“Books, Clients, and Balance: Inside the Coaching Journey of Aurelien Mangano”

In this insightful episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen Doda sits down with executive leadership coach Aurelien Mangano, founder and CEO of Develop Leaders. Aurelien shares his journey from corporate life in Europe to launching a successful coaching business in the U.S., helping directors to C-suite executives transition from management to leadership.

He opens up about the realities of being a solopreneur coach—wearing multiple hats in sales, outreach, content creation, and delivery—and why “you cannot be bad at anything” when you run your own practice. Aurelien also discusses the five pillars of his leadership programs, his upcoming third book, how he builds trust through relationship-based marketing, and the good and bad investments that shaped his path.

Whether you're an established coach or scaling your business, this episode delivers valuable lessons on delegation, trust-building, sales mastery, and growing without losing your personal touch.


Connect with

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurelienmangano/
Website: https://www.develupleaders.com/

Transcript

Aurelien Mangano: 0:00

As a coach, when you are solopreneur and you do everything, you cannot be bad at anything. Because if you are not good at uh outreaching, you will not have your client. If you are not good at selling, even you are good uh coach, you still don't coach. And when you have said when you have sell your product, you need to be good at coaching, otherwise you will not be referred. So it's also the challenge of being good at multiple things that you may not have the expertise. When you are in a company and you do your job.

Davis Nguyen : 0:31

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 Wynne, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda: 1:02

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Stewards Podcast. I'm your host, Tregen, and today's guest is Aurelian Mangano, an executive leadership coach who transforms high-performing managers into purpose-driven, influence-rich leaders. He's the founder and CEO of Develop Leaders and a member of Forbes Coaches Console. Aurelian is known for his leadership maturity metrics, a practical pathway that moves leaders from command and control execution to a level four ecosystem influencer. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Aurelian.

Aurelien Mangano: 1:45

Thank you very much for hosting me, Ray Jan.

Rexhen Doda: 1:48

It's a pleasure to have you on. And I wanted to talk to you about the beginning of your coaching business. So I know it's been around for almost four years right now. At the beginning of it, what inspired you to become a coach and start your own coaching business?

Aurelien Mangano: 2:03

So it started really with something that is during my career in corporate, I had the need for some coach and mentor to help me to really realize how I can be better in my role. And I wanted to explore on myself on how I can help myself at the beginning to really be a better professional. And I started to coach others and I loved how rewarding was it to help people to be better, a better version of themselves. And this is what made me really wish to be at the beginning a career coach for cross-functional people because I'm from Europe as you can hear it from my accent. And I moved to USA and the world was really different between what was in Europe and what I experienced in the USA. So I wanted people to transition better. And quickly I was very passionate by the leadership and uh this topic of project management, and I went deep into it, and it's when I started my company Develop Leaders and make it what it is right now. Cool.

Rexhen Doda: 3:16

And when thinking about the clients that you work with, how would we describe the ideal client profile? Is there a certain industry or demographic or psychographic, or do they have some common goals or other commonalities that you're seeing?

Aurelien Mangano: 3:31

So my speciality is moving the people from management to leadership. And for this I need to define because everybody has a different definition, and I want to define management as controlling the environment to make sure that the project or initiative is executed as expected. And leadership is inspiring others to make your vision a reality. As you can understand, we need both of them and both are essential. But what I want to help people is when they are very good at uh management and they get promoted and manage multiple people, it is less about controlling what is really done, but more inspiring people and making them do the work that is needed to be done. So my clientele is very simple. It is director to C suite because it's where you start to have more need with the leadership. For sure, there is also junior uh manager or middle management, but it's less of a need to be a leader at this time than a manager.

Rexhen Doda: 4:41

Interesting. And it's not specific to any industry, it could be any industry as well. And how is it like to work with you? So do they go through some uh coaching program? Is there a program of a certain length? How is it the engagement with you?

