Founder of DGZ Coaching | Career & Executive Coach | Former CFO | Executive Recruiter | Business School Career Director | Career Strategist | Leadership Developer | Executive Coach
The Number That Changes Everything
There is a statistic that stops most people cold the first time they hear it. Your top five CliftonStrengths, in their specific sequence, occur in exactly one out of every 33 million people. Not one in a thousand. Not one in a hundred thousand. One in 33 million. For a former CFO and CPA who spent the first half of his career inside the hard logic of balance sheets and audit trails, that number was not a motivational talking point. It was a diagnosis. The entire career advice industry, Damian G. Zikakis concluded, had been solving the wrong equation for forty years.
A Finance Man Who Reads People Differently
Damian G. Zikakis is a career and executive coach based in Holland, Michigan, and the founder of DGZ Coaching. He has coached more than 1,000 professionals through some of the most consequential decisions of their working lives, and what sets him apart is not the volume of clients he has seen. It is the angle from which he sees them.
The Long Way Around to the Right Work
The path that brought Zikakis to coaching is not a straight line. It is a series of deliberate turns, each one adding a layer that the next role would eventually need.
He started at Price Waterhouse in 1979, working as an auditor across Detroit, Tulsa, and Chicago for seven years. Audit is a discipline built on precision, on finding what the numbers actually say rather than what someone hopes they say. That instinct never left him. From Price Waterhouse, Zikakis spent fifteen years moving through controller and CFO roles across multiple organizations, eventually reaching the C-suite chair that most finance professionals spend entire careers trying to reach.
Then he stopped. Not because the work was difficult, but because he had learned something about himself that the balance sheet could not fix. He had been trading on skills that drained him rather than talents that energized him. The distinction sounds simple. Living on the wrong side of it for years is not.
In 2001, he joined Coach U as CFO, a role that placed him inside a coaching organization at the exact moment he was beginning to ask serious questions about his own career design. Two years later, he moved into retained executive search at Plante & Moran and then spent seven years as a Managing Director at Boyden, one of the oldest and most respected executive search firms in the world. Across that decade in search, Zikakis sat on a side of the talent table that most coaches never occupy. He was the person organizations trusted to find, assess, and place senior leaders. He saw what hiring committees actually valued, what candidates consistently failed to communicate, and where the gap between a strong professional and a hired professional almost always lived.
In 2010, he moved again. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business brought him in to lead its Career Development Office, a team of more than 25 professionals serving over 3,000 students annually. He stayed eight years. During that time, he also served as President of the MBA Career Services and Employer Alliance, the professional organization that sets standards for MBA career management across the country. By the time he left Ross in 2018 to launch DGZ Coaching full-time, Damian G. Zikakis had occupied nearly every seat at the talent table: the executive who hires, the recruiter who sources, the career office director who prepares, and eventually the coach who transforms.
That is not a resume. That is a vantage point most people in his field simply do not have.
What a Stuck High-Achiever Actually Needs
The clients who find their way to DGZ Coaching are not struggling professionals. They are high-achievers, senior managers, executives, founders, and mid-to-late career leaders who have done everything right by conventional standards and still feel misaligned. The noise Zikakis describes is real, and it is specific: a daily flood of resume hacks, keyword optimization tips, AI screening strategies, and market trend reports that generates enormous activity while solving almost nothing.
“We are drowning in career noise,” he says. “Despite having more information than ever, millions of high-achievers feel completely stuck.”
His starting point is always the CliftonStrengths assessment, followed by a debrief session designed to translate raw results into something a client can actually use. The goal is not self-awareness for its own sake. It is precision. When a senior leader understands not just what they do well but how they do it, they can communicate a differentiated value that no AI screener and no generic competency checklist can replicate.
The results have been consistent enough that Zikakis points to 100 percent client satisfaction and job search success as his primary measures. One case captures the stakes clearly. A Senior Manager came to him frustrated after reaching the final interview round three times without a single offer. Three final rounds is not a credentials problem. It is a communication problem, specifically the gap between what a candidate has accomplished and what they are able to make a hiring committee feel in the room.
“After completing the CliftonStrengths assessment and a debrief so he understood how his strengths enhanced his competencies, we reworked his answers to interview questions,” Zikakis recalls.
The outcome was not incremental. The client reached the final round for two separate opportunities shortly after and received two offers. One targeted intervention, built on a precise understanding of that individual’s 1-in-33-million wiring, changed the entire result.
Today, Zikakis coaches senior executives through FranklinCovey, works with TED Fellows through the TED Fellows coaching program, and serves as a project coach for the CFL Consulting Program at Hope College. He is a Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths Coach and holds Hogan Assessment certification. His calendar is full. His next move is to extend his reach digitally, through worksheets, workbooks, and online courses designed to bring the same strengths-based clarity to mid and late-career professionals who cannot access 1:1 coaching.
“When a person develops greater awareness of what their individual strengths bring to their work,” he says, “they can intentionally aim for greater effectiveness as an individual contributor and team member.”
The Signal Behind the Noise
Forty years of mainstream career advice built a system optimized for categories, for fitting unique people into interchangeable roles using interchangeable language. Damian G. Zikakis spent the better part of three decades watching that system fail the very people it was supposed to serve, first as a CFO who felt it himself, then as a recruiter who saw it from the hiring side, then as a career services director who watched it play out across thousands of students, and finally as a coach who built an entirely different approach from the ground up.
The statistic is still the sharpest thing in his practice. One in 33 million. Not because it is inspiring, but because it is true, and because the people who finally understand what it means about their own careers stop trying to fit the mold and start building something that actually fits them.
Damian G. Zikakis is the founder and executive coach of DGZ Coaching, based in Holland, Michigan. He works with executives, senior leaders, and mid-to-late career professionals seeking greater alignment between their natural strengths and their work. To connect with Damian or learn more, visit www.dgzcoaching.com or www.linkedin.com/in/damianzikakis.
