Craig Laughlin Jr is the founder of Business Coach Launchpad and creator of the Business Coach Operating System™. Business advisor. Certified Warrior Trainer. The man behind a mission to put a documented operating system into the hands of every business coach who is serious about building a real practice.
The $500 epiphany. The volleyball. Tennessee. Twenty-five years of organized scar tissue turned into a system.
Craig started his career at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked his way up, and was promoted to run the London office. He then moved to BGC Partners for another two years overseas before coming back stateside. After that came a full HubSpot Partner agency in downtown St. Petersburg. He was deliberately the lowest-paid person on his leadership team, because he valued his team’s expertise and made sure they felt it. What he did not yet realize was that while he was running the agency, he was also coaching every client in it, and giving that away for free.
What came after those years is the system. Every step, every template, every decision rule came from something that broke. The full story is below.
A client needed a spreadsheet fixed. Craig fixed it. The client said thanks. Craig threw out a number as a throwaway line: “Cool, that’ll be $500.” The client didn’t laugh. “Can you invoice me?” No hesitation. He was already a business coach. He just hadn’t been calling it that or charging for it. That was the first moment the path became visible.
Craig didn’t become a business coach through training.
He became one accidentally, inside an agency,
while fixing a client’s spreadsheet.
The ability was never the missing piece.
The system was.
That’s not just Craig’s story. If you’re reading this page, there’s a good chance it’s yours too.
Maybe you’re a year in with a handful of clients and no documented process for what happens next. Maybe you’ve been in your industry for twenty years and you’re realizing the expertise you’ve been giving away for free is worth real money. Maybe you’re a professional looking to add business coaching to what you already do. Or maybe you’re starting from scratch and you want to do it right the first time. Whatever brought you to this page, the gap is the same: real ability, no infrastructure to turn it into a consistent practice.
That gap is exactly what Craig set out to close. Every step, every template, every decision rule inside BCOS came from a real failure or a real lesson. The full arc of how it got built is the story below.
He came home. Went straight to his home office. His stepdaughter Lydia knocked on the door. She asked if they could go outside and bump the volleyball. He said: “Absolutely. Just give me one more hour.” One hour became three. Three became five. He missed dinner. The sun went down. The volleyball sat untouched in the backyard.
That night on the edge of his bed, her face kept coming back to him. Not what she said. Her smile. The one she gave him when she asked. A 14-year-old who had already learned not to expect him to keep his word. He had been home. He just had not been there. And she had quietly adjusted her expectations around that fact without him ever noticing it was happening.
This moment did not make him a business coach. It launched the question: what has to change? That question launched everything that came after.
The Nolichucky River, Jonesborough, Tennessee
After his agency partner dissolved the entity and his third marriage ended, Craig found himself in Port St. Lucie, Florida, in a situation that had unraveled almost immediately. Then a call came from Michael Batenburg at Back2Basics Adventures Outdoor Ministries in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Michael said: “I think you should come to Tennessee.” Craig laughed. He had never thought about Tennessee. But he prayed on it. The answer came clearly enough that the next morning he packed what he could fit in his truck, loaded up his dog, Penny, and drove north.
The ministry sits on fifty acres bordering the Cherokee National Forest. About a mile down the road was a house right on the shore of the Nolichucky River, and that is where Craig landed for three months. Just him, God, his work, and that river rolling behind him. He caught fish and took calls and organized everything he had built, everything that had broken, and everything he had learned into the templates and frameworks that would become BCOS.
Jessica had been a freshman at Hartwick College in 1999 when Craig was a junior. He had a crush on her, but she was dating the kid across the hall who was a friend, and Craig’s values kept him from acting on it or saying a word to anyone. She transferred schools the following year and they lost touch entirely. They reconnected online years later, both going through divorces. During the Tennessee season, Craig prayed about who to stay in contact with, and she was the one person outside of Michael, Pamela, and Jonathan at the ministry that God approved. Deep calls. Real conversations. She knew everything about him, including what he was most ashamed of, and she did not leave. She came to visit for a hiking trip near the end of those three months. When she stepped out of the car and they hugged for the first time since 1999, the comfort and the knowing were still there, amplified. “And He brought her to the man.” Genesis 2:22 They married July 4, 2023, in that same river behind the house, with Michael and Pamela and Jonathan. Just the five of them. Under God.
