Where's the Beef? How to Measure the ROI of CEO Coaching
By Liam Chrismer, CEO Coach
In 1984, Wendy's put an 81-year-old former manicurist, Clara Peller, in front of a camera, handed her a competitor's hamburger with a hubcap-sized bun, and let her lift the lid. Inside sat a beef patty the size of a quarter. She squinted at it and asked the question that sold millions of hamburgers.
"Where's the beef?"
I've been asking the same question about the ceo coaching profession for 20 years.
Search for the benefits of hiring a CEO coach, and you'll get the same bun every time: a trusted sounding board, better decisions, increased self-awareness, fewer blind spots, accountability.
Lovely bun. Now lift it.
CEOs don't run companies on adjectives. They run them on measurables: EBITDA, cash flow, retention, and a dozen other numbers they can recite in their sleep, if they sleep at all. They will argue for an hour about customer acquisition costs. Then they'll write a $50,000 check to a coach and measure the return by how nice it feels to have someone to talk to.
That’s not an investment. It's an expensive friendship.
Why a CEO Coach Should Keep Score
I ran a company for 15 years. It failed. I'm not proud of that, but I am responsible for it.
I didn't have a CEO Coach, and I badly needed one. I loved my own ideas. I was blind to the financial realities of the business. And I didn’t have the slightest clue about how I was showing up.
A serious, well-qualified CEO coach could have shown me I wasn't as smart as I thought. That some of my projects could wait. And, most importantly, could have looked me in the eye and said, "Liam, you're being a jerk, and you don't know it."
Nobody said it. Nobody was keeping score.
10 years into coaching CEOs, I hold my profession to the standard I wish someone had held me to.
Show me the beef.
CEO Coaching Needs a Scoreboard
When an NFL owner hires a head coach, they don't care whether the players like him. He doesn't care about the halftime speeches or the color-coded practice schedules. He hired the coach to win. If he goes 5 and 12 for three seasons, that coach will be offering his insights from a broadcast booth.
CEO coaching should work the same way. I am not responsible for your quarterly earnings or whether or not you hire a new sales manager, but I am responsible for whether you get measurably better at being a CEO. If you don't, then I am not delivering a return on your investment.
The deal cuts both ways. The players still have to show up, run the drills, take the hits, and execute when it counts. Hiring a CEO coach doesn't make you a great CEO any more than buying a Steinway makes you a pianist. Coaching isn't something you purchase. It's a commitment you make to practicing and to improving yourself.
Does Executive Coaching Actually Work?
Yes, but not always.
In 2023, Erik de Haan and Viktor Nilsson published a meta-analysis in the Academy of Management Learning & Education that admitted only randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of research. The paper included 37 studies and 2,528 participants, a solid sample. Coaching produced a statistically significant effect on leadership and personal outcomes. The effects were larger when people rated themselves than when someone else observed the results. What else is new?
A second 2023 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology, covering 20 randomized trials, found that coaching had its strongest effects on behavior rather than on attitudes or personal characteristics.
This is better. Behavior is what your employees, your board, and your customers actually experience. So that's what we measure.
Start With a Baseline You Can't Argue With
You can't measure change if you don't know where you started. Most coaching engagements start with a conversation. Mine starts with data.
I'm an Advanced Certified Hogan consultant, and I began there because the Hogan Personality Assessment answers three questions a CEO's own opinion can't.
The Hogan Personality Inventory shows how you come across on your good days. The Hogan Development Survey shows how you come across your bad ones: the 11 behavioral patterns that surface under pressure, fatigue, and boredom and that quietly derail careers. The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory shows what actually drives you, and it's sometimes not what you think.
I trust the Hogan because it focuses on how others see you rather than how you see yourself.
Five Ways to Measure the Value of a CEO Coach
1. Decision Quality
You are paid to make decisions. Decisions of all kinds, often with incomplete data and not a lot of time. And you own the outcomes of those decisions. You can control the quality of your decisions, but you can't always control the outcome. Just ask any NFL head coach.
So keep a decision journal. For every consequential decision, write down the alternatives you considered, the assumptions you tested, the risks you saw, and what you expect to happen. Then go back and check. Track how long decisions take, how often you reverse them, and how the results compare with what you predicted.
