Vision and values
What you want for yourself and for the company, and how your own values become the company’s mission and culture.
Executive coaching
Executive coaching with Nick Hodulik
I coach CEOs, founders, and senior executives one-on-one. I have spent three decades founding and running companies as a CEO, CTO, and operator, so I have sat in the chair you’re in. We work together on the company, the team, the strategy, the hard decisions, and the rest of your life.
The work
What we work on together.
Decisions and focus
Strategy, priorities, hiring and firing, the board. I help you make the call, build a plan, and hold yourself to it.
Leading people
Negotiation, delegation, feedback, conflict, and communication. We 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. I help you see how you think, what leads you to act, and what leads you to drag your feet.
Product and technology
I’m 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, I can go as deep as you need.
The whole person
People come to me 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.
We spend most of our time on leadership and the business, and we also work on the rest of your life, since that shapes the impact you make at work.
Leaders who let their health, partnerships, friendships, or inner lives erode while they build the company often end up, in their forties or fifties, with a successful business and a life they want to escape.
Performance
Training, sleep, recovery, nutrition, lab work, and the longevity questions that come with a long career. I’m a certified personal trainer and a long-time experimenter. Plain talk and current research.
Mind
Attention, stress, meditation, mental models, philosophy, and the experience of being a mind that has everything banging around inside it.
Relationships
Partnership, parenting, family of origin, friendship, and the loneliness of the top job. JT and I have run companies together for nearly two decades, so partnership under pressure is a specialty.
Money
Income, equity, wealth, lifestyle, philanthropy, and legacy. Your relationship to money beyond the spreadsheet: what you’ve built, what it’s for, what enough looks like, and what comes after.
Career & identity
Founder identity, exec identity, post-exit identity, the second mountain, and the identity collapse that often follows the outcome you spent ten years chasing.
Meaning
Purpose, mortality, what you’re doing here, and what you want your life to have been when it’s done. I’m not in the business of avoiding the big questions.
In practice
I help you build a support team in every city where you spend time, from top physicians and physical therapists to trainers and good sources of food. I pressure-test the plans you already have and ask the second-order questions your other practitioners skip. I also have the conversations with you that you can’t have anywhere else.
Your trainer, your doctor, and your therapist each see one part of your life. I look at all of it at once and help you decide what matters.
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 me by text, voice message, or email, and I expect you to.
Every quarter, we 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 for years.
- Sessions
- About 50 minutes
- Cadence
- Weekly or every other week, same day and time
- In between
- Text, voice message, or email
- Review
- Every quarter
- Commitment
- Six months minimum; most clients stay for years
Getting started
How it begins.
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Step 1 · Free
Intro session
A short call to meet each other. You talk about what brought you here and what you want from coaching, and I explain how I work.
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Step 2 · Free, 50 minutes
Sample session
A free 50-minute coaching session on something that matters to you. By the end, we both know whether we want to keep going.
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Step 3 · 3 to 5 hours
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 we take stock of where you are, decide where you’re going, and agree on how we’ll work together.
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Step 4
Design
We set the cadence, the focus areas, and how we’ll measure progress. Some clients are working through a specific transition. Others are working on the next decade.
What you can expect
I’m not an affirmation-and-manifestation coach. I believe coaching done well should change the shape of your life, and I work that way. I’m 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. I follow up and assign homework, and if you blow off your own commitments, I ask 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.
About me
Nick Hodulik
CPCC · ACE · Leadership Circle Profile · Collective Leadership Assessment
I started a tech consultancy at thirteen, in the dial-up days, and was at Razorfish in its early days. Since then I have founded, co-founded, or led digital agencies, magazines, an app store, software and hardware companies, restaurants, and a gym.
With JT Taylor, I ran General Things, a software and design consultancy whose clients included Nike, National Geographic, TED, and GoPro. GoPro bought it in 2013, and I became VP of Software and Services, with JT as Senior Director. The two of us went on to serve as President and COO of The MAZE Group and as co-CTOs of Goop, and today we run Polymath together.
I’m 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). I have coached founders, CEOs, and leadership teams across tech, finance, consumer, and creative industries for the better part of a decade.
I’m also a lifelong meditator and a traveler who has been to more than sixty countries.