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.