Judge the process and the outcome separately. A good decision can still lose. A bad one can still win, which is worse, because it teaches you the wrong lesson. Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning observed that, as a quarterback, he had only a couple of seconds to make a decision. Throw the ball or hand it off. He said once you make a decision, you don't worry about whether it was right or wrong. Rather, you do everything you can to make sure it was the right one.
2. Leadership Effectiveness
Leadership is not what you think you're doing. It's more than showing up, weighing in, and signing off. It's thinking, evaluating, teaching, monitoring, and finding a way to see what no one else sees.
Coaching should require you to spend time practicing and developing as a CEO. This requires dedicated practice time that you schedule on your calendar. It requires reflecting on how you showed up, where you showed up, the decisions you made, and the conversations you had. CEO coaching is about improving the value of the contribution that only you can make. This is a value that will extend beyond your tenure as a CEO, and that will improve the people you've impacted whether or not they stay with the company.
3. Strategic Execution
Before coaching begins, name your 3-5 most important objectives for the next six months. Give each one milestones, deadlines, and a definition of done.
Then watch what gets finished. Are commitments landing on time? Are obstacles getting cleared faster? Is the organization still focused in month 5, or has it wandered off to chase something shiny?
A CEO who becomes wonderfully self-aware and still misses every deadline has simply become better informed about their own failures. That’s a lesson I learned painfully too well.
4. CEO Mental Fitness
Your brain is your company's most important leadership asset. Your plant runs preventive maintenance on a schedule. You back up your computer and follow your car’s maintenance schedule. Yet no external monitor watches the asset that keeps everything else running.
CEO Mental Fitness is the capacity to sustain attention, regulate emotion, recover from setbacks, and keep your judgment intact when the pressure is on. We can measure it. Sleep quality and consistency. Hours of uninterrupted strategic thinking per week. Stress and recovery. How you behave in the meeting that goes sideways. Whether your judgment at 4 p.m. matches your judgment at 9 a.m.
It makes sense to keep score. Work with your coach to determine what metrics you want to track. It could be your sleep score, calories, amount of time spent studying, the time you leave the office. The only thing that matters is that you keep track of your actions and progress toward the goals and outcomes you want to achieve
5. Economic Impact
If revenue grows $5 million during a coaching engagement, the coach doesn't get to claim $5 million. Markets move. Competitors stumble. Sales teams have good years. Any coach who takes credit for all of it should be shown the door.
That doesn't mean you can't estimate the value. Let's say a CEO has spent months avoiding a decision about an underperforming division. During coaching sessions, the CEO becomes aware they are avoiding the issue. So the coach sets a deadline and establishes metrics.
Over the next year, the division improves operating profit by $400,000. The coach and the CEO agree that the coaching contributed 15% toward that improvement, or $60,000. Against a $30,000 annual coaching investment, that's a 200% return. The chain is the point: coaching changes behavior, behavior changes performance, performance produces income.
Sometimes the biggest return is a loss that never happened. The acquisition you didn't make. The executive who didn't quit. The initiative you killed before it screwed your earnings for the quarter. These are harder to measure, however, you can at least see the relationship between the outcomes and the coaching.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
My longtime client Ken founded a manufacturing company 20 years before we met. It was growing, but organic growth was slow and expensive. The company was highly leveraged and unprofitable.
Then an acquisition opportunity came along, and his leadership team advised against it. Their advice was solid. It was exactly the advice you'd expect from smart people looking at the numbers.
Ken saw something they didn't. He knew his business better than anyone. My job wasn't to tell him what to decide. It was to make sure the decision was his, and that it was a good one.
So we went after the things that sink CEOs in exactly that spot: confirmation bias, overconfidence, ego dressed up as vision. We pressure-tested his assumptions until only the ones that deserved to stand remained.
He pulled the trigger. Revenue has since grown more than tenfold, and the company became a household name in its industry.
Do I get credit for that? No. Ken did the work. He showed up, did the homework, and committed to the process. What I can claim is narrower, and more valuable: he made the biggest decision in his company’s history with a clearer head than he would have had alone.
The One-Page CEO Coaching Scorecard
Every engagement should start with a scorecard. Not a 40-page binder. One page both of us understand and agree to be judged by. Here's a sample with hypothetical numbers. Your real targets depend on your situation.
