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.