How Rod Power uses Marlee to coach startup founders

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Rod Power is a business super-coach and facilitator supporting Sydney’s startup ecosystem through founder forums at TechSydney. He uses Marlee to help entrepreneurs uncover their motivations, build stronger peer relationships, and develop greater confidence in their leadership. By integrating Marlee into his group coaching approach, Rod accelerates trust, enables more tailored coaching, and helps founders gain insight into their blind spots and strengths, unlocking personal growth that directly impacts their business success.

About Rod Power:

Rod Power is a business coach and facilitator supporting some of Sydney’s most promising startup founders through TechSydney’s founder forums. With a background in building strong, performance-driven cultures, Rod is passionate about helping founders scale themselves as they scale their ventures. He is now CEO of ClearaSound.

Industry: Business Consulting and Services
Website: Rod Power LinkedIn
Employees: 18‍

Challenges:

For founders, the journey can be a lonely one. The pressure is high, the pace relentless, and finding people who truly understand what you're navigating is rare. Even in peer forums, building real rapport takes time. This challenge is especially acute for first-time founders or seasoned entrepreneurs who’ve outgrown the structure of an accelerator and are now scaling solo.

Founder forums, such as those at TechSydney, offer a rare space for honest feedback, shared experiences, and working through the personal and business hurdles that can quietly stall growth. However, for any of that to work, one thing must happen first: trust needs to form, and quickly. That’s where Rod Power’s coaching and Marlee play a pivotal role.

Solution:

To make the most of the founder forums, building trust and intimacy between participants quickly is essential. Rod uses Marlee’s Motivational Analysis to gain a deeper understanding of his clients by measuring 48 motivational traits, creating a unique fingerprint that highlights each founder’s strengths and potential blind spots.

These insights are uncovered early, and simply having them illuminated is a major benefit for each individual. It also fast-tracks a sense of trust and camaraderie within the group.

“The most valuable commodity in these sessions is trust.”—Rod Power

He runs a group debrief, giving each participant the chance to explore their results and see how others compare. Perhaps most importantly, he observed that many entrepreneurs, regardless of their success, struggle with a surprisingly common issue: Impostor Syndrome.

“I am so surprised at the overwhelming sense that even some of the most successful founders seem to carry within them that they are ‘faking it’; Marlee is hugely beneficial in validating their entrepreneurial leadership skills and helping them to realize their potential.”—Rod Power

Results:

Rod prioritizes relationship-building in his coaching. Marlee provides a foundation of insights that allow him to communicate on a deeper, more personalized level with each client.

“It’s allowing me, over time, to develop a language that resonates with each individual.”—Rod Power

Rod notes that people are often surprised by the blind spots Marlee reveals, and just how different the results are from one person to the next.

“People are often very surprised by the blind spots that Marlee identifies, and what continually surprises me is how non-uniform the results are. Marlee is truly unique.” —Rod Power

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Future:

Rod continues to use Marlee as a central part of his business coaching. As a coach-turned-CEO, he champions the value of insight-driven leadership development and sees Marlee as a technology that helps founders lead with clarity, self-awareness, and confidence from the start.