Career Coaching Secrets

Dr. Vineet Mangal: Navigating Coaching Commoditization and Delivering Value

• Davis Nguyen

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Rexhen Doda interviews Dr. Vineet Mangal, co-founder of BeWise Consulting and an HR thought leader/executive coach. With 30+ years in HR leadership, Dr. Mangal discusses his shift to coaching CXOs and founders, primarily through referrals and LinkedIn content. His ambitious goal: 5,000 career transitions in five years, personally coaching each client. He stresses specializing in a few core coaching themes (executive, career, peak performance) for maximum value. Dr. Mangal highlights the commoditization of coaching as a major industry challenge, impacting pricing and perceived value. He balances growth by dedicating 50% of his time to direct coaching. His key advice to coaches: deeply understand industries and focus on long-term "career" development, not just "jobs."

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Dr. Vineet Mangal:

That's a very interesting question because I work across multiple formats, but largely my, because as you know about my background, I do a lot of stuff related to HR advisory and HR leadership consulting. So obviously because I'm doing an advisory, I work mostly with the CXOs and the COs, and now I'm increasingly working with a lot of founders.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda:

Welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. Today, we're honored to welcome Dr. Vinit Mangal to the podcast, an HR thought leader, executive coach, faculty member, and the co-founder of BeWise Consulting. With over 30 years of experience across global organizations in education, tech, manufacturing, and services, Dr. Mangal has worn many hats, from HR officer to board advisor, from social Thank you. BISC, NLP, and leadership coaching, he brings a unique mix of academic depth and practical insight to every conversation. Whether he's advising on HR tech, enabling performance frameworks like OKRs and balanced scoreboards, or coaching executives to elevate their presence, his work is rooted in clarity, impact, and long-term growth. Thrilled to have you in the podcast. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Thank you, Rajan. Thank you so much. And thank you for giving such an interactive and illustrative about my career journey. Good to hear it from you.

Rexhen Doda:

You're welcome. It's a pleasure to

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

be on the show

Rexhen Doda:

today. You're welcome. Tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become an executive or a career coach.

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

So, Rajan, as you mentioned that I've been into industry for the last 30 years. being into HR leadership role in couple of companies across the countries, Middle East, India, Southeast Asian places. So now when you are into HR leadership role, one of the things which definitely comes to you is that people come to you lot of time for some kind of an advice. And that becomes so much part and parcel of it that makes you feel that, oh, you be consulted by anyone and they can ask you for the feedback or opinion about it but gradually one start realizing that this has a more serious work to do rather than just taking it that lightly so i think around 15 years ago i decided that there must be some things seriously i have to do when it comes to getting into a coaching rather than just doing it sporadically without any format or without any technical qualification in hand. That's how I started serious about it and got into the coaching business. When I say coaching business, I started coaching around 15 years ago. But for profit, I started coaching five years ago when I started my own company. So that's how my journey is. Still learning a lot from each other. So being a coach will give you a lot of opportunity to interact and learn from each other's experience and the situation in which they are.

Rexhen Doda:

And how does your journey look like from the point that you started your coaching business to where you are at today?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

See Rajan, I think whenever I take stock of the whole situation, I think over a period of time, it is getting more refined day by day. and when it started it was more unstructured it was more need driven but today what i can say is that there is more merit to it there's more science behind it what i do and there are specialized areas in which i do the coaching now earlier it was like something anybody can be coached on anything it could be executive coach it could be career it could be anything But now, consciously over the years, I have now started building a much more specialized view about coaching. And that's how I pick my assignments these days.

Rexhen Doda:

And who do you work with? Is there a specific group of people that you particularly work with?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

That's a very interesting question because I work across multiple formats. But largely, because I do know about my background, I do a lot of stuff related to HR advisory and HR leadership consulting. So obviously, because I'm doing an advisory, I work mostly with the CXOs and the COs. And now I'm increasingly working with a lot of founders, those who are coming to the business either as a first generation and sometime as a second generation taking a legacy from their parents or from the family. So most of the time I work with the CXOs. Having said that, I am keeping myself always open to coach even something who is not at that great level. I do coaching for the first-time managers, but that is very few and far between. Largely, my focus is with CX.

