Bellon Attila · Coaching & Mentoring
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Business coaching & mentoring · Attila Bellon

Am I in the right place?
Where do I want to be in five years?
And what will it take to get there?

  • “The job works, it pays well. I just don’t know if I want to be doing it in five years.”
  • “I know I don’t want this. I just don’t know what I do want.”
  • “I like what I do — just not like this.”
  • “I know where I want to get to. Not how to get there from here.”
  • “Something is holding me back, and I can’t even name it.”

If any of those sound familiar, you are in the right place.

I grew up in the countryside and started as a field sales rep. I worked my way up through the ranks at Nestlé, the world’s largest food company — through Hungarian and European roles, up to corporate trade marketing director. Then domestic and international commercial director roles at other companies, and a board seat in Saudi Arabia. Eventually I founded my own consulting company, with business coaching as one of its core elements. I’ve seen a lot, learned a lot, and got plenty wrong along the way. The coaching craft and toolkit I built up over many years of continuous study — and that is what I’d like to pass on: so that someone is next to you, the person I wish I’d had next to me.

I’d like a free 30-minute first session Sound familiar?

The first session is free and commits you to nothing. In Hungarian or English, online or in Budapest.

Bellon Attila
20+years of commercial and leadership experience across Europe, the UK and the Middle East
4business areas I led before becoming a CEO: trade marketing, category management, sales, strategic revenue management
ICFmore than 10 years working with coaching, the last 3 as a qualified business and team coach

01 — How I work

Three hats.
You decide which one I wear.

Pure coaching says the coach doesn’t give advice. With twenty years behind me, that is sometimes not restraint but withholding. Most coaches can only wear the first hat, most consultants only the third — with me all three are available. And I'm not the one who decides when: we agree in the first conversation what you need, and at any point you can simply ask me to switch.

Coach

I ask.

“You have the answer — you just haven’t said it out loud yet.”

ICF-accredited coaching methodology. Ask for this one when the subject is your decision, your values, your direction. You don’t get advice here — you get clarity and ownership.

Mentor

I share the mistakes I’ve already made.

“I’ve been through this. Here’s what it looks like from inside.”

Ask for this one when the situation is concrete: a first leadership role, a difficult boss, a negotiation, a promotion, starting your own business. Then I don’t hold the experience back — I tell you what I’d do and why; you decide what to do with it. So you don’t work out from scratch what someone has already been through.

Sparring partner

We sit down and do the work.

“Open the file, let’s look at it together.”

Ask for this one when the challenge is commercial: pricing, a plan, negotiation prep, a business case. I sit next to you as a practitioner — with numbers, models and actual documents. What you walk away with isn’t a good feeling — it’s a decision-ready piece of work that your boss, the management or the owner will understand.

This is why you don’t have to choose between a coach and a consultant — and why you don’t have to switch people if what you need changes along the way.

02 — Two ways to work

One to one, and with teams.
Both primarily with a business focus.

Both are primarily business-focused: your work, your role, your decisions, your people. If the subject turns out not to be business, we can work with that too — the coaching method is the same, there's no difference there. It just leaves me one hat, the coach's. On a business question I can wear all three — which is where I'm most useful to you.

One to one

Business coaching and mentoring, at every level

From first job to founder. For a recurring situation, an approaching decision, or a longer leadership transition — depending on where you are.

  • Leadership role, authority, delegation
  • Thinking business and HR decisions through before you make them
  • Difficult people, difficult conversations
  • Career direction, moves, feeling stuck
Team coaching

For smaller and larger teams alike

Leadership teams, functional teams, project teams. As a team coach I don't run training — we work on how the team actually operates, together, saying the things that haven't been said.

  • Clarifying roles, decision rights and expectations
  • Trust, conflict, collaboration
  • A shared goal that everyone actually understands the same way
  • Restructuring, mergers, a new leader arriving

The two often go together: individual work with the leader, group sessions with the team. Which you need is something we work out in the first conversation.

03 — Sound familiar?

Most problems at work aren’t technical.
They’re human.

