From coffee conversation to lead funnel: How a Professional Coach packaged 13 years of expertise in a day

Timi Csontos has been a professional coach and culture consultant since 2017 and a trainer for 13 years. In that time she has worked with more than 40 organisations and logged 750+ coaching hours. She knows her subject well enough to answer questions before they are asked.

Since 2017, people exploring a coaching career have been finding their way to her through referrals, speaking engagements and mutual contacts, and they all ask the same questions. What is coaching, really, and how is it different from therapy or mentoring? Does ICF accreditation matter? Can you make a living from it? What does the early career phase look like?

Timi loves these conversations. She describes herself as a giver by instinct, someone who genuinely enjoys mentoring people considering the same path she has taken. But a lot of her time and energy was spent covering the same ground dozens of times a year, making these conversations more and more costly.

She had the idea to package it years ago. She considered recording a video, but it never happened. She does not enjoy being on camera, and the motivation to sit down and produce something never quite arrived. A plan to record a Zoom call with someone asking the typical questions also seemed unscalable. She knew the knowledge was worth sharing. She just could not find a format that made it feel worth sitting down to do.

A course offered something a video could not: structure the learner can navigate at their own pace, content they can return to and re-read as well as a format that lets people spend as much time as they need on each section. For Timi, whose professional background is in adult learning and facilitation, this was crucial. She thinks in structures and knows how people learn. A course was simply a better container for the content she had in mind.

The source material was there for her to build a course from. She had delivered a webinar on exactly this topic and had a slide deck from it, so she uploaded it to Coursebox. Within minutes, it had generated a fully structured course with chapters and suggestions for how to make each section more interactive. Coursebox had faithfully recreated her slides in a course format.

The generated content was mostly accurate, though a handful of facts needed correcting, which she expected. What she did not expect was what Coursebox added. The AI introduced angles and perspectives she had not included in the original deck. She worked those additions into the course alongside her own thinking, treating them not as 'corrections' to her expertise but as extensions of it.

Because everything in Coursebox is fully editable, the final course reflects her voice and her structure throughout. Wherever the generated content did not quite capture her meaning, she adjusted it. Where the sequencing did not follow her logic, she reorganised it. The platform gave her a great starting point and her expertise moulded the final output

The course is called 'From Curious to Coach' and on her coach training website, Timi describes it simply as 'the conversation I'd have with you over coffee, turned into a course.' Its purpose is to answer the questions she hears most often: what coaching actually is, whether someone is ready to pursue it, how ICF credentialing works, and what to pay attention to in the early stages of a coaching career.

Access is managed by signups rather than open enrolment, a deliberate choice. She wants to know who is interested so she can follow up personally. The email step functions as the first move in a 3-stage journey she has designed around the course.

Stage 1. Free mini-course, 'From Curious to Coach'. Covers the foundational questions at the learner's own pace, no Timi required.

Stage 2. Free 1:1 call with Timi. Booked by anyone who finishes the course and wants to go deeper, so the conversation starts somewhere meaningful.

Stage 3. Introduction to Coach Training EDU. Entered only after a relationship is established and the person's needs are clear.

By the time someone books the Stage 2 call, they have already been through the course and understand the basics. The conversation can start froma better vantage point rather than covering going through the basics every time. Coach Training EDU enters the picture only after that relationship has been established and the person's needs are clearer.

The course is live. Timi is sharing it with her existing network by email and through personal conversations, collecting early feedback and refining the content before she opens it up more widely.

She plans to record a personal video introduction for the opening and spend another few focused hours on the content once she has heard from the first wave of learners. She also knows what she would do differently if starting again: upload a transcript of a real conversation alongside the slide deck, since the AI generates better, more specific content when the source material includes natural speech rather than just bullet points.

What already exists is the infrastructure: a free, professionally structured course that handles the foundational questions she used to answer one coffee at a time, and a clear 3-stage path that can move someone from curious to enrolled in formal coaching education, without Timi needing to be present at every step.