Today, the name Coaching Without Borders doesn’t raise many questions, but 15 years ago, there was a very specific reason for choosing this name. It all began with a young American woman with a rich history of living and studying abroad. She had a dream to share this with others.
Her name? Margo McClimans.
Margo was working in the stone industry. No, not digging up stones—she worked in retail for a company that bought stones in Italy and imported them to the United States to be used as countertops, fireplaces, or flooring. Even though she quite liked the stone industry, she knew that one day she wanted to share her experience of living and integrating abroad with others. She wanted to give intercultural training to individuals and companies. From Stones to Students
To be able to pursue her dream, international work experience was a requirement. Margo had lived and studied abroad before but had only worked in the United States. She also realised that further business know-how would be an asset, so she decided to pursue an MBA in Italy.
She graduated after one year of intensive, seven-day-a-week schooling in Asolo, Italy, at CIMBA. Continuing the strategic steps in her master plan, Margo started working at an Italian company. Her official role was selling HTTP compression software, but her main interest was perfecting her Italian and learning HTML from watching her colleagues. Soon, she knew enough to make her own website and founded her own stone brokerage business on the side.
With the American-European time difference working in her favour, she dealt with clients in the U.S. at night, while her weekends were spent getting her business, International Stone Consultancy, up and running.
Not entirely surprising, selling software wasn’t Margo’s big passion in life. She was eventually let go, which marked a scary time for her and her boyfriend at the time, as they had no financial safety net and struggled to make ends meet. Like a young bird pushed out of the nest, Margo had to make her stone business fly. This was the push she needed to fully embrace entrepreneurship, and she’s never looked back.
A few months later, luck was on her side. The Director of her MBA programme wanted to start a leadership programme for the business students and asked Margo for help.
Removing Borders
This was in 2005. Not long after, Margo decided to get her coaching certification through the Coaches Training Institute (CTI). After running both her stone business and coaching business in parallel for five years, she made the difficult decision to close her stone business and focus fully on expanding her intercultural coaching. (You can read the more detailed story of how Margo got into coaching here.)
The aim? Erasing boundaries and misconceptions between different cultures, hence the name Coaching Without Borders.
The beauty of borders is that some create them, while others don’t experience them at all. Think of the bird, which is part of our branding. The borders we see between countries and cultures don’t exist for this bird. The same can be true for the borders we create for ourselves in our minds. What matters is how we perceive these borders and the actions we take in response to those perceptions.
What started with understanding and easing cultural borders has now expanded to removing more than just intercultural differences. Today, we focus on:
Erasing borders of gender (in)equality.
Expanding ways of thinking and expressing in both personal and work environments.
Stretching the boundaries of how teams collaborate.
Over the past 15 years, the name has gradually evolved in meaning and purpose, leaving us curious about where this journey will lead us and our clients in the future.
A world without borders is a world full of opportunities.
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