What we talked about
Chanda Coston is a business coach and strategist who helps women, especially 40 plus “third quarter entrepreneurs,” turn long held ideas into real businesses through clarity, strategy, and consistent execution. She explains why the third quarter matters: after the career and family phase, many people feel urgency to pursue work that finally feels meaningful, and they bring the maturity to move fast.
Show notes
Chanda Coston pivoted to coaching after losing her brother to gun violence at 27, a loss that forced her to ask whether she would be satisfied with the impact she had made if she died that day. That question launched a nonprofit, then a coaching practice, built on a career that spanned the US Navy, government defense programs, and corporate roles, all filtered through the discipline of a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Her clients are primarily women over 40 who are done checking society’s boxes and finally ready to build something that matters to them.
What we covered
- The “third quarter” framing comes from the urgency of a game clock: these are people who have already raised children, climbed careers, and bought houses, and now face the question “now what?” Chanda argues this urgency is an asset, not a liability, it creates the tenacity and decisiveness that younger entrepreneurs typically lack.
- Her first coaching move with any client is a calendar audit. For five days, she asks them to set an hourly alarm and record exactly where each hour goes. The data almost always reveals the same pattern: people claim they have no time, but the audit shows they are either working on the wrong things or not working on the business at all.
- Research she cites shows that simply telling another person about a goal increases the probability of achieving it by 65 percent. Having someone check in on progress on a regular basis raises that number to 95 percent, the discomfort of showing up empty-handed to a coach outweighs the discomfort of doing the work.
- Lean Six Sigma translates directly into startup coaching: she treats every client engagement as a process-improvement project, identifying bottlenecks and single points of failure that prevent a business from scaling. Clients receive not just a plan with tasks, start dates, and dependencies, but a risk register, a documented list of what could prevent each milestone, so they are situationally aware rather than blindsided.
- She draws a hard line between clients who are willing to do the work and clients who come back each week with a new excuse. When the excuses become a pattern, she tells the client she may not be the right person to help them and they may need a therapist, her role is to be a catalyst and a conduit, not a rescuer.
- Her own definition of success has changed. When she was younger it looked like houses, cars, degrees, and salary. Now it looks like saying yes and meaning it, and saying no with no regrets, a freedom she could not have imagined when her time was entirely committed to other people’s priorities.
About Chanda
Chanda Coston is the founder and CEO of Chanda Co., a business coaching and strategy practice. She holds a master’s degree, a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and a Project Management Professional certification, and works concurrently as a logistics project manager supporting the National Weather Service.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandacoston
- Website: https://www.chanda-co.com/about
Episode 126 of the PreVetted Podcast.