Assume you got a new job. Every day, you try hard to make a difference in the world. You start taking on more stretched opportunities and face various challenges, such as time management, striking the right work-life balance, and possibly even finding purpose at work. As the lines between your personal and professional lives become more blurred than ever, the desire for guidance on navigating career development and a sense of well-being becomes critical. You want someone’s advice to help you figure out what’s going on in your life. Someone qualified. Who will you turn to?

Let us introduce Better up—the world’s largest mental health and coaching startup.

BetterUp is a mobile-based leadership training platform that provides personalized coaching to Fortune 500 employees at all levels. The BetterUp model, supported by psychological resources that enable leaders to sustain behavior, employs a ‘Whole Person’ approach to measuring leadership behaviors that promise to promote innovation, employee satisfaction, and organizational success.

Keep reading the article as we will review BetterUp and will also explain what makes it the world’s best and largest mental health and coaching startup.

What is BetterUp?

BetterUp is a personalized career coaching company based in California. It follows the belief that coaching should be available to everyone and must consist of evidence-based techniques that produce real, meaningful change. The company connects employees with coaches to collaborate on leadership skills through video chat, phone, and text using a subscription SaaS model.

Since its founding in 2013, the company has focused on assisting businesses and organizations in driving transformation through lasting behavior change for all key people. It has joined forces with several well-known brands, including Google, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Lyft, and others.

It develops coaching experiences using a perfect blend of technology and science, with the primary objective of enabling individuals to develop new skills, conquer their goals, spark new passions, and become their best version. The business employed behavioral scientists and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and its core values included bravery, skill, playfulness, grit, empathy, and enthusiasm.¹ ²

How Does BetterUp Work?

Better Up’s business model consists of six core values: courage, artistry, compassion, zest, liveliness, and mental toughness.

These values serve as a reminder that the company of its purpose while also keeping them accountable. They have undoubtedly attributed a significant portion of their platform’s success to aligning themselves with these core values.

Most importantly, their bottom-up approach allows them to provide care to employees at all levels, which typically only executives get.³

· Coaching

BetterUp revolutionized coaching by utilizing cutting-edge technology such as artificial intelligence and scientific and behavioral research.

Their platform offers professional coaching, valuable tools, and resources to employees of all levels. Their online one-on-one coaching is accessible via video or text messaging, making it widely accessible to all. Users complete a short survey, the results of which help to match them with a coach.

· Resources

They provide data that teaches employers how to improve their employees’ working conditions. BetterUp blogs make management more informative by covering topics such as leadership and management, diversity, coaching, culture, and more.

Users can also access various other resources, such as handy guides, insightful events, and more.

· BetterUp Labs

They also have labs that conduct behavioral research to help people understand that life and work are never balanced.

It recognizes that work-life balance involves more than just making time to see friends on weekends. Instead, the Lab applies its findings to affect change in personal development, which leads to career advancement.

7 Tips to Get the Best out of BetterUp

Taking full advantage of a coaching program may not be for everyone. Here are some quick start tips to help you get the most out of BetterUp’s coaching session.

Firstly, recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. Use assessments such as the Gallup Strengths Finder. Make use of your strengths. Accommodate for acceptable flaws and overcome fatal flaws.
Conduct a 360-degree evaluation with the people you primarily work with to identify your strong points, flaws, and shortcomings. People you dislike may provide you with the most valuable feedback.
Speak with your executives and mentors to confirm what you hope to gain from the interaction and what kind of assistance BetterUp can provide. If in doubt, contact BetterUp support for assistance.
Examine the coaches in the catalog to find the one better suited to your requirements and learning style. The learning style is critical. A primary training instructor will cause stress and hinder learning if you learn without motivation.
Set aside at least one 45-minute session per week with your coach. Consistency is essential. Choose days and times when you will be able to arrive with a clear mind and get the most out of the session. It may not be the best time to do so before or after a weekly critical meeting.
Use the first few sessions to review the assessments and identify areas for improvement. Throughout the engagement, the focus areas may shift.
A good coach will recommend books or articles to read as well as approaches to try. Set aside time to read the articles or a book chapter. Implement the strategies into your workweek. It will help if you review your experiences with the coach in the weekly sessions.

How is BetterUp Using AI?

BetterUp recently launched a new product, Identify AI, which provides hyper-personalized leadership training programs to help them improve their capabilities.⁴

The company believes that combining the expertise of a human coach with technological advances in AI will enable them to provide broad-scale personalization at scale. The use of AI assists the company in foreseeing and providing personalized coaching needs.⁵ It comprises: –

Delivery Method: The AI helps BetterUp to recommend the best medium for a given user at any given time, such as a podcast, game, or multimedia. It contributes to the company’s goal of providing highly customized coaching solutions.
Matching Coaches with Employees: The algorithm matches employees with the most suitable coach based on their unique learning preferences and 150 factors. It continuously monitors the performance of its algorithms and observes that the more data they collect, the better its algorithms become.
Personalized Learning: Its extensive data predict which areas of professional development will be most relevant to an employee.
Assessing Big Changes: It has developed algorithms to analyze data and behavior to identify development needs at any time.

