The business follows you everywhere
Dinner, church, vacation, bed. You are physically present and mentally running the company. Your family has stopped mentioning it.
Executive Coaching for Business Owners and Entrepreneurs
Brian BachmanExecutive Coach · MA, LPC
You built it. Now the question is what it is doing to you.
Owning a business means there is no one above you to absorb the pressure and no clean line between the company and your life. The payroll, the key employee who might leave, the lease, the succession question, the marriage that is getting the depleted version of you: all one system, all carried by one person. I coach business owners privately, and I am also a licensed counselor with ten years of clinical practice, which means I can see the whole system and tell you which part actually needs fixing.
Does this sound like you?
Successful by every visible measure. Carrying more than anyone around you can see.
You cannot step back
You have capable people. You still review everything, approve everything, and fix what was already fine. Stepping back feels like letting go of a rope.
Stress comes home as tone
You are not yelling. You are short, distracted, and quick to correct. Your spouse and kids know the difference between the person who walked in and the one who is available.
Rest feels unearned
You could take a Friday. You have not taken one in years. When you do, you spend it checking in and feeling guilty about both.
The next chapter is unclear
Sell, scale, hand it to a child, keep going? You have been avoiding the question because every answer changes who you are.
You have no one to think out loud with
Your spouse is inside the life the decisions affect. Your employees work for you. Your peers are competitors. So you decide everything alone at 2 a.m.
What this work is
Not business consulting. The person running the business, and the patterns that built it and are now taxing it.
The same traits that built your company are usually the ones costing you now. Control made it reliable and makes home rigid. Vigilance kept it alive and keeps you awake. A refusal to disappoint anyone made you a great operator and a resentful spouse. Nobody in your life is positioned to say that to you. I am.
The work starts by connecting the complaints. A business owner who cannot delegate, cannot sleep, cannot enjoy a day off, and is getting more defensive at home does not have four problems. He has one pattern showing up in four rooms. Once it is on the whiteboard, the changes become specific: what to hand off, which conversation to have, what the business is actually for.
A story I see often
An owner came in to fix his stress. His business got easier after his marriage did.
Details changed. He ran a regional company with ninety employees and had not had a real conversation with his wife in about two years. She had gone quiet. He experienced that as peace. When it became clear that her silence was loneliness, not contentment, the work had a direction, and it started with him.
As the home strain resolved, something happened at work that he did not expect: judgment, creativity, and patience came back. He expanded into a second market that year. He had been carrying the relational strain as a constant background load, and once it lifted, the capacity he needed for the business had been there the whole time.
How an engagement starts
Four steps from “something is off” to a plan you can actually run.
A 20-minute call about fit
You tell me what is actually going on. I tell you honestly whether it is the kind of problem I help with, and whether coaching or clinical care is the right door. No pitch, and no pressure to decide on the call.
We pick the right depth
One defined problem is Focused Coaching. A problem that crosses work and home is Integrated Coaching. If you want a full working model of how you operate, that is Private Advisory. I will tell you which one fits, including when the answer is the cheaper one.
I build the map
Integrated and Private Advisory engagements start with assessment and a written synthesis: strengths, blind spots, the patterns connecting your complaints, and the two or three leverage points that will change the most. See a sample Whole-Person Profile
We test it against real life
Meetings roughly every other week. Between them you run specific experiments: a conversation you have been avoiding, a decision, a boundary, a different response under pressure. The map gets corrected by what actually happens.
Three depths of engagement
The engagement should match the problem, not force every client through the same process.
Focused Coaching
$2,750 · 2 months
One defined problem, four private meetings, specific experiments between them, and a written continuation plan. For people who already know what needs attention.
Integrated Coaching
$4,500 · 4 months
Most clients start here. A problem that crosses several areas of life, a targeted whole-person assessment, a written synthesis, eight meetings, and a check-in between them.
Private Advisory
$7,800 · 6 months
A comprehensive Whole-Person Profile, twelve meetings, priority access, optional spouse perspective, and a final synthesis of what changed. For a select few who want the full model.
“Brian sees patterns other experts miss. I could never turn my brain off or simply enjoy the life I built. Now, with Brian’s expertise, money serves me. I do not serve it anymore.”
Questions
What people usually want to know before they book.
Do you give business advice?
No. I am not a consultant, and I will tell you when you need one. I work on the owner: judgment, patterns, stress, relationships, identity, and the next chapter. Owners consistently find the business gets easier when those do, but that is a consequence, not the service.
What size of business do you work with?
Size matters less than responsibility and complexity. Most clients own companies from a few million to several hundred million in revenue. The pressure and the patterns look surprisingly similar across that range.
Is this therapy?
No. Coaching is provided under a coaching agreement and is organized around patterns, decisions, and implementation. My clinical license means I can recognize when something is not a coaching problem, and I will say so.
Can my spouse be involved?
In Private Advisory, yes, with your explicit consent. A spouse’s perspective is often the most useful data in the whole engagement. It remains your engagement either way.
Keep reading
Related pages.
Private whole-person coaching
The business will keep taking whatever you give it. The question is what you want left over for the life it was supposed to fund.
A 20-minute private conversation. No pitch. We look at the whole system and decide together whether it is worth working on.
Book a private 20-minute consult