The CoA Team

My dream was to become an English Teacher, despite my parents ambition for me to be a corporate CFO, and this was based on my passion to learn and develop myself and others. After graduating in Finance at University, and completing 5 years in multinational corporations in the finance department, I made the decision to change my career path and venture into the amazing world of HR – my true destiny.

Now fully established working in HR across international teams in different location with diverse cultures, I have decided to dive further into the world of coaching and Neuro-Linguistic Programming to support people to be stronger, more confident and ultimately live a happier life.

Andrew is a 25+ year seasoned leadership development specialist. Based in Ireland, he is a certified ICF Coach and his focus is on culture change and leadership development within global organisations.

He started his career at BMW and later moved to Vodafone Global where he joined the Mergers & Acquisitions Team. In both organizations he successfully created culture change programs and coached leaders to lead diverse and international teams.

His education in Occupational Psychology and experience in HR have equipped him well to address all areas of behaviour change. Andrew also speaks at international conferences and delivers in-company sessions on topics such as increasing employee effectiveness and engagement.

Dominik is a Peak Performance Executive Coach specializing in “POWER-Identity”. During his long international career as management consultant, Media-CFO & entrepreneur, he recognized the critical differences between stressed unproductive people and successful fulfilled people. As a Tony Robbins certified trainer and a peak performance coach, he shows motivated ambitious C-level executives how to implement these tried-and-tested strategies for lasting long-term success, how to build powerful teams and motivate them to achieve peak performance. Since 2019, he has successfully led participants to break through any personal limitations during a variety of seminars, online as well as in person. In his free time, he continuously strives for new challenges and is passionate about biohacking, breathing techniques and ice-baths.

Kathrin is fluent in German, English and Spanish language and specializes in the fields of Communication, Leadership Development, Personal Profiling, Health and Personal Growth. She has a passion for applied psychology and body language and practices yoga and meditation. When the weather permits, you can find her out in nature enjoying a cold ice bath and breathing her way back to warmth.

Her diverse corporate and entrepreneurial background, as well as her certification as international coach and trainer in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) allow her to combine hands-on business experience, state of the art training practices and a personalized coaching approach across multiple cultures and regions. Ask her about the times she worked as a Tour Director for North American High School students travelling all over Europe and find out why control the controllable (…and then find a way to solve whatever else is going wrong) has become one of her guiding principles and how she’s using it in day-to-day business to thrive and to relax.

For over 12 years, Nina has been a successful entrepreneur and Managing Director of a Property and Project Development company with 40 employees, responsible for major projects around Cologne. She specialises in family business transitions and personal development coaching for individuals and teams alike.

Her specialties are the amount of years of professional experience on the one hand and the intensive coaching, NLP and hypnosis training on the other hand. Nina has an unfalteringly motivational approach to coaching, and loves nothing more than teasing out and strengthening the hidden skills and talents of people she works with. Her interests are personality development, fitness and sport, piano and her dog Bobby.

Andreas has successfully founded and managed various startups for 6 years. In the course of developing his own employees, he has been intensively involved in coaching, human resource development and personal development.

This combined with his burning interest in the human psyche and why we do what we do, led him in 2019 to decide to turn this passion into his new profession.

In addition to focusing on coaching leaders from startups and scale-ups, he specializes in life coaching and personal development. His extensive tool box helps him to flexibly and individually address the wishes and goals of his clients. His goal for each session is to provide maximum value to the client.

Andreas interests are psychology, entrepreneurship and sports.

Barbara Seipel is a certified Hypno-Master Coach and has gained over 15 years of experience as Director Trademarketing in an international telco-company. During that time she discovered her passion for *Leadership in Change-Situations, Mergers or reorganizations* and *Coaching* and professionalized her competencies in those fields. As a coach she supports you or your team in all aspects of transfomation, mergers of departments and companies, or new ways of working. Her coaching approach is dynamic, efficient and holistic due to the mixture of leadership skills, corporate experience and Coaching-, NLP- and Hypnosis-techniques. With positive energy and humour she creates a confident and relaxed atmosphere in her sessions where realizing changes becomes easier. Barbara is married, has 2 kids and loves travelling, photography and sports.

