Nice to meet you, I'm Daniel Botero.
I'm a career coach turned business strategist with twelve years in the industry. My first few years were rough, I sold my 401k, ran up credit card debt, and burned through six months of savings just trying to keep things going. Once I learned the difference between being a good coach and running a good business, everything changed. Now I help other coaches build the process, the community, and the support to do the same, without burning through years and savings to figure it out alone.
Nice to meet you, I'm Daniel Botero.
I'm a career coach turned business strategist with twelve years in the industry. My first few years were rough, I sold my 401k, ran up credit card debt, and burned through six months of savings just trying to keep things going. Once I learned the difference between being a good coach and running a good business, everything changed. Now I help other coaches build the process, the community, and the support to do the same, without burning through years and savings to figure it out alone.
DANIEL'S STORY
From PepsiCo, to almost broke, to Opny.
Everything we teach at Opny, I learned the hard way. It took years of mistakes to figure out what actually works, and now I want to help other coaches get there without wasting the years I did.
2018
Corporate to coach
I started my career at PepsiCo. First as Regional Lead Campus Recruiter at the University of Central Florida, then as Regional Key Account Manager running a $100M portfolio. I genuinely liked the work and the people. By 2018, though, I wanted to build something of my own. Something that used my recruiting background to help people get jobs.
So I quit and became a career coach. The next three years were a masterclass in everything a new coach can do wrong.
How to Get a Job Podcast
Right as I started coaching full time, I launched the How to Get a Job Podcast. Over the next few years I interviewed 300+ career coaches. Some were just starting out. Others had been at it for years.
What I kept noticing was that many of them had disappeared from coaching entirely within 6 to 12 months of being on the show. That stuck with me. These were talented, knowledgeable people who genuinely cared about their clients. But somewhere along the way, the business side hadn't worked out.
That observation planted a seed that would eventually become Opny.
Mastering College to Career
In 2019 I published Mastering College to Career. It hit #1 on Amazon in the career space and received hundreds of positive reviews. I put everything into it. Months of writing, months of promoting, hundreds of hours of work.
From the outside it looked like a win. And in many ways it was. But it taught me something important about where to focus your energy when you're building a business. Some investments look like growth strategies but are really legacy projects in disguise. That lesson shaped how I think about everything we build at Opny.
Three years of the wrong moves
I was selling services for under $500. I was one of 150,000 generalist coaches on LinkedIn, all sounding the same. I was waiting on referrals from my old corporate network that mostly never came. Six months of savings disappeared. I cashed out my 401(k). I ended up $20,000 deep in credit card debt before I had a single repeatable way to bring in a client.
The money was rough. The harder part was realizing that being a good coach has almost nothing to do with running a coaching business. Those are two completely separate jobs.
2021
2023
The turning point
Then I stopped trying to figure it out alone. I invested over $150K in mentors. I paid $1,000 for one hour with someone who'd already cracked LinkedIn. I started building actual processes for finding clients, selling them, and delivering the results they paid for.
The business went from under $500 a month to $85,000. The coaching itself didn't get dramatically better. What changed was that I finally treated the business like a business. And everything I'd been seeing in those podcast interviews started making sense in a new way. The problem for career coaches wasn't the coaching. It was always the business.
Building Opny
That's why Opny exists. Not as a course. Not as a community. As a real consulting partner for career coaches who are serious about building something that lasts. Everything I'd learned, the hard way and the expensive way, became the foundation for what we do here.
Today, Opny is home to 100+ career coaches building real businesses, including some of the most recognized names in the industry.
Today
Corporate to coach
I started my career at PepsiCo. First as Regional Lead Campus Recruiter at the University of Central Florida, then as Regional Key Account Manager running a $100M portfolio. I genuinely liked the work and the people. By 2018, though, I wanted to build something of my own. Something that used my recruiting background to help people get jobs.
So I quit and became a career coach. The next three years were a masterclass in everything a new coach can do wrong.
How to Get a Job Podcast
Right as I started coaching full time, I launched the How to Get a Job Podcast. Over the next few years I interviewed 300+ career coaches. Some were just starting out. Others had been at it for years.
What I kept noticing was that many of them had disappeared from coaching entirely within 6 to 12 months of being on the show. That stuck with me. These were talented, knowledgeable people who genuinely cared about their clients. But somewhere along the way, the business side hadn't worked out.
