Bas Smeets

For nine years, I sat in a marketing and sales career that looked great on paper but felt completely wrong. I was good at it, got promoted, hit targets. And every Monday morning, I dreaded walking through that door. I didn't know what I wanted instead. I just knew it wasn't this.

That stuck feeling is what eventually pulled me toward coaching. Self-development, psychology, and eastern philosophy had always been my thing. Even as a kid, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to study psychology or IT. Turns out, I'd end up doing both.

I retrained as a career coach and started The Passion Profile, where I developed the Identity Alignment Method, a framework that helps professionals figure out not just what to do, but who they are when work actually fits. Over 15 years, I've used it to help more than 1,200 people navigate career transitions. What started as a solo practice grew into a coaching company with 40 coaches across the Netherlands.

Along the way, I got to share this work on Dutch national television and in interviews with several major newspapers. But the part I'm most proud of isn't the media, it's watching coaches on my team find their own voice and build practices they love.

Running that company taught me something else: coaches are incredible at what they do in a session, but most struggle with visibility. LinkedIn was the obvious place to show up, but the same questions kept coming up. What do I write about today? How do I stay consistent without spending half my day on two posts? I watched my own team wrestle with this daily.

I've always been a tool geek. I've built businesses, scaled them, trained coaches on how to build theirs. But the tools we needed didn't exist. Everything out there was generic. Built for marketers, salespeople, agencies. Nothing was designed for how coaches think, write, and connect with people.

So I built it myself. CoachCraft started as an internal tool for my own team, and it worked. Coaches who had been stuck started publishing consistently. Their content actually sounded like them. Now I'm making it available to coaches everywhere, because this problem isn't unique to my team. It's the biggest visibility bottleneck in the coaching industry.