Workforce Voices: A conversation with Andre Taylor
André Taylor’s 40-plus year career began in banking and spans media, marketing, and management consulting, most of which has been building companies of his own. His consulting entails coaching a select group of entrepreneurs — work he finds especially meaningful, because of the ripple effect one business staying open has on the wider economy.
When someone asks André Taylor what he does for a living, the honest answer takes a minute. His career spans finance, real-time information, media, including cable, broadcast television, and online, and building a media-centric consulting company of his own. Today, through Taylor Insight Worldwide, he’s pioneered an approach that combines media, writing, speaking, and coaching as he guides entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and companies in the premium and luxury space.
The coaching piece is one he takes particular pride in, partly because of what it makes possible for the people he works with, and for the wider economy their businesses feed into. But under the title of business coach lives something people don’t always understand, and André has watched the word get stretched in ways that don’t quite hold up.
He remembers when it wasn’t a common phrase at all. In the mid to late 1990s, a well-known figure he was talking with over the phone said, “I like the word coach, I’m gonna use that.” Back then it still felt novel. Today it’s attached to fitness, finance, life, marriage, executive presence, and most things in between. The word has traveled so far from its original meaning that the actual work has gotten harder to see.
The fire that changed the plan
Andre’s path into this work didn’t run in a straight line. His plan since childhood was to be an entrepreneur. He picked up the success classic, Think and Grow Rich at around eight years old, from a house full of books and magazines, and something about the stories of Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie stuck with him. He kept reading through his teenage years, with a keen interest in biographies of people who had built something lasting.
Then, while he was in college and preparing to build his own venture on the side, when his family had just moved from their house in Brooklyn to a Queens apartment, the place caught fire. They lost nearly everything. Overnight, the plan to be his own boss became a plan to find a paycheck.
The opportunity that opened next came through a personal connection, but André was ready for it. A family acquaintance who was a vice president at Irving Trust Company made an introduction. André came in prepared, having spent years reading and studying how business worked, and he made a strong enough impression that the offer came almost before the interview began. That opened a decade of work inside banking, then equities at Paine Webber, then news and information at a company called Telerate, which Dow Jones later bought, and after that, Reuters. In each place, he was learning how business operated from the inside.
Later came Interactive Sports, a company he co-founded that brought streaming video technology to sports teams and branded online destinations before the market was ready for it. He and his partner eventually wound it down. By then, André had accumulated something he wanted to put to different use.
What entrepreneurs carry
A business coach, at its most useful, is a thinking partner. The job is to ask the right questions so the entrepreneur can find their own answer, and to bring enough lived experience to know which questions matter in the moment. Everything else that gets sold under the coaching label sits somewhere on a spectrum around that.
When André started Taylor Insight Worldwide, he thought he’d be helping entrepreneurs solve tactical problems: how to select the right product, build a team, and market their services. Over time he found that most of what really held people back wasn’t tactical at all.
The real weight of running a business is emotional. André describes it as a specific kind of solitude where confidence must continually be worked on. An entrepreneur usually sits in rooms where everyone else is planning a vacation or thinking about retirement, and they’re the only one thinking about how to stay relevant, how to adjust their skills as the business grows past what got it started, how to keep serving customers well while the business itself is changing shape underneath them.
He described how coaching actually works with an example.
Picture an entrepreneur a few years into building something they’ve poured themselves into. One tough week, and they call convinced everything is wrong: the clients don’t get it, the plan isn’t working, they can’t keep going. André asks a few careful questions. What did that client actually say? What did you offer them in response? Is what’s happening this week a pattern, or a single bad conversation? Almost always, the answers reveal something closer to a rough patch than to a collapse. To someone outside the business, that can look like failure. To someone who’s built one, it’s just part of the job.
“A coach is able to ask the right questions, to feel the person, to listen to circumstances, and help guide the individual to the right answers,” André said. What gets missed in the popular version of coaching is that reassurance, clarity, and honest recognition are often what an entrepreneur actually needs in a hard moment. The advice comes later. The listening comes first.
Signs of a coach worth your time
André is clear-eyed about what worries him in his field. The current climate pushes people to present themselves as experts before they’ve had the chance to earn it. There’s real pressure to have a take on everything, to package yourself as an authority, to teach something before you’ve lived through much of it. He’s the first to say there are things he learns from people newer to the field. What concerns him is the culture around expertise, and how easily being in the field and having a few experiences, gets mistaken for wisdom.
He tells the coaching clients who come to him worried about this exact thing that they don’t have to teach anything. “You’ve got a product you’re offering. Offer your product. Talk about your product. Talk about what went into it. Talk about why you do it. Talk about the value of it.” The push to become an influencer can undermine building a business that people trust.
For entrepreneurs trying to figure out whether a coach is worth their time, Andre’s own history offers a rough guide. Someone worth listening to has not only done the thing they’re now teaching you about, but they can describe the hard-fought battles that resulted in what they’ve learned and offer as lessons to you. They’ve built something, made calls that didn’t work, lost money, and had to figure out how to keep going. They ask more than they answer. They notice patterns their client can’t see from inside the situation. And they carry the scars that come from time in the arena.
He learned this lesson himself in a small moment that stuck. Early in his career, during an exit interview, he was angry at a colleague and ready to say so. The HR director simply said, “Don’t burn any bridges.” Four words. He listened, and he’s kept listening to that guidance ever since. That lesson resulted in him understanding how relationships evolve and how important it is to strengthen them no matter what has transpired. Good coaching often sounds that plain.
How one open business ripples outward
This all matters beyond any single coaching relationship. When an entrepreneur pushes through the kind of moment that feels catastrophic but isn’t, they don’t just save themselves. The business stays open, the people who work there keep their jobs, and the customers who rely on it keep getting served.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics, small businesses have generated roughly two out of every three net new jobs in the American economy over the past several decades. Those jobs only exist because the person running the business found a way to keep going long enough to hire someone, then someone else. The support that helps an entrepreneur survive a hard stretch is quietly part of that story.
That’s the connection Andre’s work draws on, even if he doesn’t put it in those terms. Helping one entrepreneur build the emotional durability to keep going is workforce development in its most direct form. The business that survives becomes an employer, a customer, a taxpayer, a link in a community’s economy. Coaching, done well, is part of what makes that possible, and it’s a piece of his portfolio he holds close for that reason.
André has been through his own version of nearly every hard moment he now sits, helping others with. Setbacks, ventures that didn’t work, money he lost. What kept him coming back, he says, was the habit he built early: reading biographies of people who had built something lasting, and paying close attention to the actual steps they took to get there rather than the story the world later told about them.
That’s what he now hands the entrepreneurs he coaches. Find people who’ve actually done the thing. Engage with them honestly. Listen. Store what you hear so you can test it later. Assume you have something to learn.
André Taylor is the founder and CEO of Taylor Insight Worldwide, where he delivers professional and personal development resources for clients wanting to improve their businesses and lives via engaging media and premier-level advising. André is the author of multiple books, most recently, The Premier You – Master Your 7 Zones of Purpose, Excellence, and Prosperity, with his framework covering seven critical areas for purposeful and sustainable success.
This conversation is part of Workforce Voices, a conversation series produced by BOUNCE highlighting the stories and experiences of people working across workforce and economic development ecosystems.
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