That observation planted a seed that would eventually become Opny.
Mastering College to Career
In 2019 I published Mastering College to Career. It hit #1 on Amazon in the career space and received hundreds of positive reviews. I put everything into it. Months of writing, months of promoting, hundreds of hours of work.
From the outside it looked like a win. And in many ways it was. But it taught me something important about where to focus your energy when you're building a business. Some investments look like growth strategies but are really legacy projects in disguise. That lesson shaped how I think about everything we build at Opny.
Three years of the wrong moves
I was selling services for under $500. I was one of 150,000 generalist coaches on LinkedIn, all sounding the same. I was waiting on referrals from my old corporate network that mostly never came. Six months of savings disappeared. I cashed out my 401(k). I ended up $20,000 deep in credit card debt before I had a single repeatable way to bring in a client.
The money was rough. The harder part was realizing that being a good coach has almost nothing to do with running a coaching business. Those are two completely separate jobs.
The turning point
Then I stopped trying to figure it out alone. I invested over $150K in mentors. I paid $1,000 for one hour with someone who'd already cracked LinkedIn. I started building actual processes for finding clients, selling them, and delivering the results they paid for.
The business went from under $500 a month to $85,000. The coaching itself didn't get dramatically better. What changed was that I finally treated the business like a business. And everything I'd been seeing in those podcast interviews started making sense in a new way. The problem for career coaches wasn't the coaching. It was always the business.
Building Opny
That's why Opny exists. Not as a course. Not as a community. As a real consulting partner for career coaches who are serious about building something that lasts. Everything I'd learned, the hard way and the expensive way, became the foundation for what we do here.
Today, Opny is home to 100+ career coaches building real businesses, including some of the most recognized names in the industry.
WHY WE EXIST
Career coaching deserves better.
Career coaches change lives. I've seen it firsthand, coaches helping people through layoffs, career pivots, and some of the hardest moments in someone's professional life.
I've believed in that impact since I was a coach myself, and it's why I set a goal of helping 1 million people land their dream job. I can't reach that number alone. A growing community of full-time career coaches gets us a lot closer than I ever could by myself.
Opny exists to help coaches build businesses stable enough to make that kind of impact for the long run.
That's the work.
WHAT I'M BUILDING
What I'm building today.
I work on more than one thing. Opny is the center of it, but everything connects back to the same purpose: helping career coaches build real businesses, and helping their clients land the jobs they want.
Opny
Founder and CEO
The home of career coaching. Where some of the best coaches in the industry come to build scalable businesses.
CoCareer.ai
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
The first AI platform built specifically for career coaches, helping them support clients in landing jobs in 90 days or less.
The Career Coaches Podcast
Host
Weekly conversations with some of the most successful career coaches in the world. Ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally.
Partnerships
Active Equity Partner
Active equity partner in three career coaching businesses generating $400K+ per month combined. Opny works closely with select coaches to scale their businesses through long-term partnership rather than a fixed-length program.
Big Brothers Big Sisters
Board Member, Central Florida
14 years of mentorship work. Where my belief in coaching as a force for change first started.
WHAT I'M BUILDING
What I'm building today.
I work on more than one thing. Opny is the center of it, but everything connects back to the same purpose: helping career coaches build real businesses, and helping their clients land the jobs they want.
Opny
Founder and CEO
The home of career coaching. Where some of the best coaches in the industry come to build scalable businesses.
CoCareer.ai
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
The first AI platform built specifically for career coaches, helping them support clients in landing jobs in 90 days or less.
The Career Coaches Podcast
Host
Weekly conversations with some of the most successful career coaches in the world. Ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally.
Partnerships
Active Equity Partner
Active equity partner in three career coaching businesses generating $400K+ per month combined. Opny works closely with select coaches to scale their businesses through long-term partnership rather than a fixed-length program.
Big Brothers Big Sisters
Board Member, Central Florida
14 years of mentorship work. Where my belief in coaching as a force for change first started.
Let's talk.
Most of what I'm building and sharing day to day shows up on LinkedIn. That's where the community lives. If you're a career coach thinking about working with Opny, apply for a free business audit and we'll figure out together whether we're a fit. Either way, glad you're here.
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