Jess is co-founder and 50/50 partner in BCL
BCOS is Craig’s build. His experience, his research, his years of consequence organized into frameworks. What Jess brought when she stepped into the business was design precision, editorial sharpness, and a belief in the mission that never wavered. Her support and encouragement accelerated the work. Her execution turned working frameworks into assets that look the way a premium operating system should look. She is a certified PMP, copywriter, editor, and creative director. Jessica was already in Alexandria. Craig moved there after the wedding on July 9, 2023, and they have worked together every day since.
After settling in Alexandria, Craig went through the Warrior Trainer certification under Garrett J. White. Garrett provided the science, the frameworks, and the research behind the transformation methodology. Craig built the art, the movement, and the application of those frameworks to his own story and to the men he is now training through TruthWarrior.
The JumpStart 12 is a structured benchmarking assessment. It works through all 12 profit levers in a business, asking five or more targeted questions per lever to establish exactly where the business owner stands today. Then it maps the profit potential across those levers using 3 to 7 percent improvements in each area, compounded. The software generates a step-by-step coaching roadmap for every lever. It is typically a two-hour engagement, and the outputs it produces are grounded in a real operational picture of the business, not estimates.
Every BCL coach has access to this inside the Profit Impact Software Suite. The same diagnostic structure, the same compounding math, whether the business in front of you generates $132,000 a year or $1.2 million.
† Results from coaches in the BCL partner network. Individual outcomes vary based on implementation, market conditions, and client effort. These figures represent identified profit potential from grounded assessments, not guaranteed results.
Craig runs a live training called The System Behind $25–50K/Month. He covers the three beliefs that keep business coaches stuck, broke, and small, and shows exactly how the system fixes each one. No pitch until the end. No filler. The kind of session where you take notes and realize halfway through that you’ve been solving the wrong problem.
Register for the Next SessionWhat Craig covers
Live sessions run monthly. Replay access included for all registrants.
Alongside building the operating system for business coaches and developing a generation of coaches aligned with the mission, Craig is building a parallel men’s movement. TruthWarrior is for men who want to pursue God’s truth, dismantle the lies installed by a broken childhood or a failed relationship, and become the man their family needs and their purpose demands.
After settling in Alexandria, Craig completed the Warrior Trainer certification under Garrett J. White. Garrett built the science behind the transformation methodology, the research, and the frameworks that Craig now trains from. Craig built the art, the movement, and the application of those frameworks to his own story. TruthWarrior is what came out of that process.
Craig’s Awakening was the volleyball. His Submitting was Tennessee. His Becoming was the daily work of rebuilding, the certification, and the life he and Jess built together in Alexandria. His Liberating is BCL, BCOS, and the coaches he is training to go build practices that hold.
Join the TruthWarrior Interest ListThe Four Domains
Truth is first because pursuing God’s Truth is what enables everything else. When that foundation is right, the other three follow.
Craig didn’t build BCL because he saw a market opportunity. He built it because he spent years operating without a documented system in both his business and his relationships, and he watched that gap collapse everything at the same time, for the same reason. He knows what it feels like to be talented enough to produce real results and still not have the infrastructure to make those results consistent, predictable, or scalable.
BCL exists so coaches like you don’t have to learn that the hard way. Not because coaching is hard. Building a coaching practice without an operating system is. Those are not the same problem, and they do not have the same solution.
The business coach who runs a documented system doesn’t wake up Monday wondering where the next client comes from. They know. They have a pipeline built on a repeatable process. They close the laptop at the same time every day because the system is running, not because they gave up. Their clients stay, refer, and tell their colleagues to call. And when their spouse asks how the practice is going, the answer is a number and a timeline, not a feeling. That coach exists. BCOS builds them.
of coaches who complete the BCOS Business Diagnostic identify at least one critical gap costing them $4,600 or more per month in unrealized revenue.
Five minutes. Free. A clear picture of exactly where your practice stands and what to fix first.
What the Diagnostic Covers