For leaders making decisions that carry weight — for the people they lead, the business they built, and the life they are living alongside it. This is a steady, confidential space to think clearly about demanding choices, professional growth, and the transitions that change what your role asks of you.
Sarah ShortridgeCertified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) · ICF Certified Executive Coach
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This work is for executives, business owners, entrepreneurs, and organizational leaders. You are likely the person others bring problems to, which means you have fewer places to bring your own. The role is visible; the deliberation behind it usually is not.
Where my personal coaching begins with your inner life, this begins with your professional one — and then makes room for the person inside it.
Naming what actually matters this quarter, and what you have been carrying only out of habit or obligation.
Thinking through calls that affect people, money, and reputation — without the pressure to look certain while you do it.
How you say hard things, hold a line with a partner or board, and stay accessible without being endlessly available.
Growth, restructuring, stepping back, bringing someone in, or moving toward a transition in ownership.
Considering the professional and personal shape of the next chapter before circumstances decide it for you.
Working with the pace you have set, rather than pretending it costs nothing.
Before this work, I spent years in high-performance environments — building companies, leading teams, and living inside the kind of pressure that teaches you to compartmentalize. I know what it is to perform capability while privately questioning things. That is the room I can sit in with you without flinching.
I am an ICF Certified Executive Coach with a trauma-informed and nervous-system-aware approach. In a leadership context, that background matters for one practical reason: it makes me unusually attentive to how people actually behave under stress — you, and the people around you. Coaching and psychotherapy remain separate services, and this page is coaching. If clinical support is what would help, I will name that directly.
I also hold the Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA) credential, which means the language of ownership, succession, and long-horizon planning is familiar rather than foreign.
More about how I came to this work is on my about page.
CEPA stands for Certified Exit Planning Advisor, a credential offered by the Exit Planning Institute. The curriculum covers exit planning concepts and, more importantly for our conversations, how a business owner's business goals, personal goals, and financial goals either align or quietly pull against one another.
In coaching, that education shows up as context. When we talk about an ownership transition, bringing in leadership, or stepping back from day-to-day operations, I understand the terrain — including the part most planning processes skip: whether you are personally ready, and what you imagine your life looking like on the other side of it.
To be clear about scope: I do not perform business valuations and I do not provide financial, tax, legal, or investment advice. Those belong with your advisors. My work is the human side of the decision.
And you do not need to be selling anything to be here. Most people who reach out are simply leading something demanding.
Engagements are shaped around what you are actually navigating rather than a fixed program, so the honest answer about structure is that we decide it together. In a consultation we talk through your role, what is pressing, what you want to be different, and how often it would help to meet.
Coaching is available to clients wherever they are located, since it is not licensure-bound the way therapy is. If you would like to talk it through, the contact page is the place to start.
Executive coaching is a confidential working relationship focused on how you lead. We look at the decisions in front of you, the pressures shaping them, and the habits that either steady you or wear you down. It is not advice-giving or consulting — it is structured thinking space with someone who will ask the questions you are too close to ask yourself.
Personal coaching centers on your inner life — alignment, patterns, and the way you move through the world. Business and executive coaching starts from your professional role: leadership priorities, difficult calls, team dynamics, boundaries, and transitions in responsibility or ownership. The personal often shows up inside the professional, but the frame here is your work.
Executives, business owners, founders, and organizational leaders who are carrying real weight and want somewhere thoughtful to think out loud. It suits people who are competent and self-aware, not people looking for a motivational push.
CEPA is a credential from the Exit Planning Institute. The curriculum covers exit planning concepts and how a business owner's business, personal, and financial goals fit together. For coaching, that education means ownership transitions and the question of "what comes next" are familiar territory — it does not mean I perform business valuations or give financial, tax, or legal advice.
No. Most conversations here have nothing to do with selling anything. The CEPA training simply means that if ownership, succession, or life after the business is on your mind, you will not have to explain the landscape from scratch.
Coaching and psychotherapy are separate services. Coaching is not mental health treatment, it does not diagnose or treat clinical conditions, and it is not a substitute for therapy. If what you are carrying is better served clinically, I will say so — therapy is available to clients residing in Florida.
Reach out through the contact page and tell me a little about your role and what you are navigating. We will use a consultation to talk through your goals and whether working together is the right fit.
Tell me about your role and the decisions in front of you, and we will find out whether this is the right kind of support.
Request a consultationLooking for personal coaching? Explore personal coaching with Sarah.