Who is Nikola Jovanović?
Nikola Jovanović is the founder of Second Chair™ and the person who does every engagement. He is a communication and executive presence coach with more than thirteen years of practice and over 6,700 communication clients, among them chief executives and senior leaders, most under NDA. He trained first in English language and literature, specialised in business communication, and qualified as a certified accent coach and communication coach. He is based in Europe and runs Intonetic™, his communication coaching practice, together with his wife.
Families considering a coach for a successor reasonably want to know who will be in the room. This is the answer.
What is his background?
Nikola’s work began with language. He holds a degree in English language and literature, and the way language works under pressure has been the thread through everything since.
From there his work narrowed towards the way professionals use language under pressure. He specialised in business English communication: meetings, presentations, negotiation, the language of decisions. He then qualified as a certified accent coach and communication coach, working on how people sound as well as what they say.
Over time the centre of the work became executive presence: how a senior person comes across in the moments that decide careers. The boardroom, the pitch, the announcement, the question everyone in the room is waiting for them to answer.
What is Intonetic™?
Intonetic™ is the communication coaching practice Nikola has built over thirteen years and runs with his wife. It has worked with more than 6,700 clients on how they speak and how they come across, from professionals preparing for a single presentation to chief executives preparing for a board.
Second Chair™ is a separate practice with its own clients and its own method. The two are connected through Nikola, not through shared clients or shared content, and nothing a Second Chair™ family says is ever shared with Intonetic™.
How does he work?
Practically. The work has never been theory about leadership. It is the next real meeting: what to say first, how to answer the hard question, how to hold a room that would rather be listening to someone else.
In Second Chair™ that means a private diagnostic, then 24 weekly one-to-one sessions built around the successor’s real calendar of board meetings, team announcements and family conversations, with short rehearsals before the events that matter most. The method sets out the six months in full.
He takes on every engagement himself. There is no team of associates and no junior coach. A family that engages Second Chair™ works with Nikola from the first conversation to the handover session.
Why successors of family businesses?
Because it is the most personal leadership test there is. A successor takes over what a parent built, in front of people who have known them all their life: a senior team that remembers them as a child, a board that still looks at the founder, siblings watching how it goes.
The skills involved are the ones Nikola has coached for thirteen years: being taken seriously in a boardroom, leading people with more experience, speaking with authority without borrowing it. What is different is the setting. In a family business the same conversation carries the weight of the company and the weight of the family at once, and the successor rarely has anyone outside both to prepare with. Second Chair™ exists to be that person.
What does he not do?
Second Chair™ is deliberately narrow. Nikola does not give legal, tax, investment or estate advice, does not design ownership structures, and does not mediate family disputes. Those belong to the family’s lawyers, accountants, private bankers and family business consultants, who often work alongside the coaching. For advisors explains how that collaboration works.
How can a family speak to him?
Through the request form on the site. Nikola reads every request himself and, where there is a fit, replies within three business days with a personal email and a link to arrange a private conversation. The first conversation with Second Chair™ describes what to expect.
In short
- Nikola Jovanović founded Second Chair™ and does every engagement himself.
- Degree in English language and literature; specialised in business communication; certified accent coach and communication coach.
- More than thirteen years of practice and over 6,700 communication clients through Intonetic™, which he runs with his wife.
- His work centres on executive presence: how leaders come across in the rooms that decide their careers.
- Based in Europe, working with clients one to one.