Aurelien Mangano: 4:58

So usually I have a first discovery session to really understand what the client is and what they need to develop. I have my programs are based on five pillars. The first one is the purpose, understanding what is your purpose for work, and I go to the framework of uh Kokorosacci, you may have heard of it, or Ikigai, that is probably more known, and I go deep into this to really define. And I work on the personal Coco Rosacci, but I work also at the level of the department or the company, and I help people to define their strategy and communicate it clearly in the different levels of uh your organization. The second pillars, as you just hear, is communication, so learning how to communicate and make sure that you adjust your communication according to who you speak with. So I work a lot with clients on this. I have another pillar that is emotional intelligence, where we work on understanding your emotion and your awareness, but also your stress management, understanding how you make decisions and how you connect with people because networking is essential. The fourth pillar is the mindset mastery, because everything is led by what you think. So I help people to break their limiting beliefs, help them to be more have uh adaptability and resilience because a leader that changes of mind every week is not somebody that you want to follow and he loses his leadership. So I help people to get better at this, and on top of these four pillars, you have a fifth pillar that is more on how to influence with the language and in uh inspires. It can be a mix of uh these five, usually it takes about one year to cover high level these five pillars. If you want to work on some specific element, and I have some clients that just want to understand what uh how they can brand themselves and uh go to the next level for their career, and I help them to work more on the purpose and the communication, for example. So it can be a mix of two pillars, it can be one pillar deep, like emotional intelligence. It's really in the discovery uh call that we decide this. Most of the time I have either a six-month program or a one-year program, but after I can adjust according to the need of the person or the challenge that needs to be realistic. If you tell me I want to go from, for example, from director to C-suite in one month, I can tell you probably it will not happen because it's uh asking a lot of networking and things that is to do it, but realistically, I work with my client to make the best of it. Cool.

Rexhen Doda: 7:46

And one question that I was thinking about is when it comes to you finding your clients, your ideal client profile, or them finding you marketing-wise, is there any marketing channel that you see is working better than the others?

Aurelien Mangano: 8:00

I would tell the job of uh coach is very special because you have the advertisement that is going in the different social media, and for me, most of the time it's LinkedIn because I work mainly with professionals, and there is an outreach. But even I outreach and I am the right solution for the people, you need to earn their trust. And it is the difficulty that all coach has is to build this trust with people. So it's really for me building this connection, having the call to speak with them, having uh one-on-one um discussion when I meet them in person if possible. So the relationship connect, and after when they need my services, they come to me and uh they know that I can help them. One element that I will tell that could be very important for a coach is to show how much you care because we are very focused at performance and doing KPI, making sure that we achieve all the objectives, but the care is what makes the difference, I think, in a coaching.

Rexhen Doda: 9:10

Yeah, and you said that so correctly that yeah, they can find you on LinkedIn, but the most important part of it is building that trust with you. Uh and as a coach, you have to market yourself as opposed to like a business or an entity. You're actually the person you're marketing and the person you're selling at the same time. Uh, so it is pretty interesting. Now, if we look into the future for the next one to three years, do you have any specific business goals that you're working towards?

Aurelien Mangano: 9:38

So, right now I'm more on the next year uh idea. I'm writing uh my third book because I just uh finished my second book uh that is a co-writing. So I did my first book was published about uh two months ago in August. I have my second book that should be published by the end of the year, and I'm writing a book by myself uh that will be the leadership shift from management to uh leadership, and I will adjust the title by then. But uh it will explain a little what is my program, how it works, and my philosophy. It is in review and uh some people are reading it uh to have a forward and I hope to have it published by January. So it is my goal in the next uh month, I will tell. What I would like probably in the longer term is to be able to mitigate a little the risks because when you have a client uh as executive, it's good, but you never know if you will have the same pipeline according to the time. So I try to mitigate uh the risk by uh trying to be a public speaker. So I want uh to start slowly to go to podcasts like uh yours and also uh be on the stage so we I can share my message and help uh more people uh with my message.

Rexhen Doda: 11:04

Cool. So when you say mitigate risk is basically uh making sure that there is a constant flow of revenue within the business that you're running to.