Rexhen Doda:

And what marketing channel works best for you in finding them and connecting with these people?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

So I'm still figuring it out, to be honest with you. Marketing is not something which naturally comes to me because being into corporate, I was always on the other of a table never required to do it so that journey is still on for me but generally for me the best which is working right now is through referencing most of my business is repeat and most of my business is through some or the other reference which is having said that i time to time i try certain campaigns on the linkedin i try to do some teams to do or does some kind of calls also for our hr advisory business but coaching business incidentally comes to me more to a reference and that reference keeps me busy most of the time.

Rexhen Doda:

So mostly referrals, right?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Yeah, mostly referrals.

Rexhen Doda:

And how did you build this referral network?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

So I think like any other business, coaching business also requires a certain amount of seriousness in what you deliver into it. There has to be value proposition and no matter whatever we claim to have holding at different degrees or the qualification which we have done or the kind of experience which we have got, at the end of the day, when we interact with somebody, when we coach somebody, if that value is not derived, if that value is not as per the requirement of a coachee, then it's not going to bring the results the way we want. So my focus is always that where I'm into the coaching, the client of mine should get best out of me and that should become one of the best sessions for him. in terms of whatever he wants or she wants to take it out from that. So that is the value proposition I focus on. And most of the time, I also feel that there has to be understanding about the issue, which is very important because unless we understand the issue in detail, we will not be able to do justice to

Rexhen Doda:

it. I agree. And when it comes to goals, do you have any goals that you're working towards for the next one to three years with your coaching business?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Yeah, there are goals. I'm not too sure how much I'll be able to achieve because I've made very tall goals. So I have divided my coaching business into two parts. One is an executive coaching, which helps business grow, the leaders become more better leaders. and take their journey to the next level. The second equally important piece which I'm focusing right now is a career coaching. And in career coaching, I have kept a goal of making sure that there should be at least 5,000 people in the next five years should be able to make a career transition after getting coaching done for me. I know it's a very tall work. To an extent, it might sound a little impractical also, but In the market which I operate, I see there are a lot of people who are struggling with their career. There are a lot of challenges which needs to be addressed. And if we do just incremental way of solving this problem, probably it will take a long time. So I'm still not sure about the format which I'm going to use or how am I going to scale it to that extent. But I have given a very audacious goal for myself. that in the next five years, there should be 5,000 people should be able to do their career transitioning and I should play an important role through career coaching in their life.

Rexhen Doda:

And do you have a team that you are thinking to help you out with this goal or is it mostly you working on it? I have

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

a team which keeps on looking at what is the requirement in the market. They keep on doing their own research. They look at it, what kind of a lead generation that needs to be done. And they are also in touch with colleges. They are also in touch with the universities, which many times helps that they want their leaders to become more aware about, the students to become more aware about. What are the career options they should follow when they get into the corporate world? That is one theme which is there, which teams will also need. At my level, I do mostly through LinkedIn. My LinkedIn connect probably is good, I'll say. I'm quite regular in terms of writing it on LinkedIn. On a regular stuff, I write. It's not very standardized that I only write on one particular topic. Anything and everything with respect to HR, organization, careers, executive presence, leadership. I keep on writing and I think that is one area where I will continue to focus because that is the way I connect with the people and that is the way I get the audience and they give a very instant feedback about it whether they agree with me, whether they disagree to my point. I normally try to make at least one post every week. It can be a short post, it can be an article, it can be just sharing something which i feel is important for everyone so that is one area and secondly is of course as i said about my team which is working currently on different campaign from time to

Rexhen Doda:

time and in your team do you also have coaches that help you out or you do the coaching part

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

coaching i only myself is doing it i have still not built that kind of an ecosystem because as i said that there is an hr advisory and leadership consulting which i do so the stakes are high and i wanted to make sure that i do it myself and deliver it at this point in time from the coaching point of view i am the only certified coach in my

Rexhen Doda:

team and uh do you mostly work with uh uh Like your audience is mostly local or is it international?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Because, as I said in the beginning, I have worked across industries and into different countries. Predominantly, I worked in India. I have worked in the Middle East. And some part of my work has also been into Singapore. So from a coaching and my other businesses, my focus area is India and Middle East. So it's an equal split right now. I get a lot of work from Middle East also, some portions from Singapore. and the rest of the work comes from India.

