Joyce Guan West is the Founder of Coaching With Empathy, a strategic coaching firm focused on career coaching, business coaching, and executive coaching. She is an Asian American professional who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Joyce never wanted to play the safe route and get a “normal job”; it was too boring. As the recipient of the Chancellor’s Scholarship at UC Berkeley, she got a free ride and graduated with no student debt, so she took risks and became an entrepreneur. She designed her own major – Technology and Entrepreneurship and got a Minor in Business. As CEO or VP of the companies she founded, she didn’t have a choice on whether to be a leader or not – she just embraced it, and with many years of leadership under her belt, she is very comfortable in that role. Joyce loves to work with ambitious leaders regardless of gender or ethnicity and also has a specialty in coaching Asian Americans, women, and people of color since she has walked those paths in her career.
You can view more about Joyce’s background here:
www.linkedin.com/in/joyceguanwest, or connect with her heart on Instagram (she has some engaging and insightful Instagram Lives): www.instagram.com/joyceguanwest.
Tell us about who you are and what you do.
I’m Joyce Guan West, founder of Coaching With Empathy. I’m a career coach, executive coach, and business coach. I help my clients get career clarity and land their dream jobs, excel and level up at their existing roles, get promoted and crush it as leaders, and I help entrepreneurs scale and run their businesses. I’ve been an entrepreneur, sales leader, and executive since I started my first business in college, and I LOVE to help people make their breakthroughs. I love money and am very results-oriented, so you should only work with me if you want big, impactful, and quick results. And you’re willing to do the work.
I’ve helped my career coaching clients negotiate $50K more on their compensation packages and get unstuck and inspired. I’ve helped my executive coaching clients onboard effectively in their new roles, and rock their performance, and gain promotions. I’ve helped my business coaching clients take control of their overwhelm, survive through Covid, and successfully fundraise and scale up sales in this market.
Tell us how you created this brand and what was the sole idea behind it.
I’ve wanted to coach since I was 20 years old and I hired my first coach. It took me many years to try coaching because I didn’t see anyone who looked like me coaching. I was scared to spend $10-$15K for coaching certification, and then not have any clients.
I learned about the power of coaching from a young age: I started my first business when I was 19, and I hired a sales coach to help me learn and ramp-up. That upped my game so much! In that program, I met life coaches and business coaches who helped me along the way. When I had a breakup at 22, I hired that life coach and he helped me through the breakup, and also with re-evaluating my career.
It took me over a decade to get the courage and opportunity to get the official title of coach.
Between those formative experiences with coaching and finally getting the official title of Coach, I became a sales leader specializing in rapidly scaling startups. I founded multiple companies and sold them to multinational companies in multi-million dollar acquisitions. In my last company, I ran the sales team, and I grew sales by 10x over a year and scaled the sales team from 2 people to 10 people. I also built multiple layers of management there.
As an entrepreneur, founder, and sales leader, I’ve held the role of the coach all along – when you achieve things that are difficult and seemingly impossible, and move at warp speed, you have to coach your team and work on their mindset constantly, especially salespeople who are regularly having their sales quotas increased.
After working as an employee for a while following the sale of my last company in 2017, I realized that it was time to be my boss again. The reason that I love working for myself is that no one is taking a cut of the value I’m creating, so it’s easy to have a million-dollar or multi-million dollar business.
Never say never, but it is very unlikely that I will ever work FOR a company ever again.
A number of happy accidents in my network led to me joining a coaching platform that valued operators, not certified coaches. I am so grateful for that opportunity. In 3 months, I catapulted to being the top coach on the platform and now have over 60 5-star reviews. That was the experience I needed to realize that coaching is something that I’m good at, and it gave me the confidence to go all-in on it.
Thus, Coaching With Empathy was born. I initially intended to focus on career coaching, executive coaching, and business coaching. However, when the pandemic hit in March 2020 and unemployment soared to 15%, it was clear that I could help people get their basic needs met and find new employment by helping them improve their resumes. So, I have an entire team of resume writers who help our clients stand out, even in a tough job market through their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, cover letters, and resume design.
Go in detail and tell us about how your brand works. You may keep this from the audience’s perspective.
My firm Coaching With Empathy was founded on the basis that so much of business, especially in Silicon Valley where I am, is driven by an extreme and unsustainable view that growth should come at all costs. I’m not saying that there aren’t wildly successful companies that don’t have an amazing culture, but I’m simply saying that there are too many companies that don’t prioritize mental health, sustainability, and work/life balance for their founders, executives, managers, and employees.
I’m a strong, effective leader who delivers supernormal results. AND I prioritize kindness, compassion, staying calm in almost any situation, and drive my team to take care of themselves, and ensure that they have a life outside of work. I realized that in my past, I’ve always sold products and services that required empathy in the sales process – from selling office snacks to overworked office managers, to selling trees where terminally ill people could place their ashes. Yes, check out www.betterplaceforests.com to learn more about that very cool and unique company.
