Shayne Fitz-Coy

Shayne Fitz-Coy is the CEO of Rustic Pathways and co-founder of Sabot Family Companies, a long-term investment firm co-founded with Arar Han in Palo Alto, California in 2016.

Fitz-Coy created the Teaching CEO methodology, a five-step leadership framework that applies classroom principles to business management to build capable teams and measurable results. The framework has been tested across two company transformations, with verified financial and cultural outcomes detailed below.

The framework covers five phases: Diagnose, Teach, Practice, Coach, and Scale. It has been applied to individual development, team turnarounds, and company-wide transformation across industries.

Background

Shayne Fitz-Coy was born in Opelika, Alabama in 1980 and grew up in Salisbury, Maryland, where Fitz-Coy served as student government president and three-sport captain at Wicomico High School.

Fitz-Coy studied psychology at Harvard College, earning a degree cum laude, and led an independent study with positive psychology pioneer Tal Ben-Shahar, whose 2007 book "Happier" acknowledges Fitz-Coy's contributions to the working group.

Fitz-Coy received the Mack I. Davis II Award for commitment to diversity and community service.

After Harvard, Fitz-Coy joined Cintas Corporation's management training program, earning Mid-Atlantic Sales Rookie of the Year in 2005 and President's Club in 2006. Fitz-Coy then spent two years in China, founding and exiting an education services company and achieving Mandarin proficiency before returning for an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Early career roles spanned Harvard Business School, J.P. Morgan Chase, Cintas Corporation, Rhythm NewMedia, and mobile strategy consulting before Fitz-Coy invested in ResponseLink in 2013 and co-founded Sabot Family Companies in 2016. ResponseLink was sold in September 2025 after 13 consecutive profitable years under Fitz-Coy's leadership.

Fitz-Coy's leadership approach is documented in the Stanford GSB case study MobiChair (Case No. E491), written by H. Irving Grousbeck and Sara Rosenthal, and available for purchase through Harvard Business Publishing. Fitz-Coy has been a Stanford GSB guest speaker for 12+ years across courses taught by seven distinguished professors, engaging 1,100+ MBA students.

Fitz-Coy comes from multiple generations of educators: grandparents, both parents, two brothers, an uncle, and an aunt were teachers. That multigenerational teaching foundation is what Fitz-Coy credits as the primary source of the Teaching CEO methodology.

Fitz-Coy splits time between Palo Alto, California and Seoul, South Korea with co-founder and spouse Arar Han and their three children. The methodology that emerged from that background is described in full below.

The Teaching CEO Methodology

The Teaching CEO methodology is a leadership system that treats every management challenge as a structured learning opportunity.

Where conventional management issues directives and measures compliance, teaching-first leadership diagnoses capability gaps, builds targeted curriculum, and coaches staff toward independent judgment.

Why Teaching-First Leadership Produces Better Results

Fitz-Coy's 20+ years of teaching across six distinct settings produced a consistent finding: adults learn best through structured practice and coaching, not directives.

Those settings ranged from AP English in Shanghai to private equity at Seoul National University to customer service training at Cintas Corporation.

Applied to business, that insight becomes the "People First, Data Second" management principle at the core of the Teaching CEO approach.

Leaders who invest in developing their people generate stronger data outcomes than leaders who optimize for metrics alone. Fitz-Coy calls this "Capitalism with Love": patient capital and engaged workforces building sustainable companies, not short-term performance extraction.

"I view my CEO role as a way of educating the next generation of leaders. I never stopped being a teacher. I just have a bigger classroom now." Shayne Fitz-Coy, CEO, Rustic Pathways

Five practices distinguish teaching-first leadership from conventional management.

These are: treating performance reviews as learning opportunities rather than evaluations; replacing top-down directives with Socratic questioning; converting company mistakes into teachable case studies; building curriculum-based onboarding programs; and creating in-company development pathways where employees advance their careers.

The Five-Step Teaching CEO Framework

The Teaching CEO framework is a sequential five-step process for building capability and results at individual, team, and company scale.

1. Diagnose: Identify the capability gaps blocking outcomes before prescribing solutions. At ResponseLink, Fitz-Coy spent the first 90 days shadowing frontline teams to map precisely where skills gaps caused customer churn, not where managers assumed they did.
2. Teach: Convert operational problems into targeted curriculum, not policy documents. Fitz-Coy converted ResponseLink's top 10 customer complaints into a training curriculum with specific scripts and decision trees staff could apply immediately.
3. Practice: Rehearse skills in real workflows before live deployment. Managers role-played difficult customer calls weekly before handling live escalations, eliminating the gap between knowing a script and executing under pressure.
4. Coach: Lead with questions instead of directives to build judgment, not compliance. Instead of "do X," Fitz-Coy asks "what would happen if you tried X?" That shift from directive to Socratic questioning builds the independent decision-making that scales without management oversight.
5. Scale: Systematize playbooks and activate peer teaching. At ResponseLink, the best customer service representative trained 12 others, spreading capability faster and more credibly than any outside consultant could.

