The coaching platform that took the corner-office perk and handed it to everyone else.
// hellosayge.com - New York, NY
The Feature
Open any org chart and you will find them - the capable, the promising, the almost-there. The people who do good work and could do great work if anyone were paying attention. For decades, the fix was reserved for a narrow tier at the top: the executive coach, that discreet advisor booked into a CEO's calendar and nobody else's. Coaching, in other words, was a status symbol. You got a coach because you had already made it.
Sayge was built on the suspicion that this had the logic backwards. Growth is not a reward for arriving - it is the thing that gets you there. So the company took the private, expensive, executives-only ritual and asked a deceptively simple question: why not everyone? Its answer became a tagline that doubled as a manifesto - "Coaching for the rest of us."
"Coach your people. Grow your business."
- Sayge's promise, in five wordsFounded in New York in 2017 by Jamie Bryan and Katie Stricker, Sayge is a professional-development platform that pairs everyday employees - not just leadership - with a personal, vetted coach. The mechanics are unglamorous on purpose: you get matched to a coach, you meet one-on-one on a biweekly cadence, and if the fit is wrong, you rematch. No mystique, no boardroom velvet rope. Just a standing appointment with someone whose entire job is helping you get better at yours.
Bryan came to the idea the way most good founders do - by living the problem. He spent thirteen years inside the pressure-cooker of top advertising agencies, including Ogilvy, DigitasLBi and Deep Focus, watching talented people flame out for want of the one thing the leadership floor took for granted: someone in their corner. Stricker, who runs the coaching side of the house as Chief Coaching Officer, brought the discipline of the craft. Together they set out to demystify and democratize a practice that had spent decades behind glass.
What You Can Actually Do With It
Employees are paired with a vetted, ICF-certified coach who is 100% dedicated to coaching - no side gigs, no dabblers. Wrong fit? Rematch anytime.
Live 1:1 virtual sessions on a regular cadence. The point isn't a one-off pep talk - it's the standing appointment that compounds.
Proprietary dashboards, 360 reviews and engagement reports turn soft conversations into data employers can act on - and prove ROI with.
Enterprise for 250+ employees, Small Business for 2-249, and Individual plans. Coaching that scales from a single seat to the whole org.
The Founders
Thirteen years in leadership roles at agencies including Ogilvy, DigitasLBi and Deep Focus before founding Sayge. Holds an Executive Certificate in Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University. Built the coach he wished he'd had earlier.
Leads Sayge's coaching practice - the standards, the vetting, the craft of making 1:1 development consistent across a whole community of coaches. The reason "quality at scale" isn't an oxymoron here.
The Arc
Sayge launches in New York with a mission to extend coaching beyond the executive suite.
Led by Right Side Capital Management, with Comeback Capital, EVPI and FiDi Ventures. Funds go to team, platform and analytics.
Employee-benefits platform Bennie acquires Sayge to offer 1:1 coaching at scale - coaching becomes a line in the benefits plan.
TOTAL CAPITAL RAISED - $1.75M SEED
Right Side Capital Management (lead) · Comeback Capital · EVPI · FiDi Ventures
"Never stop growing."
- Sayge's internal mantra, and the whole thesis in three wordsMarginalia
The Landscape
Sayge was never alone in the arena. BetterUp, CoachHub, Torch, Ezra and Bravely were all racing toward the same idea from different corners - that coaching belonged to more than the C-suite. What set Sayge apart was less a feature than a posture: the plainspoken insistence that this was for the rest of us, delivered without the enterprise-software pomp that usually smothers anything to do with "human capital."
Return, then, to the person from the top of this story - the capable one, quietly stuck, doing good work with no one paying attention. In the old arrangement, they waited. Maybe they got promoted into coaching, maybe they didn't. Sayge's contribution was to close that gap: to make the standing biweekly appointment, the dedicated coach, the sense that the company is invested in your becoming, something you could get without first climbing the ladder to deserve it.
When Bennie acquired the company in 2023 and folded coaching into its benefits suite, the shift became literal. Coaching stopped being a perk you earned and became a benefit you're offered - filed somewhere between the health plan and the 401(k). Which is, when you sit with it, exactly what Sayge had been arguing all along: that the person who's quietly stuck was never the exception. They were most of us.