Executive coaching with Nick Hodulik
Nick coaches CEOs, founders, and senior executives one-on-one. He has spent three decades founding and running companies as a CEO, CTO, and operator, so he has sat in the chair you’re in. He works with you on the company, the team, the hard decisions, and the rest of your life.
What you work on
The company, the team, and you.
Vision and values
What you want for yourself and for the company, and how your own values become the company’s mission and culture.
Decisions and focus
Strategy, priorities, hiring and firing, the board. Nick helps you decide what matters, build a plan, and hold yourself to it.
Leading people
Negotiation, delegation, feedback, conflict, and communication. You and Nick role-play the hard conversation before you have it.
How you think
It’s hard to see the whole field while you’re playing on it. Nick helps you see how you think, what leads you to act, and what leads you to drag your feet.
Product and technology
Nick is a full-stack technologist: product, user and customer experience, design, and engineering. When a decision touches any of it, or what to do about AI, he can go as deep as you need.
The whole person
People come to Nick for leadership. Then something else creeps in.
I’m so tired. My partner thinks I’m ignoring them. I have no free time. I haven’t seen a friend in months.
Nick spends most of the time on leadership and the business, because that’s why people hire him. He also works with you on performance, mind, relationships, money, career and identity, and meaning, because those shape the decisions you make at work.
Working together
What the coaching looks like week to week.
Sessions run about 50 minutes, weekly or every other week, on the same day and at the same time. Each one starts with the homework from last time. Then you bring whatever matters most that week. You know better than anyone what you need to work on.
Between sessions, you can reach Nick by text, voice message, or email, and he expects you to. Much of the work happens in the homework you do between sessions.
Every quarter, you and Nick step back and look at the coaching itself: what has changed, what is working, what isn’t, and what to stop doing.
Engagements run a minimum of six months, and most run a year or more.
Getting started
How it begins.
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Intro session
A short call to meet each other. You talk about what brought you here and what you want from coaching, and Nick explains how he works.
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Sample session
A free 50-minute coaching session on something that matters to you. By the end, you both know whether you’re a fit.
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Discovery
A long first session: about three hours remote, or five in person, usually with lunch and an activity. Beforehand you do some pre-work, including the Wheel of Life and a discovery questionnaire. Together you take stock of where you are, decide where you’re going, and agree on how you’ll work together.
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Design
You and Nick set the cadence, the focus areas, and how you’ll measure progress. Some clients are working through a specific transition. Others are working on the next decade.
What you can expect
Nick isn’t an affirmation-and-manifestation coach. He believes coaching done well should change the shape of your life, and he works that way. He’s usually the one willing to say what no one else will.
You can expect honest reflection, a push when you need one, and silence when you need to sit with a question. Nick follows up and assigns homework, and if you blow off your own commitments, he asks why.
What clients say
The reason I chose to work with Nick is simple: he cares deeply. He is someone that truly wants to know the whole person he is working with, not just what they want to do with their lives career-wise, but how that interacts with the other roles we play in life. His superpower is helping you to unlock the answers for yourself. Nothing has done more for my self-confidence than to understand that I actually have answers to my problems. Once you realize that, everything seems possible.
Some people are bestowed with a bright light and I believe there is responsibility with that brightness: to help others find, facilitate and flip their light on. This is really where I truly believe Nick thrives as a coach. I have successfully cut ties with those draining relationships and organizations with his help.
About Nick
Nick Hodulik
Nick started a tech consultancy at thirteen, in the dial-up days, and was at Razorfish in its early days. Since then he has founded, co-founded, or led digital agencies, magazines, an app store, software and hardware companies, restaurants, and a gym.
With JT Taylor, he ran General Things, a software and design consultancy whose clients included Nike, National Geographic, TED, and GoPro. GoPro bought it in 2013, and Nick became VP of Software and Services, with JT as Senior Director. The two of them went on to serve as President and COO of The MAZE Group and as co-CTOs of Goop, and today they run Polymath together.
Nick is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), a graduate of the Co-Active Leadership Program, and certified in Accelerating Coach Excellence (ACE), the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP), and the Collective Leadership Assessment (CLA). He has coached founders, CEOs, and leadership teams across tech, finance, consumer, and creative industries for the better part of a decade.
He is also a certified personal trainer, a lifelong meditator, and a traveler who has been to more than sixty countries.
Next step
Start with a free intro session.
On the first call, you and Nick talk about what’s going on and whether he’s the right coach for it.