Rexhen Doda:

And in terms of investments, what resources or support has been most valuable for you growing this coaching business?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

I think there are two resources, I will say, which is very important. One is, of course, the team, which helps me look at it, what is the market requirement is and how we should approach them and how we should pitch for this. This is one. Second is the back office of making sure that everything is well recorded, is available when required. And there's a lot of confidentiality involved to it. So everything has to be recorded in a proper manner. So these are the resources which helps me.

Rexhen Doda:

Is there something you wish you had known when you first started scaling your coaching business? Is there like an unexpected lesson learned?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Yeah, I think if you ask me and if I go back the memory lane 15 years ago, and in hindsight, if I have to look it back, I think I should have been more focused on what kind of coaching I should be doing. Because in the beginning, as I said, because I was in a corporate world. So coaching started early, but coaching was very varied for me. And I think if I have to go back and re-correct that, probably I'll pick two or three themes of the coaching and focus on that only and give my deliverables and value to each of my clients based on that. So there are three areas which I'm very passionate about when it comes to coaching. One, as you said, about career coaching. And that is, of course, a passion for me because I feel that is one of the fundamental issues which many people are struggling today in the industry and that needs to be resolved. It has to be resolved not only for our purpose but also for the society purpose because the more people who are not happy with their job and if they are not able to get the way to find the solution for that, the larger the issues for the society. From societal point of view, career coaching is very passionate. I am very passionate about it and it is very close to mine. Second piece comes is an executive coaching. I will probably repeat myself when I say why I do executive coaching. coaching for a reason, because I help them into their business and HR consulting. So executive CXOs are my go-to audience which any way I interact and they require a lot of handholding in that sense. Third one which I am not practicing that much right now, but is very close to my heart is a peak performance coaching. And I feel that is also one area where if I get time, I should work. And I wanted to stick myself to these three. because it is very very exhausting it's a lot of preparation at the same time you have to make sure that you deliver value whichever theme you picked and here i also wanted to make a point which is a general point to everyone is that it's very easy to offer variety of coaching but it is very difficult to offer value in a variety of coaching because Every interaction, every thought, every perspective which you bring has to be so much tailored. It has to be so much with that that it is almost impossible that when we start focusing on all aspects or different types of coaching, it is we are too thin. So I personally feel that two is the best at the max three should not be more than that.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, absolutely. And what are some of the biggest challenges you face in scaling your coaching business or that you are still facing to this day?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Many challenges, some are more like a business challenge, which is about how to get the work done and how to approach, how to generate lead. I'll call it as more as an operational challenge. But then there are some fundamental challenges. Over the last five years, if I look back, coaching, unfortunately, as an industry is becoming commoditized. It is becoming a commodity in a sense that there are too many coaches, some certified, some not certified. As a result, what is happening is that everybody is willing to offer a solution in the name of a coach now the status attached a coaching session sometimes gets a hit because everyone call it as a coaching it could be a general conversation it could be a mentoring part of it it could be a counseling but it looks more fancy for everyone to give the name as a coaching I think that is one of the challenge this industry is should have a good coaching platforms which should filter it out and make sure that the people those who service a standard and they should be able to bring value to each of their clients so this is one of the challenge which i see also something related challenge to this is a commodity because of coaching becoming a commodity also the price point on which the coaching is now offered it is bringing a diminishing return so it becomes because somebody is offering at such a throw away prices. Everybody has expectations from a coach to offer it at a very very basic level pricing. Now that is not possible because at times if the pricing point is not correct the kind of the value you need to deliver it to the client will not be achieved. So it is becoming more like a volume game instead of a value game. And I see that as increasingly becoming a worry in the coaching industry and that At some point in time, that needs to be addressed. But as we always say, we are in the free market. And in free market, everything is derived from the demand and supply aspect. So we cannot complain about it beyond a point. But this is one of the challenges.

