From 3 Employees To 170: What Comes After Success

What does it actually take to grow a company from two customers to 170 people — and then walk toward something else entirely? Jesse Schuhlein spent over two decades building Zabre Technologies before training as a coach through Coach Academy. In this episode, he and Nathalie get into staying comfortable with the unknown, his “compassionate witnessing” practice with a small men’s group, a decision-making framework he calls unit presidency, and how coach training rewired the way he gives feedback — plus a real debate on where AI helps coaching and where it can’t replace human connection.

Jesse spent most of his career as a mechanical engineer, joining a friend’s startup out of his living room in 2001 and helping grow it into Zabre Technologies, an engineering, manufacturing, and design company that now employs around 170 people. After years of finding fulfillment in that growth, the drive to keep scaling no longer excited him the way it once had, and he found himself drawn toward work with more direct human connection. Being coached himself led him to Coach Academy’s leadership and performance coaching program, where Nathalie was his teacher; he later trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS) as well. Jesse now works part-time at Zabre while coaching engineers, leaders, and entrepreneurs in technology companies, and runs small IFS groups. Find him at rechargecoaching.ca.