Coaching & Mentoring
Friday evening. Your spouse asks how the week was. You give them the version that's appropriate for spouses: the funny moments, the team wins, the small frustrations. You don't tell them about the actual hardest moment because they can't fix it and you don't want them to carry it. You don't tell your management team because it's about them. You don't tell your board because they'll worry. You don't tell your peers because peers close enough to hold this are rare.
The actual hardest moment of your week sits with you alone, again. Your normal Friday for the next ten years, unless something specific changes.
A fixed-length 1:1 engagement for CEOs and senior executives. Hybrid coach-mentor mode: questions first, experience when it adds value, never prescribes. Provocative questions until insight emerges. The leader arrives at their own clarity.
What stays after the engagement
The decisions you've been carrying for months land faster, with less regret. Patient questioning across sessions makes legible the pattern you've been running on autopilot. Once a pattern is legible, it changes. The judgment stays yours; what changes is the reflective capacity behind it.
What your actual job is now becomes clearer. New scope, new scale, new market: identity-level work on the role you've stepped into but haven't yet inhabited. By session three you can name what the role actually requires. By session six you have a roadmap.
The conversations no one else can hold get held. The firing of someone who built this with you. The downturn you're carrying alone for the team's sake. The question you can't ask your board because it's about them. Held with someone who has had the same conversations from inside the role.
Where do you take the questions you can't take to anyone?
How it works
The mode runs on four disciplines, repeatable across many leaders and many sectors.
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Questions first. The default is asking, not telling. You do the work; the engagement creates the conditions for clarity to emerge.
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Experience as data, never as advice. When you're stuck on a pattern someone with a hundred companies of context has seen many times, experience gets shared. The conclusion remains yours. "Here's what I've seen work in similar situations" is data. "You should do X" is prescription, and prescription gets refused.
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Patient repetition. Some questions land slowly. Returning to the same question across three or four sessions is feature, not failure. Breakthroughs that only happen after repeated reflection are exactly what this engagement is designed to produce.
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Comfortable with temporary tension. Pushing beyond the comfort zone produces short-term friction. The discipline is holding that steadily, not retreating to comfortable conversation.
The output isn't a slide deck or a recommendation. It's the leader's strengthened judgment, the kind of shift where participants come back later to say thank you.
Format
- 1:1 sessions, 90 minutes each, in person in Tallinn or video
- Six sessions standard; twelve for the hardest cases
- Biweekly to monthly cadence over three to six months
- Agenda set by you; questions brought by Argo
What this work doesn't do
The coaching doesn't tell you what to do, write the decision memo, or run the hard conversation for you. You do the work. The mode is questions first, experience when it adds value, never prescribes. The moment it turns into "here's what I would do," you stop arriving at your own clarity, which is the entire point.
I have pushed people beyond their perceived horizon about ten times across the practice. Each time creates temporary conflict in the room. Every single one of those people has come back later to say thank you. The discipline of this work is holding the tension steadily rather than retreating to comfortable conversation. The breakthrough is on the other side of it.
This is for you if
You're carrying the hardest questions of your week alone, and the people you'd normally turn to are part of the situation, not outside it. Your management team is in it. Your board sees slides. Your peers are running their own companies and rarely close enough to hold what sits with you on the way home. The category is CEO, founder, MB member, or senior executive.
You want a thought partner, not another voice telling you what they'd do. You may have tried coaching that turned into nice conversations that didn't change anything, or mentoring that was a senior person describing what they would have done. The hybrid mode is built for buyers who have tried both and want neither alone.
This isn't for you if
What your company needs is a strategy or an operating system installed rather than your individual judgment strengthened: those are the longer programs (Right Things Nailed, Execution Playbook).
It's also not the right fit if you want pure coaching with no advice ever; credentialed coaches who refuse experience-sharing entirely will serve you better for that specific need.
Why Argo, for this work
Pragmatic & focused
20/80 applied to your own reflection: the one or two questions that change a pattern, not the ten that polish it. The pattern-recognition behind the questions comes from 100+ companies across 8 countries: listed-company boards, climate-tech start-ups, and ongoing work with founders. The conversation moves to what's structural fast, rather than mapping context the operator has already seen.
Full confidence during change
Identity-level work, new scope, the role you don't yet inhabit, the decision you've been postponing: each needs someone who holds steady through change. The combination of 25 years operating and 15 years applied psychology (NLP, Radical Collaboration) is what makes the steadiness credible. Doubts eliminated where doubt is the actual obstacle.
Owner's mindset & human-centric
The person Fontes calls for the hardest assignments. The Estonian senior-leader mentoring panel routes mentees by complexity, and the C-suite work routes here: the conversations no one else can hold, the board members weighing decisions where discretion is structural, the leaders carrying assignments that need operator-grade context alongside coaching craft. Thinks like an owner rather than a consultant, which is what makes discretion at this level structural rather than contractual.
Operator, not observer.
Bring the conversation you can't take to your board.
A working session, not a sales call. We work the conversation through together. By the end of ninety minutes you'll know whether this engagement is the right fit, and if it is, what scope it needs to take.