Some people arrive not knowing whether they’re in the right place at all. Others know exactly what’s wrong — they just have no one to tell: not their boss, even less their colleagues, and they don’t dare ask, because they think they should already know. Both are good starting points. These are the sentences people don’t say out loud — though almost everyone thinks them, just at different levels.

  • I stay quiet in meetings in case what I say sounds stupid.

  • I do the work, someone else gets the credit.

  • I don’t know what I want. I’m just going with the flow.

  • I’m proving myself day and night and it’s still not enough.

  • The only feedback I get is when I’ve done something wrong.

  • I know I’m underpaid, but I have no idea how to ask for more.

  • I know I should move on. I just don’t know where to.

The biggest risk at this stage is drifting for years. This is where changing direction is cheapest — and fastest.

04 — Focus areas

Six areas where I can give you the most

These six are not the only subjects, of course — but they are where I can give you the most. Not from a textbook: I have been through all six, sometimes well, sometimes the expensive way.

Impostor syndrome

“When will they realise I’m not good enough?”

Your performance and your self-assessment have come apart. The higher you go, the worse it gets: promotion doesn’t ease it, it amplifies it. Over-preparing, procrastinating, deflecting praise, avoiding risk — those are symptoms, not your character.

What we do together:

  • A fact-based track record to argue back at the inner critic
  • Separating competence from confidence — they are not the same thing
  • A preparation routine that is enough, and doesn’t consume you
  • How to talk about your results without lying or shrinking them
Narcissistic bosses, toxic colleagues

When it isn’t your fault, but you’re the one paying

Some people cannot be convinced, won over or fixed. The goal isn’t to change them — it’s to stop being ground down, while keeping your credibility and your career intact.

What we do together:

  • Telling the difference: a difficult person, a bad day, or a genuinely destructive pattern
  • Setting boundaries without becoming “the difficult one”
  • A factual written trail — protection and evidence
  • Energy management: what to engage with, what to let go
  • And the hardest question: when leaving is the right answer
Office politics

The games go on whether you play or not

“Politics” isn’t a dirty word: it means decisions don’t run on arguments alone, but on interests and relationships. People who ignore that lose with good ideas. I don’t teach manipulation — I teach how to get the thing you believe in over the line.

What we do together:

  • Stakeholder map: who decides, who influences, who loses if you win
  • Groundwork before the meeting — by the time everyone sits down, the decision is usually made
  • Visibility: getting your work seen without becoming loud
  • Building alliances with people you don’t particularly like
  • Where your line is — and how that becomes a strength
Building teams that work

Usually it isn’t the team that’s the problem — it’s the setup around them.

Most “team problems” are unclear roles, unspoken expectations and avoided conflict. Those are fixable — not with away-day games, but with work. And if it does turn out to be the team, we find that out quickly too, and work out the right steps.

What we do together:

  • Roles, decision rights and expectations, written down
  • Trust, and a workable form of conflict
  • Delegating in a way where you actually let go
  • Difficult conversations: underperformance, feedback, letting people go
  • Team coaching — when the work belongs to the whole team, not just you
From corporate to your own business

You’ve been thinking about it for years. And not moving for just as long.

A well-paid role, a solid structure, a brand name behind you — and the thought that you’d rather be doing your own thing. Most people hold back not because the idea is bad, but because they can’t see exactly what they would be risking. I started my own company after twenty years in FMCG corporates: I know what that decision looks like up close, and what comes after it.

What we do together:

  • Separating the idea from reality: what you'd sell, to whom, and why they'd pay
  • What you'd lose and gain — specifically, not by feel
  • Runway: how much time you actually have before the decision is real
  • The first clients — where they come from, when the company name used to bring them
  • And the reverse question too: maybe leaving isn't the answer
Getting ahead

Faster up the ladder — without trampling anyone or losing yourself

There are two bad routes up. One is waiting for good work to be noticed — it usually isn’t. The other is elbowing your way through and becoming someone you don’t much like. There is a third: stretching your own limits, making your results visible, and building in a way that leaves the people around you better off. It starts slower and takes you further — and you don’t have to explain yourself afterwards.