How BetterUp become a Multi-Billion Dollar Company?

BetterUp has long been a global company in many ways, as it works with many companies with employees worldwide. It leverages a network of over 3,000 coaches working in 64 languages across 70 countries to deliver a personalized, life-changing experience for all its users, aiming to drive transformation and growth for individual members and their organizations.⁶

More than 600 companies, including NASA, Google, Hilton, and other Fortune 1000, rely on the company’s coaching platform. So, how did they become a multi-billion-dollar company in such a short time?

· Staying Committed to the Goal

BetterUp prioritized three areas of impact: mental fitness, career growth, and social connection. They aimed to help people worldwide live their lives with more clarity, meaning, and enthusiasm. The goal was to assist each user in reaching their full potential, thereby assisting teams and organizations in achieving tremendous success

The platform combined one-on-one or group coaching, evaluations, and content actions with a scientific approach to behavioral change and HR topics. It also provided experts to assist members in focusing on critical issues like communication, diet, and even guiding the journey of being a working parent. Identify AI, BetterUp’s proprietary algorithm finds the best coaches and recommends personalized paths to growth for each user, and manages it all.⁷

· Embraced Flexibility and Extended their Reach

While COVID presented challenges for BetterUp, as it did for all businesses, the company had long embraced virtual and hybrid work before the pandemic. Pre-COVID, more than half of BetterUp employees worked remotely, so while the change into the pandemic wasn’t easy, BetterUp had some procedures and tools in place to make things go more smoothly.

BetterUp focused more on processes and efficiency improvements. They redirected their talent to what they are uniquely capable of doing, such as engaging clients to bring BetterUp to more groups in their organizations and deploying quickly and seamlessly. Moreover, in the last year, it has opened its first offices in Europe and established teams there.

· Transforming their GTM Strategy

BetterUp’s go-to-market (GTM) teams are almost entirely cloud-based, proving crucial in keeping the company moving forward. They all benefit from workflow management on the sales side and the CRM, which powers much of their marketing outreach.

BetterUp’s supply side operations also benefited from the automation as new customer organizations came on board. When a new customer signs up with BetterUp, the quote includes information about the number of workers and their location. For example, if the job is to coach a group of people in Japan and BetterUp’s network isn’t as robust there, an inbuilt signal generates to begin seeking and sourcing talent for the job.

Is BetterUp Profitable?

Yes, BetterUp, the fronting provider of leadership development & training solutions, has a successful business model and expects to see continued high revenue and profit growth.⁸

It has created a profitable business by incorporating video content into a personalized training experience and is positioned to displace traditional corporate training companies. It has built a reputation for making health and wellness available to all employees. Since 2016, the company has received approximately $267.8 million in funding from investors. The company achieved “unicorn status” with its newly acquired valuation of $1.73 billion. Their comprehensive business model has increased employers’ responsibility to invest in the employees who drive their business.

Despite being the world’s largest coaching network, the company is growing and will continue to grow. The company plans to use this funding to assist in the launch of its newest initiative, BetterUp Care.⁹ ¹⁰

CONCLUSION

BetterUp, founded in 2013, is the pioneer of digital professional coaching and the leading provider of 1:1 and group coaching, counseling, and mentorship. It combines world-class coaching with artificial intelligence (AI) technology and behavioral science to deliver personalized behavioral change and enhance the workforce’s well-being, adaptability, and effectiveness.

Their interactive content, analytics, and reliable data track progress and provide deep learning for organizations and individuals. Coaches can assist you in developing better habits and skills to improve your ability to focus, prioritize, and ultimately work towards achieving your professional and personal goals.

Want to learn more about how BetterUp works with businesses to help employees achieve unparalleled focus and peak performance? Request a demo right now.

FAQs

What’s the difference between coaching and therapy?

Therapy is like coaching in some ways. But, coaching emphasizes on the present and future, whereas therapy focuses on the past, present, and future. Coaching focuses on personal and professional growth, whereas therapy intends to help you conquer issues like anxiety and depression.

What is their refund policy?

You can cancel anytime by going to the subscription page in your account settings.

How are coaching sessions structured?

You will spend the first 30-minute coaching session getting to know one another and exploring what coaching is and how it can help you achieve your objectives. In subsequent sessions, your coach will assist you in answering questions that will steer you on your journey to growth and success.

What is the pricing process?

They provide monthly subscriptions that include 1:1 coaching sessions, an on-demand content library, goal-setting features, and other benefits. They have various pricing options depending on how frequently you want to meet with their coach.

Are their coaches effective?

They have the world’s largest network of optimistic behavioral change certified coaches. To guarantee the highest quality experience for their members, they only accept 8% of coach applicants.