Deal to Watch: Tech-Enabled Professional Coaching for the 21st Century Workplace

Key Stats:

Summary

The A-Plan Coaching team has been selected as a “Deal to Watch” by KingsCrowd. This distinction is reserved for deals selected into the top 10%-20% of our due diligence funnel. If you have questions regarding our deal diligence and selection methodology, please reach out to hello@kingscrowd.com.

Problem

In the US, 83% of workers suffer from workplace stress. These stressed-out workers are also disengaged from their work. While Gallup’s 2019 workplace engagement survey pointed to a new “high” in workplace engagement, the survey also found that only 35% of workers were involved in or enthusiastic about their work—not a statistic to inspire confidence. 

These grim work statistics and many more are causing employers to rethink the employee experience, and one dimension of ensuring professional success for employees is coaching (sometimes called executive coaching or professional coaching). Coaching is becoming increasingly common at all levels of organizations, not just the C-suite. 

To meet this increasing demand, the supply of coaches is steadily increasing. According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the most highly-regarded certifying body for professional coaches, the number of practicing coaches increased between 2012 and 2016 (2019 figures are slated for release later this year). The ICF estimated that there were 47,500 practicing coaches worldwide in 2012 and 53,300 in 2016, an increase of 12% in three years.

While the popularity of working with a professional coach and the supply of coaches have both grown in recent years, coaching remains an individualized industry dominated by sole proprietors. The need for a close working relationship and individualized attention and development plans mean that coaching is difficult to scale under existing models. The industry is in need of a technologically-enabled solution that maintains the essence of one-on-one coaching while offering increased efficiency.

Solution

A-Plan Coaching is a tech-enabled professional coaching company working with small and large organizations to democratize professional coaching through scalable frameworks and tools. A-Plan maintains a network of experienced professional coaches, who partner with A-Plan’s clients to conduct one-on-one sessions simplified by A-Plan’s coaching mobile app. 

The A-Plan app takes the administrative headache out of coaching and tracking results. Coaches and clients can meet over video conference, exchange messages, collaborate on exercises, and track data that captures the efficacy of the coaching relationship. 

Outside of the app, A-Plan leverages a standard coaching framework to deliver value to each client. The A-Plan coaching philosophy is centered around three steps: vision, map, and act. A-Plan coaches work with clients to first identify short- and long-term goals for better work, then develop specific methods to meet those goals, and finally commit to the planned behaviors to achieve professional success. 

A-Plan Coaching has signed on impressive corporate clients, including MetLife, Nike’s Valiant Lab, The City of San Francisco, and the Tides Network. These clients helped A-Plan to generate almost $230,000 in revenue in 2019. A-Plan boasts over 25 trained professional coaches who serve 200 users.

The Team

A-Plan was founded as a collaboration between an experienced coach and a serial entrepreneur with a focus on user experience. Michael Counts, A-Plan Coaching’s Co-Founder, has worked for more than 20 years to design “immersive and transportive” experiences in mobile tech, live entertainment, and tourism. He partnered on A-Plan Coaching with Sara Ellis Conant, who leads the company as CEO. Ellis Conant received a BA and MBA from Stanford, and she managed Deloitte Consulting’s corporate responsibility services unit before becoming a professional coach. She leads the coaching team at A-Plan in addition to managing the business.

Growth Plan

A-Plan has been bootstrapped up until this point, and they implied that raised capital will be used to extend operational capacity in marketing and account management. A-Plan will also devote a portion of raised capital to further developing its mobile app, which is key to the company’s promise of scalability. 

A-Plan projects earning almost $2.4 million in gross revenue in 2020, turning a profit with a net income of $145,000. By 2022, A-Plan has the ambitious goal of almost $38 million in annual revenue and over $11 million in net income.

Why We Like it

• A (more) scalable coaching model: A-Plan rightly recognizes that the executive coaching industry has long struggled with scalability. When the entire premise of an industry is one-on-one human relationships and deep, individualized engagement, it’s difficult to envision a solution that can dramatically reduce human labor hours and serve hundreds of thousands at once. A-Plan has worked to streamline as much of the coaching process as possible by offering coaches and clients a mobile app to coordinate on coaching. While the core of the A-Plan coaching model is still human coaching relationships, making truly massive scale somewhat impossible, A-Plan still has an advantage over sole-proprietor coaches and has the potential to become a big name in the coaching industry.

• Significant revenue traction: A-Plan coaching generated $197,000 in revenue from January 1 through March 10 of 2020, more than half of the company’s $228,000 in 2019 revenue in less than three months. While A-Plan may ultimately struggle to scale to a billion-dollar company, this impressive traction proves that the A-Plan coaching model has the power to win a number of paying clients and build a valuable business.

Rating

A-Plan Coaching is innovating in a hot market. More and more business leaders are recognizing the value of professional coaching, for both senior executives and lower-level managers who can optimize productivity with the help of a focused coach. A-Plan is going a step further by bringing coaching partially online, leveraging its proprietary mobile app to streamline the relationship between coaches and clients so both parties can focus more on professional development and less on logistics or administration. 

The concept of scalable coaching is certainly promising, but it remains to be seen whether A-Plan’s technological approach will be sophisticated or powerful enough to truly unlock scalable coaching. While coaches save some administrative time thanks to the A-Plan app’s features, they can still only work with a small number of clients at one time, meaning that A-Plan’s personnel costs will continue to increase alongside its revenue. Moreover, many other startups (including well-funded BetterUp) are developing digital coaching solutions as well, so the industry is competitive. 

Still, A-Plan generated a sizable amount of revenue in 2019 and is on track to greatly increase revenue in 2020. While the A-Plan framework may reach a ceiling of scalability, the company still offers a more scalable model than virtually all sole-proprietor coaching shops, which allows it to win a great deal of business as more and more companies demand coaching. While A-Plan may never become a unicorn tech startup, it still stands to become an increasingly valuable company that can return investors’ capital over time. A-Plan could achieve exit via acquisition from a larger human resources and consulting firm like Korn Ferry if it builds a notable brand in executive coaching. 

In sum, A-Plan Coaching is approaching a lucrative and growing market with an innovative solution to scale more efficiently than the landscape of sole-proprietor competitors. While investors should be realistic about the growth potential of a services-based company, they should also recognize A-Plan’s proven success and potential to continue netting high-value clients. Therefore, A-Plan Coaching is a Deal to Watch.