My biggest fear in life is being undifferentiated, so when it came to naming my company and defining my vision and mission, I focused on getting clear on my unique value proposition. My mission is to help my clients be wildly successful, all while feeling bliss and ease. Thus, the name Coaching With Empathy came up for me. I was blown away that the domain wasn’t taken! It’s as if that wasn’t a priority for anyone else.
As I mentioned, I believe in the philosophy “the first one is free”. As such, I offer a free intro call to anyone interested in coaching with me. If after that call we decide it’s a fit, then we kick off with a one-hour discovery call to figure out what the person’s goals are, and how they want to prioritize them. We also confirm what the intended outcomes are so I’m clear about exactly what my client wants to accomplish.
Coaching with me is more like jazz than classical. I’m both highly intuitive as well as data-driven and strategic. What I lend to my clients is my ability to process on the fly and see things that they aren’t seeing due to the blind spots that everyone has about themselves. I am also a master at decision making and building decision trees, so someone unable to decide for months is usually unblocked by me almost immediately.
What is your giveaway idea through this interview? Highlight something that may interest the readers on a one to one basis.
I have two sweet giveaways – I truly believe in the concept of “the first one is free”. I don’t try to get people to sign up with me without them being fully on board with what I can help them accomplish.
So, anyone reading this can sign up for a free 20-minute coaching discovery call with me so we can talk about their needs, goals, and where they are feeling stuck. You can sign up for that here: https://calendly.com/coachingwithempathy/intro-call-ceomedium.
For folks who are looking for a new role, I offer a free guide to the Top Interview Questions You Need to Prepare For – DM me on Instagram or email me at hello@coachingwithempathy.com for this awesome resource.
Explain the challenges you went through while you were working on brand creation. What are the challenges you go through on an everyday basis?
I didn’t have many challenges with brand creation. I’ve known who I am for a long time. I let my values drive everything that I do and how I present myself.
How do you manage your finances through the services you offer. Any fundings etc received?
I am the queen of self-funded ventures. I am the product, so it didn’t take any startup capital to build my business. However, cash flow is a real thing. In the first 6 months that I ramped up my coaching business, I was still running my sales strategy consulting business to pay the bills. Once I got more traction with coaching, I moved to do that full time. I of course have the luxury of knowing how to sell since I’ve been a VP of Sales for so long. So the classic challenge that many entrepreneurs have of not knowing how to get business wasn’t one of my challenges. Now I teach other coaches how to do that effectively through the coach’s mastermind I run.
I would attribute my success to my family – I have the most supportive, unconditionally loving husband in the world. He keeps me going when challenges come up from time to time. The love he gives me flows through to my clients. He makes me feel psychologically safe, and I in turn make my clients feel psychologically safe. In addition, we have two amazingly cute and affectionate cockapoo puppies, Sprinkles and Wylde. You can check them out on my Instagram.
Tell us your future vision about the brand. How far do you want to take it? What is your dream about taking it to the next level?
I’ve always been more of a business to business person vs a consumer person, ie I’ve done a lot of selling products and services to businesses. As such, now that I’ve built my own successful and thriving coaching business, instead of spending all of my time signing on individual clients, I am excited to be a “coaches’ coach”. I run a mastermind for coaches, consultants, and service providers who already have some traction in their business and want to get to the next level – they want to get anywhere from $100K to $500K in annual revenue. And they want to get there quickly and aren’t afraid to get out of their comfort zone. We meet weekly and have a monthly topic we’re focused on, run a monthly challenge, and then we have 2 sessions per month where we crowdsource ideas, and every week a few people get to be in the hot seat. We also amplify each other’s social media posts, and we refer business to each other. To ensure that we execute, not just talk about ideas, we also do a weekly 2-hour co-working accountability session.
Empathy, kindness, and compassion are the key to everything to me – living a full, joyful, blissful life full of ease and love. These themes are the underlying foundation of my career, executive, and business coaching. This year I plan to go even deeper into coaching the whole person. I plan to do this by offering life coaching as well as one on one and group meditation sessions – I’m currently in Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s two-yearMindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program.
What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it?
Don’t wait. Tomorrow or the perfect conditions may never come. There are so many ways to just prototype and test out your side hustle. Or if you have a hobby you love, just take a small step towards monetizing it and doing more. From the time I spent working at Better Place Forests, where I spoke with many people who were terminally ill, you realize that life is short.
I host an Instagram Live with a guest on the first and third Thursday of each month at 12:30 pm PST. You can check these out here: www.instagram.com/joyceguanwest/channel. Connect with me on Instagram so you can stay updated on when these are happening and what the topics are.
Company name: Coaching With Empathy
Email Address: hello@coachingwithempathy.com
Website: www.linkedin.com/in/joyceguanwest
Instagram: www.instagram.com/joyceguanwest