How Unicorn CEO Aidan Corbett Built a Strong Leadership Team at Wayflyer

About Aidan Corbett, CEO of Wayflyer

Aidan Corbett is the CEO of Wayflyer, a Series B company with 270 employees. Wayflyer is a company that offers revenue-based financing to eCommerce businesses. Wayflyer is valued at over $1 billion, making it a unicorn company from Dublin, Ireland. According to Crunchbase, they have raised $889.2 million in total funding.

Key achievement: Building a strong leadership team

Sabrina has been Aidan’s executive coach for over 8 months. Throughout this journey, Aidan has identified the key achievement as assembling a leadership team and making the right people decisions.

A first-time CEO learns by making mistakes or talking to people who have been through it before. When it comes to people-related problems, you WILL make mistakes because emotions take over. Over the last 8 months, Sabrina has helped me step out of the emotional hijacking of fear and allowed me to make the right decisions.

Once Sabrina helps me get through the fear, she will guide me on the strategy and tactics of how to implement my relevant decisions. Specifically, she has helped me and our Chief Legal Officer Deirdre MacCarthy work on the onboarding strategy for our new execs with excellent outcomes.

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Coaching Approach

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Because Sabrina has insights on CEOs with similar problems, the knowledge that she had created a lot of validation and credibility with me.

Sabrina has the right balance between asking me questions and being opinionated, which I think is the hardest thing for coaches to do. What’s very frustrating is when people are opinionated without the whole context. What’s even more frustrating is when people don’t give an opinion at all.

For example, when our Chief Legal Officer and I did an onboarding executive session with Sabrina, we were suspicious in the first 30 minutes. We were thinking “Where are we going with this? Why is Sabrina not giving us answers or a playbook?”

Instead, Sabrina prepared a list of questions about the success of an executive and asked Deidre and me to write down answers without discussing them with each other. At the end of it, she provided best practices that were appropriate for our organization, and we felt like it was excellent. We were able to communicate our expectations for the leadership team much better and got the playbook we were hoping for.

Furthermore, she is the best example of never avoiding the hard comments or the hard conversations, but I still look forward to it every time. I know I can always expect transparency and honesty from her, and I know it will be delivered without judgment.

Coaching impact

I’m more present with family and not on autopilot when I’m going home. When I was dealing with very stressful interpersonal issues at work, they didn’t stop at the office door, they followed me home. Coaching with Sabrina has improved my personal life massively. I sleep better, it gives me more energy. It impacts everything.

Professionally, I’m a lot more assertive. I had a lot more fear, and when Sabrina coached me through the fear, I went through with it and realized it was fine. Now I want to try it again and again. I have so much more momentum at work.

I would highly recommend first-time CEOs scaling a business once they move into 30-40 people to work with Sabrina. It would be insanely helpful.