Aurelien Mangano: 11:12

Exactly. If I don't have the number of clients that I want for my coaching, I have some money coming also from uh the speaking engagement. And it's also helped me to diversify my perspective because when you do something for so long, and I experienced mainly this in you start to have a comfort zone where you learn and you are complacent in your way of thinking. And when you start to go on multiple platforms and trying to challenge yourself on different ways of doing uh the same work, you have people that come with feedback that are not always uh pleasant, I will tell you. But it is good to have this unpleasant uh command because it helps you to readjust your direction and understand where you do well and where you do not so well and you need to improve. Cool.

Rexhen Doda: 12:02

Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that uh early on. And when thinking about either writing the book, now this is the third book that is coming up in a few months, or making sure that you mitigate that risk of new clients coming, older clients leaving. What would you say are kind of like the main challenges that you're facing right now in working towards those goals?

Aurelien Mangano: 12:25

So I will tell it's more what I was uh facing uh before. It was that I have to be the salesperson, the outreach person, and the coach. And doing this three role in one day, it's taking a lot of time. And when you are good at coaching, you may not be so good at sales or outreach. So no, I have a way of delegating uh little my outreach and uh content management. Even I love to do content management, I have somebody that loves to create uh things and uh build uh this uh grid. Perhaps it can be another way of uh mitigating my risk by doing some content management for some people. But um I understood that I need to have some somebody to and the system to delegate all this outreach and sales and focus more on what I'm good at so I can uh focus on my client. So it was really the challenge that I had so far. What I struggle the most, I think, is because I come from a background of IT, we are not very exposed in uh the way of communicating and uh selling, and the sales process and things like this was something that was very different for me, and I had several uh ways of uh connecting, and uh I think we will cover it uh later, but um I never had always the right solution. I need to make a mix of multiple ways that people uh teach me to find the right way of doing.

Rexhen Doda: 14:02

Yeah, um, and actually it is definitely a challenge that is seen with solopreneur coaches. The fact that you have to wear multiple hats at the same time, you have to do the sales, you have to do the coaching, which is the main thing, and then you also have to do the marketing or like with the outreach. And that alone, then you have to think about doing these speaking engagements and writing the book at the same time. There's a lot of operations that go in it, which oftentimes is a lot for a person to take while you're scaling. So, hiring in that case, so you're thinking about it right, hiring or having a system to help optimize that operation is a very good way to think about kind of like working towards that challenge, and is a challenge that, like I mentioned, I've seen many coaches share on this podcast as well.

Aurelien Mangano: 14:53

And one thing also that is essential as a coach, when you are solopreneur and you do everything, you cannot be bad at anything. Because if you are not good at uh outreaching, you will not have your client. If you are not good at selling, even you are a good uh coach, you still don't coach. And when you have said when you have sell your product, you need to be good at coaching, otherwise you will not be referred. So it's also the challenge of being good at multiple things that you may not have the expertise. When you are in a company and you do your job, you just need to be good at one thing that is your speciality, and you don't need to have all the flow and things like this coming into you to make it happen to do your real job, as you tell.

Rexhen Doda: 15:39

Yeah, absolutely. I also wanted to ask you about um investments as well. So throughout the last two, three years with your coaching business, what have been some investments that you've done that you feel really good about? Either you learned a lot or got a good return from, uh, and these could be investments of time, money, or both. And what have been some investments that you don't feel so good about, you that you would have preferred to have avoided or bad investments? So we're looking for good investments and bad investments that you've done.

