that's been my mix, but in terms of my practice, it's been almost exclusively one-on-one coaching. And I just talked to people to figure out how we could customize it for them in terms of the number of sessions, frequency, and duration. Then we figure out how to support “this” with other pieces like worksheets and CoachAccountable. It has been amazing and people love this approach.
Does Taking Clients On Hikes Make an Impact?
This year, part of what I have been stepping into is “How do I bring more Leland into my work?”
As you both know, I love adventures.
And I have since taken people to jump out of airplanes. I have done polar bear swims in the ocean where it's freezing cold, and I do hikes now. And I LOVE hikes.
I do it maybe 6 or 7 days a week with my dog in the mornings. It started with friends and slowly moved to taking my clients hiking.
I cannot overstate what it's like to take someone out of their business setting, out of their little Zoom screen, and take them into the wilderness to hike a mountain and witness the creativity and innovation that comes to them. So, now I offer coaching hikes, and I'm on a mission to offer the best and most valuable ones on the planet.
I also still do tandem skydiving with my clients as a tool to unlock facing your fears or building courage. We do coaching before the jump and then we do coaching after the jump to integrate the learnings from the experience.
And things get blown open. It’s amazing.
Tell Us About a Client You Took Skydiving?
Yeah. Actually, I have a client who was one of the top architectural designers at her company. And for the longest time, she wanted to leave and start her own business. She had thought about it for years and years.
She used to say that she's like a monkey having to swing from branch to branch. She has to have the next branch. Otherwise, she can't let go of the last branch. And her family could see that she really wanted this, but she was suffering. So, we met, and she shared the vision with me.
And we did a series of adventure activities. And that December, she said, this is it. I'm gonna make the leap. I don't have to hold on to the next branch to let go of the last one. I can just make the jump.
And she did. And her 1st year, she made 6 figures. She crushed it. It was always in her. I didn't do that. It was just an invitation and a little bit of support, and she flew.
What Coaching Advice Did You Get Early On?
I think early on, it's really important to optimize for experience. So, I generally recommend that people get into coaching while they still have the financials figured out: a good job, a partner, or something along those lines. Because, one of the things that I've seen kill early coaching businesses is when coaches make coaching their whole life, and they haven't built up the pipeline and the relationships to have a sustainable practice. So having something where you're kind of in a safe place means that you can show up in your calls and not be needy, really give, and not be attached to the financial outcome.
So, when I say optimize for experience, I personally believe in doing a lot of things for free. For instance, I joined Modern Health where I got tons of coaching hours under my belt. It was incredibly helpful.
Another piece of advice was told to me by Susan Carlisle, a very dear mentor and first coach of mine, and I’ll be forever grateful for this. She said, Leland, you need to untangle your rates and your fees from your self-worth. And to be honest, I'm still unlearning this because, for my entire life, it's like your salary is what you are worth to the company, and you get paid more, and you feel better. Right?
People aren’t paying you for your time. They're paying you for their dreams to come true. Or, saying it differently, they're paying you for the value of the results. So we tend to make our fees about us and what am I worth.
There's a whole rabbit hole called value-based pricing. And I try to do this as much as I can; talk about what would be valuable for them and try to quantify it in terms of time or money saved or earned and then turn that into, “Well, if we can make you a $100,000, let's invest $10,000 with me. Wouldn't that be a great return? Yeah.”
That's a great ROI. So I try to think about that in terms of pricing. It isn't about me and my numbers. It's about them.
Moving away from charging hourly is a big one. The work we do is not hourly, people.
The real impact of coaching happens in between the sessions when you're in the rest of your life, where you're applying the insights in the boardroom, with your kids, or with your spouse. So don't sell yourself short by charging by the hour. Move to a monthly or package-based model.
Don't over engineer or over design your website and your marketing too early. It's a waste of time. I have a client who decided to become a coach. She didn't have a website for the 1st 4 years, and she makes over $400,000 a year.
Get out there and coach people, solve problems, listen, and get experience. That, I think, is the biggest leverage for your time.
What Coaching Resources Do You Recommend?
For me, one of the most influential things was the Coactive program that I went to. It wasn't for the certification. And I was very clear on this. All it means is that you've got a piece of paper. The real value of going to a formal, trusted, and well-known place to get certified was, first, actually learning skills and refining some of the raw ingredients, like asking the right questions and having new frameworks. Second, it builds confidence in you.
Third and perhaps most important, is the community. So, I really wanted to stay in touch with the people that I went through the program with, and we ended up doing that. I built this little group and I called it the “Coaching Collective. We met once a month for about two years after the program ended.
A second thing that has been influential for me is “doing my own work”. Whether it’s journaling by yourself, sharing in a trusted group, couples counseling, coaching, or any other kind of personal or professional development, continuing to work on yourself is one of the most powerful things we can BE and OFFER to others.
Many coaches have a misguided belief that we need to be perfect or flawless, and I think the opposite is true. It’s our humanity and vulnerability that shines through. If the moment feels right, I will often share a personal challenge with the client I’m with, and they’ll say, “This is so helpful.” Not just to know that you're actually a person with your own shit, but to learn. They see gold in what I'm sharing because I'm just super honest and transparent about some of those things. There's no substitute for really living your own life and putting yourself out there, taking risks, making mistakes, and getting back up. That is where so much gold comes from.
Lastly, if I could point you to one free resource that I think is genuinely a huge help and super valuable, it would be the Coaches Operating System by Townsend Warlaw. If you look up the Coaches Operating System, it's a free community, and it's incredible.
How Do We Find You?
Any Last Words of Advice?
Yeah. I think finding people and holding on to people who really believe in you is one of the most incredible things to cultivate.So much of my journey and “success” has been because of other people. Because of the beliefand generosity of other people. So, if I can pass it on somehow to you as a listener, I'm here for you.
We are who we are because of others.