Every Company Now Wants Coaching for Managers. Most Coaches Are Still Chasing the CEO.
The Client Everyone's Ignoring
For years, "executive coach" meant one thing. You got hired by the CEO, or maybe the C-suite, and everyone below that level watched from a distance. That's still a real market. But it's not where the growth is anymore, and the coaches who haven't noticed are about to get outpositioned by the ones who have.
The Math
The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study broke down who coaches actually work with, by how long they've been in the profession. Among coaches with ten or more years of experience, 38% work primarily with executives and nearly 30% work primarily with managers. Among coaches in their first year, only 18% work with executives and just 10% work with managers.
Read that gap carefully. It's not that new coaches are avoiding managers. It's that the most experienced coaches in the field, the ones who've had the most time to watch where the money and the demand actually are, have moved a third of their book of business down to the manager level. Access to coaching has widened downward through organizations. The most seasoned practitioners are the ones following it there.
Here's why. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast, built on a survey of 1,826 HR professionals and 13,695 leaders worldwide, found that nearly 40% of leaders say they receive inadequate coaching from their own manager, and 31% of frontline leaders say they want more coaching than they're currently getting. That's not a soft preference. High-potential employees are twice as likely to say they intend to leave an organization when their manager isn't an effective coach, and companies with a real coaching culture are 2.9 times more likely to retain their top talent.
Put the two data sets together, and the picture is clear. Companies have a documented retention problem tied directly to manager quality, and the coaching industry's most experienced practitioners have already started building services to solve it.
What's Actually Happening
Ten years ago, coaching a "manager" would have sounded like a downgrade to most executive coaches. Smaller budget, less visible, less prestige. That calculation has flipped. A single VP hire is one relationship. A manager-coaching engagement touches a layer of ten, twenty, sometimes fifty people who all report up into the leadership team that hired you in the first place. It's not a smaller opportunity. It's wider, and it's recurring in a way a single executive engagement rarely is.
Across 170+ client relationships, and a career before this one spent developing hundreds of mid-level and executive leaders inside companies I helped grow past $100M, I watched the same pattern play out over and over. The managers who got real coaching - not a training binder, not a one-day workshop, actual ongoing coaching - were the ones who became the executives running the company five years later. The ones who didn't get that investment mostly plateaued or left. Companies are finally connecting that dot at scale, and it's showing up as a line item in HR and talent budgets that didn't exist a few years ago.
Where This Shows Up by Phase
For a coach building their own practice, this is a bench-strength question, not just a service-menu question. In the Leader phase, you're still the only coach in your business, and every new manager-coaching client is a scheduling problem before it's a revenue opportunity. In the Architect phase, you start building the systems: A repeatable manager-coaching curriculum, a cohort format, a way to deliver this without your calendar being the bottleneck. In the Executive phase, you've built or licensed a team of coaches who can deliver manager-level coaching at the scale a mid-sized company actually needs, while you stay focused on the relationships at the top.
This is exactly the bench-strength problem your clients are trying to solve in their own companies. You cannot credibly sell a service you haven't built the capacity to deliver yourself.
What I Learned the Hard Way
Early in my corporate career, I inherited a team of managers who'd been left to figure leadership out on their own. No coaching, no development plan, just a title change and a bigger headcount. I made the mistake of assuming competence at their old job meant they were ready for the new one. It didn't. I lost two good people in eighteen months before I changed how I developed managers, and once I did, several of them ended up running divisions. The lesson stuck with me: Management ability doesn't show up automatically at promotion. It has to be built, deliberately, the same way you'd build any other skill. That's the whole case for this service line, and I learned it the expensive way before I ever coached anyone on it.
Practical Guidance for Coaches
1️⃣ Build a manager-coaching offer that's structurally different from your executive offer. Cohort or small-group formats scale better at this level and match the budget reality of a manager-development line item.
2️⃣ Sell it to HR and talent development, not just the owner. The buyer for manager coaching is often a different person than the buyer for your executive work, and they think in retention metrics, not just performance metrics.
3️⃣ Price it as a retention investment, not a training expense. DDI's turnover-risk data gives you a business case your buyer can take to their leadership team.
4️⃣ Start building your bench now. If manager coaching is where demand is heading, a one-person practice will hit a capacity ceiling faster than you expect.
✅ DO treat manager coaching as a distinct offer with its own pricing model, not a discounted version of executive coaching.
✅ DO lead conversations with retention and bench-strength data. It's the language HR and talent leaders already use.
✅ DO build delivery capacity, through associate coaches or a licensed model, before you need it.
❌ DON'T assume manager coaching is a lesser engagement. It's often wider and more recurring.
❌ DON'T price it the same way you price C-suite work. The buyer, the budget, and the format are all different.
❌ DON'T wait until you're turning down manager-coaching inquiries to think about how you'd actually deliver them.
➡️ The company that used to hire you for the CEO now wants you for the next fifty leaders coming up behind them.
A Question for You
If a client called you tomorrow and asked you to coach twenty of their managers, not their CEO, could you actually deliver that? And if the honest answer is no, what does that tell you about how ready your practice is for where this industry is heading?
Quick Answers
Why are companies expanding coaching to managers instead of only executives? DDI's Global Leadership Forecast, based on a survey of 1,826 HR professionals and 13,695 leaders worldwide, found that nearly 40% of leaders report inadequate coaching from their own manager and that high-potential employees are twice as likely to leave when their manager isn't an effective coach. Companies are responding by extending coaching investment down through the org chart, not just keeping it at the top.
Is manager coaching a real growth market for business coaches? Yes. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study found that coaches with ten or more years of experience serve managers at nearly triple the rate of first-year coaches, 30% versus 10%. That gap suggests the most experienced practitioners are actively building manager-coaching capacity because they see sustained demand there.
How should a coach price manager coaching differently than executive coaching? Manager coaching typically involves a different buyer (HR or talent development, not just the owner or CEO), a different budget category (retention and development, not executive performance), and often a cohort or small-group format rather than pure one-on-one work. Pricing and positioning should reflect all three differences, not a discounted executive offer.
If This Hit Close to Home
If you're ready to build a coaching practice on a proven model instead of guessing your way into new service lines, the Certified My Biz Coach license gives you the tools, frameworks, and support system already built, including how to structure and price offers like manager coaching, without the six-figure investment or restrictions of a coaching franchise. Learn more about becoming a Certified My Biz Coach.
If you'd rather see the bigger financial picture first, the 2026 Business Survival Guide walks through the pricing, positioning, and financial discipline work that supports building new offers like this one. It's free. Download the Survival Guide here.
If you'd rather talk it through than read about it, I'm glad to have that conversation. Reach out for a free conversation this week, and we'll look honestly at whether this path fits your background.
And if you coach clients who are wrestling with exactly this bench-strength problem in their own companies, put the My Biz Navigator in front of them. It's a free 5-minute assessment that shows exactly what's working in their business and what it's quietly costing them.
To Your Success,
Eric T. Whitmoyer, Business Growth Strategist
Founder & CEO at MyBizCoaches.com
Host of The Biz Coach Show
From Startup to Exit, We’re There for Your Biggest Decisions
P.S. If you’re serious about taking your business to the next level, then you may find value in getting a copy of our 2026 Business Survival Guide, full of strategies, tactics, and solutions to help move your business forward faster this year.
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