The Journey to Becoming a Certified Scaling Up Coach: Embracing the Abundance Mindset of Sharing

By Scaling Up Coaches COO & Certified Scaling Up Coach Kevin O’Connor

From Player to Certified Scaling Up Coach: My Journey

I like to use this image when I am presenting to our Coaches. I find it both funny and relevant because if you ask any random person on the street, “What do you think a Coach does?” you’ll likely get a variation of any of these answers. Like many kids participating in sports or extracurricular activities, I found tremendous value at an early age with excellent coaching. As a player being coached, I learned early on the impact a good coach can have on performance and, at some level, thought it would be an incredible feeling to be able to have such a positive influence on someone’s performance and knew that whatever I did in life had to have that component. And so, my coaching journey started personally, like many parents, coaching kids in sports as a volunteer when I was a young adult. 

My professional journey as a coach took a little longer. We learned how to implement the Rockefeller Habits (now Scaling Up Platform) at our call center business, Appletree, in 2006. Our CEO, John Ratliff, met Verne Harnish, read his book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, and shared the process with the rest of our leadership team and me. Initially, I was not impressed. But after attending one of Verne’s workshops and having a coach help us implement the process at Appletree, I was all in. Using that process, we grew the organization by over 500%, which led to a successful exit to a publicly traded company in 2012.

After remaining with the acquiring company for six years, I rejoined John at his new company, align5, and became a Certified Scaling Up Coach. I began coaching companies on implementing Scaling Up in 2018. In 2022, I took on a leadership role as COO of Scaling Up Coaches, a community of over 200 coaches on six continents worldwide.

The Importance of Continuous Learning and Methodology Mastery in Coaching

Along the way, I discovered that two of the more remarkable aspects of coaching are seeing the success of your “students” and the feeling of constant learning. Many of our coaches are highly successful leaders – entrepreneurs like John, who grew their companies from scratch. Others are executive leaders who have been in growth-stage companies. Some have practiced Scaling Up in their own companies or as independent coaches, while others are learning about it for the first time. The most consistent characteristic is how hungry they are to master the methodology, best practices, manners, and methods in which our community deploys the platform into organizations.  

Scaling Up Coaches uses various methods – self-paced online learning tools, guided group calls, one-to-one mentoring, and an in-person 2-day training session – to certify and fully prepare our coaches to help companies implement Scaling Up. And while companies can “self-implement” the platform, “Everyone needs a coach,” as Bill Gates famously said in his 2013 TED talk.  

Seeing these highly successful leaders with decades of knowledge and experience talk about how much more they learned upon completing certification to become a Scaling Up coach is humbling. One coach, the founder and CEO of a business that grew to several hundred million dollars in revenue, told me upon certification that this was the best investment he had ever made. Wow! 

Knowing that these highly successful people from all walks of life can still be humble and passionate enough to learn new approaches, strategies, and tools to help businesses grow is inspiring.

The Power of Community: How Scaling Up Coaches Work Together

Once certified, our coaches light up at our regional Confab events, sharing story after story  - not of their success, but of the success they’ve helped a client achieve. And when a coach encounters a challenge with a client – a new barrier or an unforeseen development (remember shutdowns from COVID-19) – it is incredible to see the support from our community In our global slack channels. 

Our coaches share their experiences, a tool they’ve developed for such a problem, or a different way one of our tools was used to solve a similar situation. They offer to hop on a call or video conference and hear more about the issue to help solve the challenge. Our community is very diverse. That diversity creates an enormous body of knowledge that can be deployed to solve almost any problem, which is another excellent quality of being part of this organization. But one thing they all share is the desire to give back and share knowledge for the betterment of a global community.

I am very grateful to be a coach and part of a coaching community that values the success of others. The abundance mindset of sharing to improve the world is a powerful and transformative way of approaching life.