Corporate to Coach® is the six-week program for executives leaving corporate, and senior leaders leaving any large organization, to build a coaching business. ICF-certified or in process. Years zero to three. Strategy, not guesswork.
Coach training teaches you to coach. It does not teach you to run a business. Corporate to Coach® closes that gap. You leave with a complete plan, a clear niche, the pricing, and a pipeline that brings in revenue. Three ways to join. One roadmap.
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You have 10+ years in a leadership role. You are certified, in certification, or actively researching it. You can coach. The part no one has taught you is how to turn this into a business that pays you what you used to earn.
This is where most coaches stall.
If that sounds familiar, this program was built for you.
Every session is structured to put work in your hands, not concepts in your head. By the end of week six, you walk out with the assets to launch or accelerate, not a stack of notes.
Define where you are going and what success looks like for your specific practice, not somebody else's.
A complete plan covering strategy, operations, and business development, built for a robust coaching practice.
A market-ready menu with pricing you can quote without flinching.
Your niche, your positioning, your bio, your elevator pitch, and the outline for your website.
The legal, financial, and tech infrastructure that protects you and lets the business actually run.
Your client acquisition strategy, including 11 specific ways to source corporate clients.
Six weekly 90-minute live virtual sessions, facilitated by Elissa Kelly, PCC. Online modules and intersession work between sessions. Three to five hours per week, total. Real progress every week, without it taking over your calendar.
Vision, goals, niche, and the strategic framework underneath your practice.
Your offers, your pricing strategy, and a clear answer to who your client is.
Brand identity, bio, website outline, and the elevator pitch you stop dreading.
LLC, insurance, contracts, scheduling, and the financial setup that protects you.
How the sales funnel works for a coaching business, your pipeline plan, and your client sourcing strategy.
Your complete plan, peer feedback, and a clear runway for what happens the week after the cohort ends.
You know the work. You do not know what to do first.
Should the LLC come before the first client or after? Build the website now or once you have something to sell? When does insurance actually matter? How do you price coaching when your only reference point is a salary band?
Corporate to Coach® is built on 20 years of Fortune 100 risk management. The Four Pillars of Entrepreneur Risk are how the program addresses every challenge of the leap.
The result: you get further in six weeks than most people get in six months of guessing. You compress a year of learning into six weeks, and you start with a roadmap instead of a search bar.
The free training is on demand, so you can watch the moment you have 20 minutes. You get a real look at what a coaching business earns in the first three years, and two ways to keep income steady while you build. Plenty of people watch it well before they enroll, and even if the timing is not right today, it is worth the 20 minutes.
Join the Free Business Building SessionNine perspectives from coaches who completed the program. More on request.
“I joined Corporate to Coach® wanting to gain insight into ‘all the things’ I would need to know in this space, to determine if I could be successful. The process and tools provided helped me make that decision and understand that my business is viable. I am now fully equipped for success when I launch.”
Kim G., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“Corporate to Coach® helped me demystify the building blocks of creating a strong business foundation. It was an opportunity to ‘make a plan and do the work’ rather than just ‘read the book.’”
Elizabeth B., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“As a result of Corporate to Coach®, I evolved how I was thinking about my business, and solidified my comfort with the necessity of niching. My doubt and fear are smaller, and I feel ready to build my coaching business with courage in the driver’s seat.”
Hope G., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“Before joining the Corporate to Coach® program, leaving my corporate job to become a coach was just a dream. This program gave me more than just the tools and tactics to build a business plan. It connected me with an incredibly supportive network of peers. I now have the confidence and concrete steps to fully transition and build my coaching business.”
Mary Ann S., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“Corporate to Coach® gave me exactly what I needed as I was building my business. It’s a comprehensive view of what it takes to launch a coaching practice, delivered in a way that’s practical and designed to help you make meaningful progress right away. Elissa creates an environment where no question is too small, and she genuinely wants to help.”
Danika D., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“I met Elissa through the CHIEF network during her presentation of Corporate to Coach®, and it could not have come at a more perfect time. I learned so much in just six weeks and left feeling prepared, inspired, and grateful. Run, don’t walk. Take the class.”
Ivana M., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“Corporate to Coach® program helped me gain the tools and confidence to launch my coaching practice to a wider audience. The class provided me with the structure and discipline that I needed to jump start my practice while knowing that I was not missing anything important along the way. I would recommend this program to any new first-time solopreneur coach looking to get useful frameworks, tools, and building blocks to launch their coaching business.”
Talal S., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“Elissa is incredible and has created a powerful, engaging, and motivating platform to help folks move from wherever they are into readiness to launch their solopreneur life. Elissa combines a rare set of gifts. She will help you drill down into details and face the hard things, and she does it in a way that helps folks feel seen, safe, and heard. I cannot recommend Elissa or Corporate to Coach® enough.”
Ken G., Corporate to Coach® Graduate
“As a result of Corporate to Coach®, I have more confidence in the business development and operations for my launching business. I have the tools I need to understand what pipeline management looks like, and how to manage my time and capacity, so business building feels less overwhelming.”
Michelle, PCC Certified Coach
Elissa Kelly spent two decades climbing the slippery ladder of corporate America, ending as Chief Product Officer of a $4 billion insurance company before making her own pivot. She built her coaching business to six figures in year one, doubled it in year two, and doubled it again in year three.
She built Corporate to Coach® for the coaches she met along the way: people with the credentials, the experience, and the drive, and no roadmap for the business side. The frameworks inside the program are the ones she used in her own transition, refined since with the 75+ coaching businesses she's helped build across the cohort, the Insider Circle, Private Advisory and one-on-one work.
