Turn your challenge into momentum
I coach:
Start-up founders to overcome their scaling challenges as headcount grows
Tech leaders and managers to reach a crucial goal that stretches them
CEO/Product teams to regulate traction momentum or create product traction
Stuck? Not anymore.
Feel stuck as a scaling start-up founder, a manager with an ambitious new goal or a CPO who needs to control traction momentum?
Evolve from a start-up founder « Doer » to a « Leader » who scales
How do I stop being the bottleneck that blocks decisions as we grow from 50 to over a 100? How do I set the course and goals? How can I delegate and communicate while aligning teams? Adapt my mindset, skill-set and posture to scale well?
Turn your challenges as a leader into clarity, actionable steps and results
How do I fulfill my new ambitious mission in an unfamiliar context that stretches me as a manager and leader? How do I shift my awareness, posture, and skill-set to reach the level needed to pull off my hardest mission yet?
Create a high-growth product when an existing one sunsets
When Product leaders base roadmaps on intuition or stakeholder pressure, new features and products often fail to find traction or keep users. As a product leader, how can I pin-point users’ pains and build what they want fast?
How coaching helps scaling
By helping founders redefine success, I enable them to transition from « Operator » to « Strategic leader. » The outcome ? Greater confidence deciding, communicating and delegating. Alignment, engagement and results return.
How coaching enables growth
I help you identify what is really going on, understand yourself and your impact, set goals that align personal growth with organizational priorities while testing new approaches to develop your ability to lead with confidence.
Traction Product coaching
When product teams think they know users’ needs, but they don’t, product traction is often the first victim. I work with people who want to make high-traction products using Customer Discovery like the minority of the best SaaS companies do (like Slack, Paypal and AirBnB).
Iain wallace
Proven Track Record
I am a former CMO and CRO of listed companies, and a scale-up CEO who exited after 7 years, 5 of which with VCs.
Realising most business problems are human rather than technical, I grew my people development skills by coaching and training scale-up founders, Excoms, managers and their teams. I balance human, technical and business cursers according to the needs of each coaching.
I do this in parallel to my work as Customer Discovery coach, helping start-ups and corporate product teams create products people badly need by building them with users. Current startup co-founder.
> 1 850
Start-up founders, CEOs, leaders and managers coached.
%
Success rate when you do the work
Start-up and tech leaders coached
%
Product proijects with clear user needs reach sustainable growth
Making YOU WANT TO STRETCH YOURSELF
1
See the problem
Clarify the situation
- What’s holding me back & why ?
- What are my strengths & levers?
- What should I prioritize ?
2
Set goals
What does success look like ?
- What are my priorities?
- What are my first actions?
- What KPIs do I choose?
3
Live your 1st wins
Where do I start to move?
- My first quick wins
- Grow my confidence
- Shift my mindset and behavior
4
Anchor behavior
How do I embed new behavior?
- Repeat what now works for me
- Communicate changes clearly
- Foster stakeholder engagement
What my clients say
Don’t take my word for it – hear what my clients say
Products & Services
When pressure rises, I coach tech founders, CEOs, Excoms and managers to rise above it.
Start-up founder scaling
I help you take back control of your company when scaling threatens to bring it to a standstill by transitioning from a Doer to a Leader
Conrol high but erratic traction
I help you speak to users, validate the deep problems they encounter and address them with a product they love and keep using.
Ambitious management goal
I help you visualize what success looks like, choose your strategy and plan, find the 1st confidence-building steps and embed the momentum you need to execute it.
I asked Iain to get us to a place Finding the right market fit for a consulting offer is never easy. Sometimes the real challenge isn’t about the market itself, but about finding the confidence to face it, to dare putting yourself in front of it. When I started working with Iain, I was exactly there. I had always built SaaS products, hidden behind a screen, avoiding the idea of selling myself. The thought of stepping forward, of embodying my own offer, felt almost impossible. Iain immediately understood that. He didn’t just give me frameworks or theories. He took the time to truly listen, to help me dig deep, to identify what was holding me back, and to turn that resistance into clarity and action. It was one of the most powerful personal breakthroughs I’ve experienced in years. As a coach, he has this rare mix of empathy and precision. He challenges you at every step but always stays close enough to your comfort zone so that you can grow without breaking. Every conversation with him ends with clear, actionable objectives. He doesn’t let you stay stuck in your own thoughts, he moves you forward. Three weeks after our first session, I had officially launched my SEO and GEO consulting offer for marketing teams, and reached 3K MRR. 2 months in, I was at 8K MRR with 7 clients closed. Iain is a remarkable coach. Not just because of his years of experience, but because of his ability to see through people and guide them where they didn’t even know they could go. For the value he delivers, it’s simply a no-brainer. Read this testimonial Arnaud Mège Founder & CEO, BeyondRankingSEO
I asked Iain to get us to a place where we could build our new SaaS products and major releases in a completely new way. Our playbook had relied up to then on big client inputs and PM hunches, and excluded user research insights and product co-construction with users. He explained the benefits and the how of using Customer Discovery to our worldwide product team. And he coached us to get meaningful insights. Seeing it was completely foreign to our culture and recognizing he was getting almost no buy-in, he neither insisted nor gave up. He identified the one product manager who was "onboard" with keen to try the Customer Discovery approach, even though they had never done Discovery before and were still conducting their first customer discovery interviews. 18 months later that courageous Product Manager registered spectacular traction at launch on a completely new product, in our biggest bet on our biggest market. Now, we have first-hand evidence that, in the right hands, Customer Discovery works. Funnily, it's no longer seems that hard when you have used it successfully once. We are busy extending its use as our default playbook.
At ThrustMe, we have entered a new phase of development: an organic growth driven by high market traction and customer success. To prepare for this next step, we have significantly strengthened our management team, with seven out of ten managers joining within the past year. I strongly believe in continuous learning and improvement. Therefore, to build a shared understanding of what management means at ThrustMe, and to ensure a coherent management culture as we scale, we partnered with Numa to design a tailored training program addressing the challenges ahead. Iain, our Numa coach, has been an excellent match for this mission. He helped us quickly build trust, alignment, and cohesion within a newly formed management team, to the point where it feels like we have been working together for years. What I particularly value in Iain is his ability to move naturally between a CEO-level perspective, pragmatic operational frameworks, and a deep understanding of human dynamics. He brings the credibility of someone who has scaled companies himself, not just advised them. His feedback is direct and demanding, always delivered with empathy and a clear intent to help leaders grow. Through his work with us, our managers have accelerated their ability to empower and lead their teams, align execution with strategy, and build solid foundations for a company designed to scale. I would strongly recommend Iain as a coach and trainer to any CEO looking for a true partner, someone who can strengthen both leadership capability and organisational maturity during a scale-up phase.
Building a bridge between you
and your ambitious goal
I help you see what separates you from a crucial goal and move to reach it
About me
my mission
My Mission
Help you restore or initiate fast growth by:
- Overcoming the initial negative impact of scaling on your growth
- Reaching your next ambitious goal as a leader and manager
- Working with users to know what need they need and build a product that delivers it
The “How”
- People skills
- Managemet skills
- Product skills
14
Years as CEO
> 20
Years in tech and business
1850 +
Leaders and Managers coached
Iain wallace
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