Leonie has been in the digital industry for over 12 years. For many years, she accompanied well-known brands on their way into e-commerce at Amazon, and later specialized as a digital and innovation consultant in building and empowering innovation teams, especially in the German SME sector. She always follows her very personal mission: to make people enjoy their work and motivate them to achieve better results. Since 2021, she has combined her personal purpose with her duties as Chief Executive Officer of the CoA Academy. Her cheerfulness and her openness help her to inspire and captivate the people around her. She is also a passionate author, snowboarder, and mountain climber.

Before Stéphanie became a professional EMCC certified coach, she had various leadership positions during the last 20 years, e.g. as marketing director, category management director and strategy director in an international FMCG company – a strong successful career in team and project management. She is totally convinced that the notion of performance in a company is linked to the relationship to oneself, to the relationship with others and to collective intelligence. And all of that is only possible if you have leaders or managers with the right level of leadership. Becoming an executive coach enabled her to put her experience and her knowledge to support managers in developing their leadership skills. She has developed her own specific approach, a mix of emotional and operational tools, to have quick positive results. Passionate about the human psyche, she is actually in cycle 2 to become a Gestalt practician in EPG (Ecole Parisienne de Gestalt)

Her personal interests are trekking (she has already done half of the Compostelle trail), and healthy/organic food (she is president of a food cooperative association with 300 members and a grocery shop). Her motto is: “Alone, I go fast; together, we go far”

Thorben Schütt has been an entrepreneur since 2004 and has founded 4 companies since then. In his role as founder and managing director, he knows the importance of communication skills and condition management. With many years of experience from his own companies, he supports entrepreneurs and managers as a coach and mentor.
His life purpose: “I empower people to live healthy, relaxed and happy lifes!”
He is a NLP Master and Advanced Hypnotic Practitioner of the Society of NLP and works as a volunteer mentor in the Entrepreneurs`Organization.

He likes to spend his free time with his wife, their two children and Bo, his Australian Shepherd. Traveling, sports and photography are hobbies that, in addition to family, provide a balance.

Alena has 10 years of experience in customer service. She started off as a trainee in a hotel and ended up in Business Development. Her blue energy and communicative green nature make her love being a hub of information for teams, coordinating projects and processes. She now lives her passion for supporting people as CoA’s Chief of Customer Success. You will find her most of the time in our CoA Community!

Ali started his career in 2015 working as a Chapter Manager for YPO Pakistan, later at YPO international. At YPO he got a chance to work with the top business leaders and travel the world. He absolutely loves traveling! In Fact he loves it so much that in 2018 he decided to move to Germany to pursue his Msc degree in Economics! In March 2021 Ali completed his masters and joined CoA Academy as a Process Automation Manager. At CoA, Ali helps in process optimization and automation. Being a problem solver by nature he enjoys it quite a lot. Ali speaks 4 languages: English, German, Hindi and Urdu. He has been learning German for the last 3 years – it’s not fluent yet, but he is learning all the time.

Sarah is a typical “something with media” millennial: She started out studying communications, switched to marketing and music business, and during that time worked as a journalist, among other things. It wasn’t until the end of her studies that she found exactly the profession she feels at home in: content management. After a brief time in project management, she now works in this field independently since the beginning of 2021.

Her diverse experience makes it easier for her to work with equally diverse companies, or the people behind them. She supports the CoA Academy with entertaining content and informative texts. She is also co-author of the follow-up book to Chief of Anything – one of her biggest and most exciting projects to date.

Andy is our Global award-winning Creative Director and self-proclaimed ‘Chief Colouring-In Guy’, Andy partners with us here at CoA Academy and is also a founding partner of Origami, a strategic brand agency based in Auckland, New Zealand. Andy has worked with CoA Founder Michael Portz for over 13 years on establishing kick-ass brands in their sectors such as Vodafone Qatar, Alto Analytics, Teva and Emoción.

Like great leadership, Andy’s guiding force is the unshakeable belief that the most effective creative can only be produced if the right strategic thinking is in place first.

Lars is an IT specialist for application development and loves to use technology to advance companies and people. He is also passionate about personal development, as the best technology can only fully unfold its effect if you don’t work against it yourself. He has more than 15 years of experience in this field and makes it a point to always go through the world with open eyes, ears and heart and to develop himself in the process. He loves to spend his free time with his son.