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Focal Point / UK franchise

Coach stories

Who they were. What the first year was like. Where they are now.

Focal Point has coaches working in the UK now, and the network here is growing. The three below are from the United States, where Focal Point is the largest business coaching network in the country, filmed by Focal Point talking about their own businesses. We chose them because between them they answer the three questions most people bring to this page: what it is like to leave a senior job for this, how a practice takes shape around the industry you know, and what the business looks like years in. A British coach’s story will join them after launch.

“I hadn’t spoken to her in twenty years.”

BJ Santiago, Lexington, Kentucky. Former CEO, one year in.

BJ Santiago started his career as an army officer and finished it as chief executive of a robotics and AI company whose machines patrol supermarket aisles. He retired in February. Thirty years earlier, a stranger at a small software company had stayed late every evening for months to teach him the technology he knew nothing about, and when Focal Point asked him why he wanted to coach, that was the answer: to do for other executives what had been done for him.

He signed his first client before his training had finished. Over dinner he told a friend, a corporate lawyer, that he was about to start coaching. The next afternoon the lawyer rang: a private equity firm he knew was worried about the chief executive of one of its companies. Two weeks later the chief executive was a client, and then his three senior sales managers were too. His largest account came from a LinkedIn post about why he was changing careers. The chief operating officer of a large security company saw it and asked whether he would coach her and her chief executive. She had worked for him in 2005. He now runs the leadership development programme for the whole company.

A year in he has ten accounts and about thirty hours of coaching a week. He has never used a lead generation tool, only the people he already knew, LinkedIn and the local chamber of commerce. His advice to anyone who has never sold themselves is to ask the coaches who have. Two he had never met walked him through his first strategic business review before he had been taught it.

“They said yes, every one of them.”

Chris Vurnakes, North Carolina. Sports and non-profit executive, certified July 2025.

Chris Vurnakes spent his career in sport: selling sponsorships and hospitality, running professional golf tournaments, then leading youth and collegiate sports organisations as an executive director. In April 2025, with two daughters and a third child on the way, he started looking for a business of his own. A franchise consultant showed him several. Most needed premises and a staff of twenty or thirty, and he could see what that would do to the balance he was looking for. Coaching did not.

Before he signed he asked every coach he spoke to the same question: is the balance real? They all said yes. He asked how they found clients, because selling himself rather than a ticket package was new to him, and he asked whether the investment was worth it compared with simply setting up on his own. His conclusion was that he would not have known where to start.

His sector is non-profit executives, because that is where his standing is. Fundraising, team dynamics and time are the problems business owners have, in a different setting. Three months after certification he had three paying clients and was still in his day job until the year end, with a target of eight to ten clients and the option to take on more when his children are older. His first client was a restaurant owner he had known for three years. By the fourth conversation the owner stopped him before the question: we’re in, let’s start next week.

“If you’d told me in 2013 that I’d be here, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

Alay Yajnik, California. Seventeen years in medical devices, twelve years a Focal Point coach.

Alay Yajnik ran a hundred-million-dollar business for Siemens Healthcare and helped start several medical device companies. Neither suited him: the big company was slow, the start-ups belonged to their investors. A franchise broker introduced him to Focal Point in 2013. He quit his job and went to certification, and picked up his first client on day thirty.

The first year was ups and downs. He had never had to sell to eat, and the pressure of that was new. What got him through was the practice mentor he was given, the coaches he had trained with, and the knowledge that the alternative was going back. A time study with his mentor showed he was spending a full working day each week in the car driving to clients, so he moved his coaching to video, years before the pandemic made that normal. It is why his practice is now national. He is not tied to a geography; he works with clients wherever his network takes him.

Twelve years on he earns more than he could working for anyone else, works about thirty hours a week, keeps Fridays mostly clear and takes the whole of July off. The business has grown beyond one-to-one coaching into training, assessments, group coaching and roundtables for business leaders, and he is now rebuilding it as a single programme so that he can take on more clients without more hours. The thing he cannot get over is the AI prospecting: it builds a profile of his ideal client from his own background, finds those people, books them into his diary and briefs him before the call, so that the prospect feels he already knows them.

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You have spent years learning how business works. Focal Point is where that experience becomes a business of your own: your sector, your clients, your name on it. The prospectus tells you everything you need to decide whether this is for you.

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