Your weekly edge for turning expertise into income
Quick Hits
📌 This week: Why your corporate track record is your coaching credential—no certification required
💡 The insight: Decades of pattern recognition and problem-solving beat a coaching certification when building your practice
⚡ Your move: List the specific "unsolvable problems" you fixed in your career—that's how you identify your ideal coaching clients
🎧 Listen online: Experience over Certification
Coffee with Curt ☕
The YouTube Assembly Line
Ever notice how we put artificial deadlines on ourselves once we "have freedom"? I felt that this week. We're heading out on a short trip starting today, and I didn't record my first YouTube video before we left.
Here's what I'm learning about being a retirepreneur: Freedom doesn't mean forcing progress, it means choosing it. No stress, no artificial pressure. Just deliberate forward movement.
And I made real progress. This is what progress looks like before the first public result shows up: 🔸I spent hours in a Think Media webinar learning YouTube's 2026 state of play.🔸I dove into Creator Studio and built thumbnail templates for four different content types: Deep Dives, Weekly Insights, Podcast Episodes, and Coffee with Curt.🔸I cleaned up existing videos, added a channel banner, wrote descriptions, organized playlists.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The foundation is finally taking shape. The first video will happen when we're back.
If you want to see how I'm structuring this from day one, and be there before the first real push. => Check out the channel
Video of the week: As I transition to personal videos, I've been using NotebookLM, an amazing AI tool, to create video-style summary posts based on my newsletters. Watch how it transforms written content into conversational deep dives. => Watch Video
That same "build the foundation first" mindset applies to coaching too, especially when it comes to credentials. While I'm working on video infrastructure, many of you have been asking about coaching without certification, so here's what I've learned.
Your Corporate Experience Is Your Coaching Credential
Should you get certified before launching your coaching practice? That's the question I hear most from experienced professionals. Here's what I learned watching my executive coach work: he had zero certifications and charged premium rates because his 25 years as a founder and C-level executive mattered more than any credential ever could.
What Decades of Leadership Actually Taught You
Your 20-30 years in corporate roles gave you something certification programs can't replicate: the ability to recognize patterns across hundreds of situations, people, and outcomes.
You've seen which strategies actually work versus what sounds good in theory. You've diagnosed problems in real-time with real consequences. You've guided teams through challenges no textbook covered.
That's not background noise. That's your coaching foundation.
The Credibility Stack That Actually Matters
Your coaching authority comes from a stack of evidence, not a single certificate. Think of it as three layers:
→ Experience layer: Your track record in corporate roles with quantifiable outcomes
→ Expertise layer: Specific domains where you solved repeated problems
→ Proof layer: Direct reports you mentored who got promoted, crises they solved under your guidance
That last one matters most. If you've guided people through tough decisions in your corporate role, you've already been coaching. You just weren't calling it that.
"Former VP of Operations who scaled teams from 50 to 300" carries more weight than any certification acronym with your ideal client.
When You Need the Coaching Framework
Here's the practical part: you do need to learn coaching structure. How to frame questions. How to structure sessions. How to design assignments that create momentum between meetings.
Books, templates, and proven frameworks can teach you the "how to coach" part. Your experience provides the "what to coach" part, and that's where the value lives.
The only real skill to learn? Resisting the urge to immediately give the answer. Coaching frameworks teach you how to guide clients to find it themselves.
The Real Question
Your corporate experience isn't just relevant to coaching. It is your credential. The question isn't whether you're qualified.
The question is whether you're ready to package what you already know into a structured coaching approach.
Next Steps
⚡ YOUR FOCUSED ACTION THIS WEEK
→ Take the list of problems you identified above. For each one, ask: "Who's facing this exact challenge today?" That's your target client. That's your marketing message. That's how you position yourself in a crowded coaching market.
Want to go deeper?
📖 Your Corporate Experience Is Your Coaching Credential: Read the expanded version with frameworks for translating corporate wins into coaching packages. → Read the full article
🎯 Retirepreneur Hub: Everything you need to turn decades of expertise into a sustainable second-act business - completely free, no credit card required. → Join Free
🛠️ Coaching Toolbox: When you're ready to structure your coaching sessions with proven templates and frameworks, The Coaching Tools Company offers ready-made business coaching resources I recently discovered. → Learn more
🏠 Keep building,
—Curt
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