Pulley vs. Carta for Coaching Businesses Granting Equity

Option grants need a strike price at or above fair market value, and a recent independent 409A valuation is the usual way to support that price if the IRS asks. For a coaching business, that valuation has to account for revenue that is often concentrated in one or two facilitators, which is not a straightforward thing for a generic valuation process to capture well.

If your business has changed shape recently, say you added a cohort program on top of one-on-one coaching, the valuation needs to reflect that shift. A stale 409A, or one that predates a material event like a pivot, may no longer support your strike price, which puts grants issued against it at risk.

Pulley offers 409A valuations, so compare its current turnaround time and refresh process against Carta's. For a coaching or cohort education company issuing options to a handful of facilitators and operators, that speed matters more than almost anything else the platform offers.

It also fits the typical structure here well: one entity, a small cap table, and a need to model dilution the next time the founder raises outside capital or brings on a co-owner.

Carta becomes the better fit once a coaching brand has scaled into something closer to an education company, with multiple programs, a larger team, and a need to benchmark compensation against comparable roles in adjacent industries.

It also fits better if the founder wants to let an early facilitator sell part of a vested stake before any acquisition talks start, since Carta supports that kind of liquidity event more directly than a lean cap table tool does.

The most common mistake is granting first and valuing later, if at all. When the IRS or a future acquirer eventually asks for the valuation behind a grant, a business that never got one, or that got one long after the fact, has no clean answer. The recipient can end up owing tax on income they never actually received in cash.

The fix is simple to state and easy to skip under deadline pressure: as a rule, no option grant goes out before a current 409A exists. If a facilitator is leaving next month and you want to lock them in today, get the valuation moving first.

Confirm the entity that will hold the grant is the right one, especially if the coaching business and any cohort program run under separate legal names. Confirm the valuation is less than twelve months old and reflects the business as it looks today, not as it looked before your last product change.

Confirm the recipient understands vesting and what happens if they leave to run their own program, since that is the scenario founders in this industry worry about most and plan for least.

Founders usually reach for cap table software at the worst possible moment: a valuable facilitator has one foot out the door and the founder wants to make an equity offer today. That pressure favors whichever platform can get a defensible 409A moving fastest, so compare Pulley's and Carta's current turnaround times for a single, uncomplicated entity.

Carta can still move quickly, but its setup overhead is built around a broader range of structures than most coaching businesses have. If your business is genuinely simple, one entity, one or two founders, a handful of facilitators, that overhead buys you capability you are not yet using, in exchange for a slower path to the grant you need this week. That tradeoff reverses the moment a second program line or an outside investor enters the picture, so it is worth revisiting the choice rather than treating it as permanent.

Before a facilitator receives an offer, work through this sequence:

1. Confirm the entity that will hold the grant is the right one, especially if the coaching business and the cohort program run under separate legal names.
2. Order a current valuation that reflects revenue often concentrated in one or two facilitators, rather than the business as it looked before your last product change.
3. Compare Pulley and Carta on current turnaround time for a single valuation, since a facilitator with one foot out the door will not wait.
4. Issue the grant only after the valuation supports the strike price, never granting first and valuing later.
5. Make sure the recipient understands the tax treatment and what happens to the stake if they leave to compete.