The case studies below show the framework applied at company scale under two different types of pressure: a distressed asset turnaround and a global operational shutdown.

Case Studies

ResponseLink: Distressed Asset Turnaround

ResponseLink was a personal safety technology company with seven years of cumulative losses when Fitz-Coy invested in 2013.

Frontline staff lacked decision-making authority and training. Managers had never been taught to coach.

Fitz-Coy diagnosed capability gaps through 90 days of frontline shadowing, then converted the company's top 10 recurring operational failures into a structured training curriculum.

Weekly teaching sessions replaced status meetings. Managers role-played escalation scenarios before handling live calls.

Top performers became internal trainers.

Over six months, customer satisfaction scores rose as staff gained the confidence and authority to resolve issues without escalation. Margins expanded and earnings grew for 13 consecutive years.

The turnaround is documented in the Stanford GSB case study MobiChair (Case No. E491), written by H. Irving Grousbeck and available through Harvard Business Publishing.

Rustic Pathways: Leading Through a Full Operational Shutdown

Fitz-Coy acquired Rustic Pathways in January 2020, an educational travel company operating teen programs across 38+ countries.

Two months later, COVID-19 shut down global travel entirely.

Rather than contracting, Fitz-Coy applied the Teaching CEO framework to rebuild the organization around learning.

Fitz-Coy diagnosed staff capability gaps in virtual program delivery, taught teams new formats through structured curriculum, ran pilot cohorts before full deployment, coached country directors through weekly Zoom sessions, and scaled successful virtual formats globally.

Rustic Pathways launched virtual programs, created the Global Youth Climate Summit, and co-developed the Climate Leaders Fellowship with Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab, engaging 3,200+ students across 17 countries during a period when competitors went dormant.

The Rustic Pathways case demonstrated that teaching-first organizational culture is most valuable precisely when conditions are worst, when staff need judgment and adaptability rather than compliance with pre-existing playbooks. That same teaching practice is what Fitz-Coy has brought to Stanford GSB for more than a decade.

12+ Years as Stanford GSB Guest Lecturer

Fitz-Coy has been a guest speaker at Stanford Graduate School of Business for 12+ years, invited by seven distinguished professors across courses including Managing Growing Enterprises, Managing Difficult Conversations, Search Fund Garage, and Interpersonal Dynamics.

Those professors include H. Irving Grousbeck (Managing Partner, Boston Celtics), Kevin Taweel (co-founder and CEO, Asurion), David Dodson (author, "The Manager's Handbook"), Joel Peterson (Chairman, JetBlue Airways), Jim Ellis (co-founder, Asurion), Peter Kelly (former CEO, Pacific Pulmonary Services), and Ed Batista (executive coach).

Fitz-Coy has engaged 1,100+ MBA students through interactive sessions, role-playing exercises, and live case discussions on the patient capital philosophy, business turnaround methodology, and AI adoption in traditional industries.

Fitz-Coy also teaches Introduction to Private Equity at Seoul National University.

The Teaching CEO methodology is the subject of the Stanford GSB case study MobiChair (Case No. E491, 2013), written by H. Irving Grousbeck and Sara Rosenthal and available through Harvard Business Publishing and The Case Centre.

That academic practice, refined across 1,100+ MBA students on two continents, directly informs the articles and speaking work described below.

50+ Published Articles and Speaking Topics

Fitz-Coy writes and speaks on teaching-first leadership, business turnarounds, patient capital investing, and the application of AI to workplace communication and youth development.

Fitz-Coy is a member of the Forbes Business Council, Fast Company Executive Board, Entrepreneur Leadership Network, and Inc. Masters contributor programs.

Selected recent articles:

• I built a company that broke people. Now I'm choosing capitalism with love., Fast Company (2025)
• How I Turned a Dying Business Losing $500,000 a Month Into a $45 Million Cash Machine, Entrepreneur (2025)
• AI and middle management: How the vice president role could evolve, Forbes (2025)
• The counterintuitive leadership approach that transformed my Gen Z team's performance, Fast Company (2025)
• 4 signs your workplace has made decision making impossible, Inc. (2025)

Fitz-Coy has published 50+ articles across Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Authority Magazine. Available for speaking engagements via SpeakerHub.