Executive Coaching for UK Founders, Leaders & Operators
Mon–Fri 9am–6pm GMT hello@tidescoaching.co.uk
Services

Five coaching offers, held with care.

One-to-one and team work for the seats that carry the most weight. Each offer is structured, but the cadence and depth are shaped to the person and the moment in front of them.

01One-to-One

Executive Coaching

For CEOs, MDs, C-suite and senior board directors carrying ultimate responsibility for an organisation, a function or a P&L. The seat at the top is different from the one below it; the work is shaped to that difference.

Typical engagements cover strategic decisions you cannot easily think about out loud anywhere else, the relationships immediately around you (board, investors, executive peers, successor), how you are using your own time and attention, and the personal shifts that come with being the most senior person in the room.

The work is direct without being prescriptive. We will name patterns where we see them, ask the harder question, and stay with the parts of the conversation that most people in your week have a commercial interest in moving past.

Typical shapeTwelve sessions across six months
Session length90 minutes, every 2–3 weeks
FormatVideo by default; Cornwall or London in-person
02One-to-One

Founder Coaching

For founders building, scaling, professionalising, or stepping back from the company they started. The founder seat is its own seat — not quite a CEO role in the conventional sense, not quite anything else — and the work is held with respect for what the company is to you.

We work on the things founders rarely get to talk about properly: the question of what the role asks of you now that it didn't at the start, the relationship with co-founders and investors, succession and what comes after, and the long arc of building something whose centre of gravity keeps moving as it grows.

For founders preparing for an exit or stepping back into chair, we also work on identity transitions — what it means to be the person you have been, and the person you are about to become.

Typical shapeSix- or twelve-month engagement
Session length90 minutes, every 2–3 weeks
FormatVideo by default; in-person where it earns it
03Team

Leadership Team Coaching

Sustained work with a small senior team — typically four to nine people — on how they think together, decide together and hold each other to account. This is not facilitation, and it is not an off-site. It is coaching of the team as a unit, over time, with a contract held by everyone in the room.

The work usually moves between the team's actual operating cadence (how meetings run, how decisions are made, what is and isn't discussable), the relationships inside the team, and the team's collective leadership of the wider organisation. We also coach the dyad of CEO and chair, or CEO and chief of staff, where that is the right place to start.

Engagements are contracted to outcomes that everyone signs up to before session one. Confidentiality inside the team is held strictly.

Typical shapeSix- to twelve-month engagement
CadenceMonthly half-days or quarterly full days
FormatMixed: in-person key sessions, video between
04One-to-One

New-in-Role Transition Coaching

A focused six-month engagement from week one in a new senior seat — whether you have been promoted internally, hired externally, or are stepping up after a founder hands over. The first ninety days do disproportionate work, and most leaders run them on instinct.

We work on what your listening tour should actually surface, how you map stakeholders properly, what to commit to in the first quarter and what to deliberately not commit to, how you build the rhythm of your new operating cadence, and the personal shifts that come with stepping up.

This offer also works for senior leaders moving sideways into a different kind of role — founder to CEO of a larger company, executive to non-executive, operator to chair.

Typical shapeTwelve sessions across six months
Session length90 minutes, weekly in month one
Best startedTwo to four weeks before day one
05Group

Group Supervision

Small confidential groups of senior leaders, meeting monthly online, to bring real situations from the work and think them through together with a senior coach in the room. Cohorts are six to eight people, drawn from across the country and across sectors, with non-competing seats.

Group supervision is quiet, demanding and remarkably useful over time. It draws on something most senior leaders never had: a peer group that is not also a network, not also a sales channel, not also an audience — just a room of people in roughly the same seat who have agreed to think carefully about each other's work.

Cohorts run on rolling twelve-month contracts. We hold the group, but the work is done together.

Typical shapeRolling 12-month cohort
CadenceMonthly, 90 minutes, online
Group size6–8 senior leaders, non-competing
In Practice

How Coaching Looks in Practice

The mechanics of what an engagement actually feels like, week to week.

Cadence

For one-to-one work, ninety minutes every two to three weeks is the default. Long enough that the conversation can go somewhere; spaced enough that there is time to live with what came up before the next session. We occasionally compress the rhythm in a transition (weekly in the first month) or stretch it once the engagement is established (monthly), but the default holds because it works.

Between sessions

Sessions are not the whole of the work. Most engagements have something agreed at the end of each session — an observation to test, a conversation to have, a habit to notice, a piece of writing to do for yourself. None of it is homework in the school sense. It is what makes the next session worth ninety minutes.

The contracting conversation

Every engagement starts with a contract. For private engagements it is short and direct. For sponsored engagements it is a three-way conversation with you, the sponsor and the coach: what is the sponsor hoping to see; what are you hoping to do with the work; what will and will not be reported back; how will we know whether it is working. Nothing begins until everyone has signed.

Sponsor and HR alignment

Where coaching is paid for by the organisation, we work with the sponsoring leader (often the line manager) and HR partner at the start and the midpoint of the engagement. The content of sessions stays inside the coaching room. The agreed outcomes and the broad sense of progress are shared transparently. This is the bargain that makes sponsored coaching work; we hold up both ends of it.

Reviews and endings

There is a structured review at the midpoint and a clear ending. Endings are not an afterthought; they are part of the work. Many clients move to a longer-term, lower-cadence arrangement after the first engagement. Some do not, and that is also a good outcome.

Fit

Who This Is For — and Who It Isn't

We would rather say no early than half-take on a piece of work that should be done somewhere else.

This is for you if

  • You are carrying real senior responsibility — founder, CEO, MD, C-suite, board director, head of a sizeable function.
  • You want a confidential, considered space to think about the work, not a programme to follow.
  • You are willing to be honest about the situation, including the parts you usually edit when explaining it to anyone else.
  • You are ready to commit to a contracted cadence for at least three months.
  • You are open to the work being direct as well as supportive — we will name patterns where we see them.
  • You want a coach with operating experience, not a generalist following a script.

This is not for you if

  • You are looking for a mentor who has personally run a business in your exact industry — coaching is a different relationship.
  • You want a consultant who will tell you what to do; if that is the brief, we will say so and point you elsewhere.
  • You are not in a position to protect the time for sessions and the work between them.
  • What you are actually carrying needs the support of a therapist, not a coach — we will say so plainly if that is the case.
  • You want a quick fix or a single conversation; this practice is not built for that.
  • You are looking for the cheapest available coach — this is a senior practice and is priced that way.
Begin a Conversation

The right place to start is a chemistry call.

A free thirty-minute call. We talk about the seat you are in and what you are hoping coaching might do, and you leave with a clear sense of whether this is the right fit — without obligation.