In her coaching and her business, Adrienne helps individuals and businesses become leaders that make an impact on the world.

Adrienne’s passion for helping others to grow shows up in her business, where she provides leadership and development for individuals and organizations, and in her role as an associate coach for Strategic Coach®. This role she took on in 1995, becoming the company’s first associate coach in the United States.

With a background in adult education and experience as an entrepreneur, she says, “Strategic Coach has been a huge factor in the success of my business. One of my intentions when I go into the workshop room is that each client will receive exactly what they need to take their business to the next level. My goal is that the workshop will restore their clarity and confidence about the next quarter and give them the tools and strategies that lead to extraordinary results. These are lifelong learners who truly believe their future is bigger than their past. I have a great deal of admiration for them and for their willingness to continue to grow.”

Adrienne was born with the entrepreneurial instinct in her blood: “My first entrepreneurial venture was in the fourth grade,” she says. “I went to the pharmacy, bought cinnamon oil, soaked toothpicks in it, then went to school and sold packages of cinnamon toothpicks. I had quite a little business going in my elementary school until they didn’t want me marketing my cinnamon toothpicks anymore.” This pattern followed her through life, as she continued inventing and selling her own products and services without any outside support system.

Adrienne’s passion and talent for music carried her through an arts degree and post-graduate studies in Europe with flute masters James Galway and Jean-Pierre Rampal, but even as a musician, she approached her career with an entrepreneurial bent. She played in an orchestra but always maintained a business on the side, teaching music and booking ensemble performances.

Her work with young people opened her eyes to a bigger need: “I learned that a huge part of their ability to have confidence, to make their way, and to express themselves creatively had to do with the kind of home and parenting they had. I realized that if I wanted to have a bigger impact in the world, it was important for me to work with adults on their own transformation.” Once again, Adrienne started from scratch, developing a business to encompass the bigger contribution she wanted to make. “I realized music was not the only way I could have an impact, and that another platform could give me just as much joy and just as much passion, maybe even more—and it has.”

The result was a highly successful venture, Big Futures Inc., a business she founded with her husband, Patrick, 25 years ago to provide leadership and organizational development services to a variety of industries. When coaching, she finds herself drawing on this experience: “There hasn’t been one kind of business that’s shown up in my Strategic Coach workshop room that I haven’t had as a client at Big Futures. I’ve worked with the financial services industry, the medical industry, the manufacturing industry, and the retail industry, to name a few. Not only that, I’ve used Strategic Coach for 19 years to help build my own successful enterprise—so I think that gives me a tremendous edge in coaching.”

Adrienne is well aware of the dangers that come with being an entrepreneur. “My father worked in a very large, bureaucratic organization, but then became an entrepreneur at age fifty. That was a very stressful time in my family, and one of the things I learned from that is that if you don’t have a balance between your personal life and your business life, you’re at risk—at risk of your health, at risk of your family, at risk of dividing your attention, at risk of dividing yourself. Because of that, when I met Dan Sullivan, there was a real feeling of synergy. There was complete alignment between what he was saying and what I knew to be important. What I was hearing was that I had to be able to apply this learning to my life as well as my business—they were integrated. I knew I had to be in the Program.”

Over time, Adrienne and Patrick developed a line of products and services they called The Moon Project* (www.moonproject.ca). This brand tied together all the human and organizational development work they’d pioneered together. “We experimented with the metaphor of going to the moon. That was a very visible time in the 1960s, when a group of people came together and exceeded potential, exceeded what anyone believed could happen. Within an hour of using this metaphor with a new group, we were able to connect them to an inspiring vision of their future. The Moon Project became a sustainable platform that aligned their vision with the strategy and commitment that could make it happen. It just worked!"

Today, The Moon Project model is used by individuals and businesses as an organizing principle for designing goals and bringing about the learning, teamwork, and actions needed to achieve them. “People are talking about going to the moon,” says Adrienne. “Whether as an individual or a team, they’re inspired, they’re achieving extraordinary results, and they’re having an impact on the world!”

The Moon Project brand and related programs and products have given Adrienne’s company a much bigger presence in the marketplace and have led to an exponential increase in revenue. “But the really cool thing,” she says, “is that I’m loving what I’m doing. How great is that?” One of her greatest accomplishments has been the ability to develop this opportunity and yet maintain a personal life with no compromises. “I’ve been able to be a mom and be a mom who is present,” says Adrienne. “Strategic Coach has helped me grow a very successful business, but it’s also helped me grow a life. One of the things I’m most proud of is how aligned my business is to who I am and what my gifts are—and that was by design.”

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[Download] PDF version of Adrienne Duffy’s Coach Story.

*The Moon Project® is a registered trademark of Big Futures Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.