What we do together:

  • What the next level actually means for you — and what it really takes, not what you assume
  • Stretching your limits without grinding yourself down: where your sustainable pace is
  • Making your work more effective — and, often more importantly, making it visible
  • How to ask for support so it reads as maturity, not weakness
  • Sponsors and allies: who speaks about you when you are not in the room
  • How to back others in a way that builds you too — without turning into self-sacrifice
  • Staying yourself: what you won’t give up for any job title

Other themes I regularly work on:

First 90 days in a new role Becoming a manager Burnout and energy management Difficult conversations Giving and taking feedback Negotiation and persuasion Decision-making under pressure Delegation Career change and direction Asking for a raise or promotion Interview preparation Matrix organisations and managing up Remote and international teams Cultural differences Restructuring and redundancies Presence and presentation Work–life boundaries Succession, stepping out of day-to-day

05 — Business mentoring

When the question isn’t “what kind of leader am I”,
but “how do I actually solve this”.

In these areas I don’t work as a coach but as a practitioner: on a real project, a business case, a planning task. My background is FMCG, but the logic carries across most commercial sectors.

Trade marketingChannel strategy, promo effectiveness, in-store execution, plans that make sense at store level.
Sales & customer developmentKey account management, annual negotiations, trade terms, sales structure.
Net revenue managementPricing strategy, discount architecture, mix management, protecting margin under inflation.
Pack-price architecturePack and price ladder design by channel, managing cannibalisation.
4P / 5PProduct, price, place, promotion — and the fifth P: the people who execute it.
Category development & managementCategory role, planograms, shelf share, building the category story for the retailer.
Market entry & route-to-marketMarket prioritisation, distributor selection, entry business case, first-years plan.
Business case & planningA numbers-backed proposal that management or the owner will understand and approve.
When it isn’t about you, but about your company

Sometimes the question is bigger than one person: market entry, a growth model, building the commercial system, team and processes together. I don’t do that as coaching but as consulting, through my own company — and I’ve set out in detail how, on a separate site.

ACG Solutions Group — for companies →

06 — Who this is for

Four levels, four different kinds of work

Early career & specialists

Direction, confidence, visibility. Finding what you’re good at and actually enjoy — and getting it noticed.

Typical outcome: a clear next step, a prepared conversation with your manager, a career goal you can say out loud.

Middle managers

The transition from specialist to leader. Delegation, authority, difficult conversations, managing up and down at once.

Typical outcome: leadership routines that hold, less firefighting, a team that moves without you.

Senior leaders

One place where you don’t have to be strong. Strategy and politics, board communication, organisational change, your own sustainability.

Typical outcome: cleaner decisions, less leaked energy, boundaries you’ve actually named.

Owners & CEOs

Separating the company from the person. Building a management layer, letting go of control, growth versus profit, succession, stepping out of the day-to-day.

Typical outcome: a leadership team that carries things, and an owner looking at the company again.

07 — What it looks like

Shaped by your subject and your goal

  1. 01

    Free first session — 30 minutes

    You tell me where you are. No preparation, no questionnaire. At the end I’ll tell you whether I can help — and if I can’t, I’ll say that too.

  2. 02

    Goal and frame

    In a sentence or two we define what you want to change and how we’ll know it worked. If your employer pays, this is where the goal is agreed three-way — the content never is.

  3. 03

    Sessions

    60–90 minutes, typically every two to three weeks. Online or in person in Budapest. In Hungarian or English. Between sessions you try something — most of the work doesn’t happen in the room.

  4. 04

    A typical arc: 6 sessions over 3–6 months

    A single concrete situation sometimes takes 2–3 sessions. A leadership transition or a deeper pattern takes more. You can stop at any point — there’s no long lock-in.

  5. 05

    Closing and measuring

    We go back to that first sentence: what changed, what didn’t, what you carry on with alone. Good coaching ends.

Bellon Attila coaching beszélgetés közben
Confidentiality — no exceptions

What you say in the session stays there. If your employer is paying, they see the goal and your attendance, never the content. I work to the ICF code of ethics, and that isn’t a formality here: the whole thing rests on you being able to say what you normally don’t.