She is Hudson-trained, PCC-certified, and the founder of Surya Partners, an executive coaching collaborative. Her work has been featured in Forbes.
Answers to what coaches ask most before joining the program.
Corporate to Coach® is a six-week, cohort-based business coaching program for coaches transitioning from corporate. It is built for executive women and senior leaders with 10+ years in a corporate, government, nonprofit, or private leadership role, who are either still in their role and planning the exit, or already out and building. Participants are certified coaches, currently enrolled in an ICF-accredited coaching certification program, or actively researching certification. If you are searching for how to become a corporate coach or a corporate coaching program built for women leaving corporate, this is the program.
The program works for anyone with substantial organizational leadership experience, not only Fortune 500 backgrounds. Doctors leading practices, nonprofit executives, government leaders, and senior leaders inside private organizations have all gone through the program and built strong coaching practices. One note: if you want to coach, you need to be certified or actively pursuing certification. If you want to consult instead, the same framework applies and you can use it to build a consulting business without the certification requirement.
Most business coaching programs are written for entrepreneurs in general. Corporate to Coach® is built for the specific transition from corporate to coaching, and it is grounded in a risk management framework drawn from two decades of Fortune 100 experience. The program uses The Four Pillars of Entrepreneur Risk, financial, professional, psychological, and life obligations, to help you build a coaching business that is strategic, sustainable, and aligned with the life you actually want. The business development for coaches inside this program is built specifically for the corporate-to-coach context, not adapted from a generic startup framework.
You do not need to be certified before you start. Participants should be currently enrolled in an ICF-accredited coaching certification program or already hold a coaching credential. The program is designed to run alongside your certification so that by the time you complete your hours, your business infrastructure is already in place. Graduates have gone on to earn their ICF ACC or PCC designation through Hudson, Co-Active, and other accredited programs.
The cohort is $2,799, or $2,499 with early registration. It includes six 90-minute live sessions with Elissa, the Coach Business Building Toolkit™, two months of Solopreneur Insider Circle™ membership and 25 ICF CCEs.
The Insider Circle carries the full Corporate to Coach® curriculum, self-paced, for $99 a month. It isn't a cohort, so there's no live facilitation of the program and no cohort peer group.
Corporate to Coach® Private Advisory is one-on-one with Elissa, by application. It starts at $7,497, billed in three payments of $2,499, and includes eight advisory sessions, six months of the Insider Circle and the same 25 ICF CCEs.
Graduates leave with a complete business plan, a defined niche, a menu of services, a brand identity, an operational setup outline, a client pipeline strategy, and a peer network. Past participants have landed corporate clients, doubled revenue within six months of completing the program, and built full-time coaching practices. One graduate described the program as ‘a practical, pragmatic roadmap filled with everything you need to support yourself as a solopreneur.’
Readiness is less about feeling ready and more about whether the four real risks of the transition are addressable. Those are: financial runway, professional positioning, the psychological identity shift, and the life obligations you already carry. Corporate to Coach® walks through each one. If you have made the decision to leave inside the next 18 months and need a structured way to plan the build, you are ready.
The four biggest risks of transitioning from corporate to coaching are: inconsistent income before the pipeline is built, professional positioning that reads as vendor instead of expert, the identity shift of leaving a senior leadership role, and underestimating the obligations of the life you already have. Corporate to Coach® uses the Four Pillars of Entrepreneur Risk to address each one as part of the business plan, with specific tools for pricing, pipeline, brand positioning, and capacity planning.
The next cohort runs in Spring 2027, and the waitlist is open now. If that timing doesn't work, the Solopreneur Insider Circle™ carries the full Corporate to Coach® curriculum, self-paced, at $99 a month, and Private Advisory runs on your timeline instead of a fixed calendar. The free training is on demand, and it's the best way to test fit. Many people watch it six to nine months before they enroll.
Yes. Corporate to Coach® is accredited by the International Coaching Federation for 25 ICF Continuing Coach Education credits: 8 in Core Competencies and 17 in Resource Development. Because they span both categories, the credits meet the eligibility requirements for ACC, PCC, and MCC credential renewal. Cohort participants receive a CCE certificate at the end of the cohort to submit to ICF as part of their credential maintenance. Corporate to Coach® Private Advisory clients earn the same 25 CCEs. The program is also a recognized fit for coaches enrolled in Hudson, Co-Active, iPEC, Newfield, and other accredited coaching certification pathways.
Pick the format that fits your calendar and your budget. Every one runs on the same curriculum. What changes is how much time you spend with Elissa, and who's building alongside you.
Corporate to Coach® is a business-building program for coaches making the move from organizational leadership to their own practice. Whether you're getting certified, recently left your role, or have been building a coaching practice on your own, it provides the complete roadmap: business strategy and pricing, brand identity, operational setup and pipeline development. It's designed for executives, directors and senior leaders with 10+ years leading people and budgets inside a company, hospital system, agency, government office or nonprofit, and it starts where standard coach training ends, on the business side. The curriculum is available three ways: the Solopreneur Insider Circle™, self-paced at $99 a month; the six-week live cohort at $2,799, with the waitlist open for the Spring 2027 cohort; and one-on-one Corporate to Coach® Private Advisory, by application, starting at $7,497. The cohort and Private Advisory are each accredited for 25 ICF CCEs. Built by Elissa Kelly, PCC, a Hudson-trained coach and former Chief Product Officer of a $4 billion insurer inside a Fortune 100 parent company, the program uses The Four Pillars of Entrepreneur Risk to address the financial, professional, psychological and life-obligation risks of building a coaching business.
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