--- title: "About me" id: "33" type: "page" slug: "about-me" published_at: "2024-08-20T06:11:11+00:00" modified_at: "2026-08-19T15:05:06+00:00" url: "https://jakesmolarek.com/about-me/" markdown_url: "https://jakesmolarek.com/about-me.md" excerpt: "A Few Things Worth Knowing I’m a business coach and entrepreneur. I’ve spent more than 22 years building businesses and 18 years coaching one-to-one. Over those 18 years, I’ve spent more than 27,000 hours coaching and worked with more than..." --- # About me ## A Few Things Worth Knowing I’m a business coach and entrepreneur. I’ve spent more than 22 years building businesses and 18 years coaching one-to-one. Over those 18 years, I’ve spent more than 27,000 hours coaching and worked with more than 1,600 clients. I am the first choice for founders, business owners, CEOs and senior leaders whose decisions affect companies, teams and livelihoods. They come to me because I say what needs saying, especially when nobody else will. I’m based in Mayfair, London, where I meet many of my clients in person. Face-to-face coaching is my preference, and clients travel to see me from across the UK and internationally. Zoom is there when distance makes meeting in person impractical. A lot of my clients are already excellent at what they do. They know their companies, their markets and their people. What they value is having someone outside their business to think out loud with, pressure-test a difficult decision, get a straight answer and see something they have become too close to see clearly. Founders can be surrounded by people all day and still have very few people they can speak completely freely with. My work moves between business strategy, leadership, decision-making, accountability and the person behind all of it. The person making the decisions always comes into the room with the business. Pressure, confidence, ego, health, relationships and energy all affect judgement. They show up in decisions, behaviour and ultimately in the business. I often explain coaching through football. You can know your business better than anyone and still only see the part of the pitch you’re standing on. Someone outside it can see more of the field and sometimes spot what you cannot from where you’re standing. I hold myself to the same standard. I still work with coaches and mentors because they see things I miss. ![Jake Smolarek - about me](https://jakesmolarek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/JakeSmolarek_about-me.webp) ### Business Came First My coaching practice is my main business and takes up most of my time. I also own a performance marketing agency specialising in SEO, paid media and AI visibility. I own a lead generation business serving the construction industry too. Staying involved in both keeps me close to the commercial reality my clients deal with every day. Over more than 22 years, I’ve built and operated businesses across construction, PR, digital marketing, technology and coaching. Construction became one of the largest businesses I built and taught me early what responsibility feels like when there are clients to win, people to pay, problems to solve and nobody above you to make the final decision. One of the things I’m proudest of building made very little money. I founded a UK non-profit that grew from 2 volunteers to more than 600 and worked alongside organisations including Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Football Association, BBC, ITV and the Mayor of London’s Office. It taught me more about leadership, culture and people than many commercial ventures ever could. The road here was hardly clean. I came to the UK from Poland in 2004 with about £150, limited English and no useful network. Four years later, during the financial crisis, I lost a business and went bankrupt. Since then I’ve made good decisions, expensive decisions and a few decisions I would quite happily never repeat. That experience shapes how I coach today. I care about judgement, people, timing and execution because those are the things that still matter when the meeting ends and the decision becomes yours. Over the years, I’ve coached people at very different stages of business, from owners building their first serious company to founders and senior leaders responsible for large teams, significant revenue and expensive decisions. ### A Few Raw Things About Me I tend to stay pretty calm when things get complicated. I like to understand what is actually going on, look at the options and then make the decision. Pressure on its own has never been a particularly good reason for me to move faster. According to the Myers-Briggs personality test, I’m an INTJ. I sometimes use personality tests in my coaching too, although I see them as tools rather than definitive answers about who someone is. Some parts of the INTJ profile fit me very well. I notice patterns quickly. I pay attention to inconsistencies, small details and sometimes to what somebody has not said. When something genuinely interests me, I tend to go deep. A surface-level answer normally just creates another ten questions. I use a whiteboard a lot. If something is complicated, I’d rather put it in front of us and work through it properly than talk around it for an hour. A few of my clients had never used a whiteboard before working with me and ended up buying their own. I like planning and I like strategy. I also play video games, particularly strategy games. Not every game does it for me, but give me something with a lot of moving parts, decisions and long-term consequences and I can happily disappear into it for hours. I also love travelling and I usually plan things well in advance. Sometimes very well in advance. I once booked a restaurant table almost a year ahead. That probably tells you quite a lot about me. One principle has stayed with me for years: *Learn. Practice. Master. Become a F**cking Legend. It reflects how I approach things I genuinely want to become good at. Learn it, practise it, master it and keep pushing. I’m also perfectly comfortable saying “I don’t know”. There are things I know extremely well and plenty of things I don’t. Pretending otherwise has never made much sense to me. And I’m not quite as serious as some of my photographs make me look. My phone wallpaper is currently a picture of me sitting with a cat like Don Corleone. There is a story behind it. ******Let’s get to know each othEr****** Book your ****complimentary**** initial consultation session! [Get in touch](#contact) I have spoken at [https://www.ox.ac.uk/](https://www.ox.ac.uk/) [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/) [https://www.gre.ac.uk/](https://www.gre.ac.uk/) [http://www.bbk.ac.uk/](http://www.bbk.ac.uk/) [https://www.uwl.ac.uk/](https://www.uwl.ac.uk/) [https://www.lse.ac.uk/](https://www.lse.ac.uk/) [https://www.ox.ac.uk/](https://www.ox.ac.uk/) [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/) [https://www.gre.ac.uk/](https://www.gre.ac.uk/) [http://www.bbk.ac.uk/](http://www.bbk.ac.uk/) [https://www.uwl.ac.uk/](https://www.uwl.ac.uk/) [https://www.lse.ac.uk/](https://www.lse.ac.uk/) Contact Me & Book Your Complimentary Consultation Session address Davies Street, Mayfair, London W1K phone number Mobile: [+44 7738 514 600](tel:+447738514600) email [[email protected]](/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#6d04030b022d070c06081e0002010c1f0806430e0200)