08 — About me

I walked the whole road, and it wasn’t easy.
Yours can be easier.

Attila Bellonbusiness & team coach, mentor
ICF-accredited business & team coachBudapest Metropolitan University · 10+ years with coaching, qualified for the last 3
20+ years in commerceFrieslandCampina · Nestlé · Arla Foods · Reckitt Benckiser · BioTechUSA
Founder and managing directorACG Solutions Group Kft.
LanguagesHungarian, English

My first job was in the field: van sales — selling out of the back of a van, store by store — while I was finishing university and playing semi-professional football in Hungary’s second division. That has been my benchmark ever since: performing in more than one place at once, and making sure that whatever I say or plan works in the store and on the pitch as well, not just on paper.

Then nearly a decade at Nestlé: from graduate, through Hungarian and European roles, to leading corporate trade marketing and e-commerce in Hungary. I learned what a headquarters decision looks like by the time it reaches the market — and how often it doesn’t arrive at all.

Then Saudi Arabia with Arla Foods: leading Puck to market leadership as category head and board member. Full P&L responsibility, a foreign culture, a team where nothing worked automatically. That’s the period I learned the most about people.

Commercial director roles at Reckitt Benckiser and BioTechUSA followed, driving international expansion. Three director roles, three completely different cultures — and the same conclusion in all three: the bottleneck is almost never the strategy. It’s who carries it, in what shape, and with whom.

Along the way I completed the ICF-accredited business and team coach programme at Budapest Metropolitan University. Not as a second career. I did it because it kept becoming clearer that behind almost every commercial problem I had, there was a human one — including mine.

I started my own company, ACG Solutions Group, after twenty years in corporates. That role brought a new set of lessons: what it’s like to decide alone, to make payroll, to say no. It’s why I like working with owners — and with people who are still only weighing up whether to leave the corporate world. I’ve stood where they’re standing.

That's why I sit down with people today. Not to say clever things — but so that someone is there who understands both the business and the person, and doesn't disappear when it gets difficult.

09 — Questions people ask

What people ask
before they write

What’s the difference between coaching, mentoring and therapy?
Coaching works from the present towards the future, through questions: the answers are yours. Mentoring passes on experience: I have answers because I’ve done it. Therapy works with the past and with psychological functioning — that’s not what I do. If it turns out you need a therapist, I’ll say so and point you to one.
Who pays — me or my employer?
Both work. If you come as a private client, nobody else is involved. If your employer pays, we agree the goal three-way at the start and review it at the end — the content of the sessions still stays between us.
What does it cost?
We agree the pricing in the first, free session, based on the complexity of the subject and the time frame. I work per session or in packages, with different rates for individuals and companies.
How long until something changes?
For a specific situation — a negotiation, a hard conversation, a decision — often after the first session. Rewriting leadership habits realistically takes 3–6 months. If nothing has moved after three sessions, tell me: we either change direction or we stop.
Do I need a coach just to admit I’m struggling?
It isn’t about struggling. Most of my clients are performing well — which is exactly why they have no one to be honest with. Coaching isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s the same as in sport: people who take it seriously work with a coach.
Does it work online?
Yes — a good share of my clients work with me online, from several countries. I like to hold the first session in person if it’s practical, but it isn’t a requirement.
Do you work with teams too?
Yes. As a team coach I work with leadership teams and functional teams: clarifying roles, conflict, collaboration, shared goals. That’s usually a few group sessions alongside individual conversations with the leader.

10 — Let’s talk

The first step is a conversation.
We find the question and the goal here, together.

Bellon Attila

In the first session we define the questions and the goal together. And it is entirely fine if they change along the way — that is often the sign that something is moving.

I reply personally within 48 hours. I read every message myself.

If you’d rather write directly:
attila.bellon@acgsolutionsgroup.com
+36 30 363 6800

Your message is confidential, and you won’t end up on any mailing list.

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ACG Solutions Group Kft.
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Company reg. no.: 01-09-456219 · VAT no.: 33046224-2-41
Represented by: Attila Bellon
E-mail: attila.bellon@acgsolutionsgroup.com · +36 30 363 6800

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