As someone who has spent much of my career training coaches, I’ve repeatedly encountered a need that has never felt fully met. Coaches need meaningful and practical business education. Not superficial marketing tips or promises of overnight success, but thoughtful, practical, psychologically aware education about how to build sustainable coaching practices.

I’ve wanted to create that for a long time.

In truth, this project has been much longer in the making than it might appear.

Long before AI entered the picture, I was experimenting with ways to help coaches and entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses.

Back in 2008, when I first launched my coaching school, I created something called Smart Minds. It was a free mastermind and thinking space where people would gather in person to explore business ideas, challenge assumptions, and help one another move forward. What interested me even then was not simply teaching people what to do, but creating environments where better thinking could emerge.

Later, I experimented with more immersive formats. One of my favourites was something called Boat Camp, where I would take a small group of people onto a canal boat and spend time exploring their businesses together. Removed from the usual distractions, conversations became deeper, more creative, and more strategic. There was something powerful about creating space for people to step back and see their business differently.

After that came the Business Launchpad. Twelve people in a room. Me acting as mentor, guide, challenger, and supporter. We worked closely together on the realities of building a business. Many people benefited enormously from it, but over time I became increasingly aware of its limitations. Twelve people in a room can create a wonderful experience. It cannot transform a whole profession.

Then came Coaches Uncaged. First as a collection of live workshops involving myself and other experts. Later as a more unified video training programme. Again, there was real value in it, but it still felt constrained by the traditional model of education. A programme had to be coherent, linear, and substantial enough to justify its existence. Valuable ideas that sat outside the programme often remained unexplored.

Not only that, but there was only so much time and resources available to create video courses. You see, the Catch 22 is that successful coaches earning significant income do not have the time or the incentive to sit in front of the camera and make a video course for a coaching school. At the same time coach coaches who don’t have clients don’t make the best trainers of building a business!

So where did that leave us?

Well, you can’t say I haven’t tried, and looking back, I can see that all of these projects were attempts to solve the same underlying problem.

How do we create business education for coaches that is deep enough to be meaningful, practical enough to be useful, flexible enough to meet people where they are, and scalable enough to reach far more people than a room, a workshop, or a single programme ever could?

None of my experiments fully solved the problem.

The challenge was never a lack of ideas. 

Every year I found myself finding more and more things that could help coaches. Niche topics that deserved attention. Important questions that never justified a full workshop. Practical skills that sat in the gaps between larger programmes. Observations about marketing, pricing, positioning, confidence, visibility, referrals, associate coaching, client relationships, and the countless other realities of building a coaching business.

But the economics simply didn’t work.

Traditional expert-led education has limits. Every course requires a trainer. Every workshop requires scheduling. Every new topic must justify the time and cost of developing and delivering it. As a result, many valuable ideas remain untaught, not because they lack importance, but because they lack commercial viability.

The Opportunity of AI-Supported Creation

Then AI arrived and it created a possibility I could only have dreamed of previously.

Instead of thinking about creating a single programme for a fixed number of people with a specific curriculum, I was able to create something entirely different.

A diverse, spacious, evolving learning environment that can grow alongside the coaches themselves. A place where hundreds of ideas and concepts can exist together. Where coaches can learn what they need, when they need it. And where business education can finally become as nuanced, varied, and expansive as the businesses coaches are actually trying to build.

Now, I understand why AI creates strong reactions. It is imperfect. Sometimes uncanny. Sometimes overhyped. It raises legitimate concerns and difficult questions.

And yet, when I encountered it, my reaction was not primarily commercial.

It was creative.

For the first time, I could see a way to build the thing I had always wanted to build.

Not simply a collection of courses, but an entire learning environment. A place where ideas could exist at their natural size. Where a valuable insight did not need to become a six-week programme in order to deserve attention. Where learning could be more granular, more interconnected, more exploratory, and more responsive to the realities of running a coaching business.

Perhaps most importantly, it aligned with something I have long believed about learning itself.

I do not believe most people need to be constantly guided.

Of course there are times when live teaching, mentoring, supervision, and human connection are invaluable. But I also believe that most adults are far more capable of directing their own learning than our educational systems often assume.

Too much education is built around control. Fixed schedules. Fixed pathways. Fixed instructors. Fixed groups.

The underlying message is often that learners cannot be trusted to navigate their own development.

I disagree.

My experience is that thoughtful people are remarkably capable of finding what they need when the right resources are available to them.

The Coaches’ Business Studio is built on that assumption.

It is designed for people who are curious enough to explore, independent enough to choose their own path, and reflective enough to decide what is useful for them.

There is another reason I find this project so compelling.

I genuinely love creating it.

I love imagining the faculty members. Their backgrounds. Their perspectives. Their personalities. The subtle details of how they think, speak, teach, and interact.

I love researching topics and uncovering connections between ideas.

I love taking complexity and shaping it into coherent pathways for learning.

I love the possibility of creating hundreds of resources that would never exist in a traditional educational model.

And I love the thought of building a team around this vision. People who are excited not only by what AI can do, but by what thoughtful human beings can create with it.

This is not a project born from fear of missing an opportunity.

It is not a reluctant adaptation to technological change.

If AI had never emerged, I would still be trying to solve this problem.

AI simply happens to be the technology that finally makes the solution possible.

Ultimately, I do not expect everyone to embrace this approach. Some people will always prefer traditional classrooms, live teaching, or learning directly from recognised experts. That’s entirely reasonable.

But I suspect there are many others who care less about where an idea comes from than whether it helps them think more clearly, act more effectively, and build a business that reflects their values.

Those are the people I hope this serves.

This project is an experiment.

An experiment in self-directed learning.

An experiment in what becomes possible when educational economics are transformed.

An experiment in combining human creativity, judgement, and care with emerging technology.

Most of all, it is an experiment in expanding access to useful ideas.

If we can help coaches find clarity a little faster, build confidence a little sooner, avoid a few unnecessary struggles, or discover possibilities they might otherwise have missed, then this Studio will have achieved something worthwhile.

And if, along the way, we learn how humans and AI can work together to create richer forms of education than either could create alone, then perhaps we will have achieved something even more valuable.