Dimension | How it's measured | Baseline | 6-month target |
Decision quality | Decision journal review, 1 to 10 | 4 | 7 |
Leadership effectiveness | Confidential stakeholder feedback, 1 to 10 | 6 | 8 |
Strategic execution | Milestones hit on time | 52% | 75% |
CEO Mental Fitness | Structured assessment, 1 to 10 | 5 | 7 |
Personal fulfillment | CEO self-rating, 1 to 10 | 6 | 8 |
Economic impact | Documented benefit attributable to coaching | $0 | Net positive |
Review it at 90 days, 180 days, and a year. Use business data, observed behavior, and confidential feedback. Write down what didn't work alongside what did. Nothing builds credibility like a coach who keeps score. As things change, and they will, then change the scorecard.
And keep three kinds of evidence separate:
Is the CEO behaving differently?
Is that change showing up in the organization?
Is the organization making or saving money because of it?
All three matter. They are not interchangeable.
Accountability Cuts Both Ways
A coach should not be allowed to hide behind "the client wasn't ready." A CEO should not be allowed to blame the coach for changes they refused to make.
My job is to set clear objectives, challenge your assumptions and excuses, tell you the truth even when it's unwelcome, and change my approach when it’s not working. Your job is to show up prepared, be candid about what's going wrong, do the work between sessions, and actually change.
A CEO who skips the homework isn't being coached. He's renting a listener. And a coach who tolerates it isn't coaching. He's invoicing for time, not generating positive change.
The 90-Day Test
At the start, agree on three meaningful changes for the first 90 days. At day 90, sit down and answer five questions honestly.
What specifically has changed in how the CEO thinks, behaves, or leads?
What evidence, beyond the CEO's own opinion, supports it?
What difference has it made to the organization?
What did each of us commit to, and what did each of us actually do?
Is the progress enough to justify continuing?
90 days is too soon to prove a financial return on a complicated leadership problem. It is not too soon to see whether anyone's behavior has changed. If it hasn't, the answer is not another six months of pleasant conversation. Change the approach, reset the objectives, or end it.
The Real Test: Do You Still Need Me?
A good coach builds players who perform when the coach isn't on the field.
Six months after we finish, are you still asking better questions? Still challenging assumptions, delegating real authority, keeping your temper in the meeting that goes sideways? If you need me in the room for every big decision, I haven't succeeded. I've just become a habit.
The goal of CEO coaching is more capacity, not more dependency.
So, Where's the Beef?
CEO coaching can be one of the highest-leverage investments a chief executive ever makes. Belief isn't evidence, though. And good intentions have never once shown up on an income statement.
Here's my side of our agreement. Before any engagement begins, I'll put in writing what results would prove the coaching was worth your money. Then, at 90 days, we'll check. If I can't show you the beef, you shouldn't keep buying the bun.
Not every win belongs to the coach. Not every loss does either. But over time, the record has to justify the check.
Otherwise we're both just standing at the counter with a very expensive hamburger, and Clara is still waiting for an answer.
Frequently Asked Questions About CEO Coaching
How much does a CEO coach cost? Engagements commonly run $25,000 to $50,000 a year or more, depending on scope, frequency, and whether assessments and stakeholder interviews are included. The better question is what return you should expect, and how you'll know.
How do you measure the ROI of executive coaching? Establish a baseline before coaching starts, track behavior change through stakeholder feedback, connect that change to organizational results, and conservatively estimate the share of financial improvement coaching can credibly claim.
How long should CEO coaching last? Long enough to produce durable behavior change, and no longer. Research suggests engagement length matters less than most coaches would like you to think. A 90-day checkpoint will tell you whether to continue.
What's the difference between a CEO coach and a consultant? A consultant solves the problem for you. A CEO coach makes you better at solving it yourself. If you still need the coach for every major decision a year later, something went wrong.
Liam Chrismer is a CEO coach, Hogan-certified consultant, and author of the forthcoming book CEO Mental Fitness (Fast Company Press). A former CEO himself, he works exclusively with chief executives of companies under $100 million in revenue to improve decision-making, strengthen leadership, and build the mental fitness to live and lead better.
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