Business coaching
I’m Max Friedle. I coach founders and leaders through the decisions they can’t think their way out of. I also build and run companies of my own. Based in southern Germany.
Who I work with
If you could think your way out of it, you would have done it by now. Most people I work with are smart and good at their job, and still stuck on something they have already talked about ten times.
The company grew and the role didn’t. You are still doing the job you hired yourself out of, and everything routes through you.
Nobody is quite sure who owns what any more, so the same conversation keeps coming back around.
A partnership, a big hire, an exit. Too much going on to keep it all in your head, and the decision will not wait for you.
How I work
Some things will not go into a sentence. You know something is wrong, or that a decision matters, but every attempt to explain it comes out flatter and smaller than the thing itself. So you explain it again. The conversation circles.
So we stop talking and start looking. In a room I use cards on the table, objects, a sketch on paper. Online we share a board and both draw on it. Either way you end up outside the problem instead of stuck inside it, and then you can point at it, move it around, and disagree with it.
Get it out of your head and onto something we can both point at. That is the whole trick
The coaching
One to one, online, over a series of sessions. We draw a lot. Most of it is working material and you can forget it. What you keep is the picture that finally shows the whole thing, so you can act on it, come back to it later, or show it to someone else.
Maximilian from metaFox really transformed the vision I had of my organization. He helped me draw baselines, job descriptions, RACI matrix, to enhance the communication between the team and myself. Clear roles for everyone, which brought a lot more involvement from everyone as well. Jean-Yves Lontie · CEO, Rhizome
Three full sessions, published with the client’s permission. Have a look at what actually happens.
Max is a confident, effective and motivating coach. He showed me how to trigger myself, posing simple questions and building on the answers I provided, enabling me to say out loud things that were circulating in my mind. He motivated me to try activities that I wanted but always found excuses and postponed.
Maria Pantzali
What I’ve built
metaFox is the company Tobias Weghorn and I started in 2018, and where I have been Managing Director since 2022. A team across several countries, three businesses, and a physical product that ships worldwide. Hiring, margins, who does what, letting go of something you built. None of that is theory for me.
Ecommerce
Picture cards, strength cards, emotion cards, and the rest of the deck family, made for coaches, therapists, facilitators, and educators.
metafox.eu →
Software
The online coaching suite, and the board I use in my own sessions. The same tools, built for the screen.
metafox.online →
Education
Where coaches learn to work this way. Visual Online Coach runs twelve weeks online; The Inner Journey is three days in a room.
metafox.academy →The team
This page says “I” far too often. Tobias Weghorn started metaFox with me and he has been in it ever since. We built the products together, and we still make the big decisions together.
Most of the people who build metaFox are in the Philippines, and I run that team from Germany. Hiring, structure, and the weekly work of getting everyone moving in the same direction across a lot of time zones.
So when we talk about your team, I am talking about something I do every week. And honestly, it is why I believe in the coaching too. None of us sees the whole thing on our own.
In 2025 we also took over Stattys, the electrostatic sticky notes a lot of facilitators already work with. Different product, same idea: give people something they can move around and look at.
If you want to build something together, I am always up for that conversation.
Recognition
The BDVT, the German professional association for training, consulting, and coaching, awarded the metaFox picture cards in the Tools category of the European Training Award 2024.
A jury from our own industry looked at the cards and said they work. Good to have someone else say it for once.
About me
I have always loved working with people, and at the same time wanted to understand how the world works.
Engineering taught me how the outside world is put together and why it behaves the way it does. People follow different rules, and helping them grow is what I love doing.
At metaFox I get to bring both together, the technical side and the people side, in the same job. It is a winning combination, and I have been proving it since university, when friends and I started BEST. There will be more.
Contact
Things I am happy to talk about:
Book a session, or 30 minutes first if you would rather talk it over.
Partnerships, collaborations, or something you want to build. I read and answer my own email.
Also on LinkedIn.