Rexhen Doda:

What about handling the balance between delivering great client results and managing business growth on the other side? Do you see a challenge there or how do you handle this balance?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

See, if I understood your question correctly, you are asking me that one is that the regular business which I do, which has many other people in the business and coaching, which is more centric to me, which I give it to my client. That's a question, right? Yeah. So basically what I do is I maintain a very strict calendar for myself. I commit myself that 50% of my time goes to the coaching all the time and the things which are not that much of importance from a business point of view or the things which can be handled by a team from a known coaching assignments. normally try team to focus more on but when it comes to the coaching it's very close the baby is very close to my heart so i try to make sure that i only handle that and it's not that difficult as long as you are able to prioritize and as long as you are aware about is what is the kind of criticality which you are dealing with

Rexhen Doda:

in terms of um Going back to the question, so thanks for sharing that. Is there any aspect of running your coaching business that would figuratively keep you up at night? So it's like a worry for you?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

Yeah, so many times it so happens, especially when it is a career coaching part of it. You have a couple of times the clients which are desperately in a problem and they are struggling or suffering. I will use the word suffering. and for them the job the career is at stake and now as much as i want it to be it's very difficult to keep yourself away from that because in the day when you are coaching them and there are some things which is not going in their favor it keeps me bothered it keeps me sometimes upset also and of course The very next day I'll try my best to make sure that we look at this issue more objectively and able to find a common solution to the problem. This is on when it comes to my clients. Things from a coaching business which keeps me awake at night is probably I've already answered is that the way it is becoming a commodity and I personally feel If it is going to be diluted at this rate when it becomes a commodity or everyone is offering at a thrower where price is the coaching, I really don't know in future how the coaching industry will be respected. It should not so happen that everyone start looking at as one of the volume driven business more like a transaction rather than a value or investment in the interaction. So that is one of the things which bothers me at night.

Rexhen Doda:

Is there any advice you'd like to give to other career coaches who are looking to scale their impact?

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

I think everyone is good enough and professional to pick their things around what works for them. But still a few points I can say what I have learned the hard way. When it comes to a career coaching, the understanding about the industry or the people you are coaching is very, very essential. career is just not giving them some kind of a very basic level of tips and tricks to get the interview call or to get them some sort of cv making it is actually about a career and that is only possible when the career coaches are going to invest themselves into few industries few roles more specifically so that they become more competent enough to address those issues and their advice the people will be more more i'll say to them because if you know those industries pretty well you are able to give better advice second thing which i think for career coaching also is important is look it at offering a comprehensive solution many times i have seen i have come to know through various sources only that a career coaches sometimes focuses too much on resume building or a branding part of it and they do not go more deeper into about the individual traits about their career about their aspirations about the career and I always say that's my favorite line that there is a difference between a job and a career now most of the time the career coaches try to solve the problem of a job whereas their focus should be in solving the problem of a career So if you ask me, job is a subset of a career. It's not the same. And that is where most of the times coaches are not able to differentiate and disintegrate. My advice to them is focus on the career. That's a more long-term journey. Anybody is interested. And that is a more value-add you can do. The current job or the next job is just incident. If they are prepared for a marathon, they can do a small run very easily. That's my advice to them.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you so much. Thanks. It's been great having you on the podcast. I think a lot of our viewers are going to find your advice very helpful. For anyone who wants to connect with you, they can connect with you on your name in LinkedIn is Dr. Vinit Mangal. Or they can also find you in BeWise.com. Dot in if they wanted to reach out to you as well. So it's been a pleasure having you on. Thank you for coming. And yeah, let me know if anything else.

Dr. Vineet Mangal:

No, I think. Thank you so much. These questions were really insightful and I think they're going to be really helpful. And through the series of this podcast, you people are doing a great job. It is like a service where you are doing it. because it is going to address a lot of problems, especially in the career section of the people. And by getting this podcast, a lot of things can be easily communicated to the people who are aspiring to have a better career in their life. So thank you so much for it.

Davis Nguyen:

Thank you. Thank you.