Scaling Minds provides executive team coaching for privately held companies in the Chicago area, generally 50 to 200 people, where the leadership team needs to start carrying weight the CEO has been carrying alone. I'm based in Chicagoland, and most of this work happens in person, in your conference room, because that's where your team's actual patterns live.
This page is the short, direct version. The rest of this site goes deep on the patterns themselves; this is for Chicago-area CEOs deciding whether to pick up the phone.
Who is executive team coaching in Chicago for?
The companies I work with look like the Chicago midmarket actually looks: manufacturing and distribution businesses in the suburbs, professional services firms in the Loop, family-held companies on their second or third generation, the privately held operators that make up most of this region's economy and almost none of its press coverage.
The CEOs come in three flavors. Founders whose company outgrew the wiring. Successors who inherited a team that still operates like the previous owner is down the hall, and in Chicago family businesses, the previous owner often literally is. And hired CEOs, increasingly PE-backed, who walked into a leadership team they didn't pick and a clock that's already running.
Different doors, same room: an executive team that's smart, expensive, and somehow still routes everything through one chair.
What does working together look like?
In person, mostly, and on your real work. I sit in your actual leadership meetings, run sessions with your team in your building or somewhere quiet nearby, and work the patterns where they actually fire instead of in a hotel ballroom. Being local is the point: the work happens in your operating rhythm, monthly and sometimes weekly, not in quarterly fly-in events.
The shape of an engagement: a diagnostic up front, where I interview every executive and put one honest picture of the team on the table. Then sequenced work, because teams change in an order and skipping ahead is how the last consultant failed. One Chicago-area client, a third-generation distribution company, watched that order pay off the day their VP of Operations told the family CEO, in the meeting, that the expansion timeline was a fantasy, and instead of the conversation everyone feared, they got the first honest planning cycle in a decade. The system I run that work through is the Six Shifts, and I built it for exactly these teams.
If you're still sorting out what kind of help you need, coach, EOS implementer, peer group, consultant, I wrote an honest map of who does what. Read it first if the categories blur together. They blur for everyone.
How do you start?
A conversation, thirty minutes, no deck. You tell me what's actually happening with your team, I'll tell you whether it's the pattern I work on, and if it isn't, I'll point you at whoever fits better. Chicago's business community is small enough that referring you well matters more to me than closing you.
If it goes further, the next step is the diagnostic, and you'll know within a month whether this is working, because your team will already be having meetings that sound different.