Aurelien Mangano: 16:08

So, first things I will tell you there is no bad investment. All investment are useful because it's either you invest in experience and you know what to not do and that doesn't work and what to do. I invested a lot in my uh business and I invested in multiple techniques, and there is some that I believe more than uh what I'm doing right now. For example, I was working with uh a company that was telling you need to build the relationship, do the webinars, then send some free stuff, and after the relation will build and they will come to you later. But sadly, in my experience, my type of uh clients, prospect, it is not something that works well because probably executives don't have the time to look at the webinar, take the relationship to the level that is needed to build uh this and make it happen. And I work with uh I mean I'm still working uh right now with a salesperson that I don't believe really in it because I'm not somebody that likes to push, but it works better for me. So I learned the techniques of sales and learning how to manage better the objection and things like this, and it is one of the things that I will recommend any coach to go to something that is hard sales, just to learn what is a hard sell, even it is not what you feel that it is good for you, but at least you know how it works, what it is, what it takes to have a deal, and after you can adapt it to your personality, your way of thinking, and it is really the reason I uh sign up uh with uh this uh coach to help me to really strengthen my way of uh self, understanding how things work and make it uh happen. After I invest in a lot of uh development for myself on uh neuro linguistic programming, I I work uh on a lot of programs for uh coaching. I'm always learning, so I did live coaching, I did executive coaching, organization development coaching, neuro linguistic programming coaching, I did uh some other uh coaching uh of team. So I always develop uh my skills. I leave I read about one book per week when I can find uh the time to do it, and I will recommend to really develop this, and it is an investment that you want or not. It's not a big investment every week, but at the end of the year it can be a big investment to do this, and you learn from others, you learn from uh yourself by reading and you adjust also your technique. I will tell go to event also. It's a way of networking and it is a good investment to connect with people and see where your perspective is the same or not aligned. So it is some of the investment. After the investment that I will regret really, I will tell I had invested probably in some lead generation solution, and I will have tell don't invest in lead generation until you are clear really on who you want to have and you are clear on what they are doing as a lead generation. Because I invested one time in a lead generation that was bringing me people into a webinar, and I was doing my webinar to to share my message, but the people that were coming to this webinar were looking just for free stuff, and they were not looking to go further in the process. So it's a lot of investment for uh finding the leads, but at the end the lead quality were not the right one. So it was one of the bad investments I will tell, but it teaches me something, it makes me understand better what are my personas, who I want to work with, and who I don't want to work with.

Rexhen Doda: 20:07

Yeah. And just like you mentioned, in these cases, what we call kind of like bad investments, you always get to learn something from it, what not to do in this case with the lead generation system as well. Thank you. And my final question uh actually is um for coaches who are listening that want to scale their coaching business, they want to scale their impact, reach out to more people. Is there any advice you'd like to give to these coaches? In a way, you're also trying to scale your impact with your books and reaching out to more people that way, so it would be like an advice you give to yourself.

Aurelien Mangano: 20:42

So I will tell the important is really to have the direction, understand what you want to do. Because if you want to scale your company just to scale and have more money, it will not be something that will work at the end of the day because you will not feel fulfilled and something will break at a moment. So what I will really recommend is be clear really on why you want to scale. Does it make sense for you to scale? Because some people tell you you need to scale to do this, but is it your decision or is it the others that decide for you? Because it is also important. For me, I would not like to scale too much. If I have two or two or three more coaches, it will be the maximum that I want my company to be, because I want my company to resonate with the familial uh style where it is really a person that is close to you, where you learn really the things, you build this relation and you are close and everybody is uh approachable. When you scale too much for me, after you lose this specific uh touch that I think uh doesn't worth the money.

Rexhen Doda: 21:53

Thank you so much, Aurelian, for coming to our podcast today. For anyone who wants to connect with you or find you, number one, they can go into LinkedIn, look up Aurelian Mangano. They'll be able to find your profile on LinkedIn. They can also go into the website, which correct me if I'm wrong, but it should be divaleaders.com, and we'll put that in the description as well. But I believe that is the right website.

Aurelien Mangano: 22:18

Yeah, so I have two websites. I have developleaders.com and I have also aurelian morgano.com, and uh they should be linked one to the other if I'm not wrong. And uh yeah, so they can connect on LinkedIn if they want. Just put a message so I know who you are and where you connect from. Because with no message, I receive a lot of uh people and I'm not sure who they are, so sometimes I reject because not sure who cool.

Rexhen Doda: 22:47

And uh for the websites, we'll always put that in the description for the podcast so people can find that easily. But I really appreciate your time. Aurelian, thank you so much for coming to our show.

Aurelien Mangano: 22:57

My pleasure. It was a great discussion. Thank you.

Davis Nguyen : 23:00

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making an impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit join purplecircle.com.