One-to-one coaching
Ninety days on the decisions only you can make.
I coach the people who carry the decisions — chief executives, senior partners, board directors — to see their situation clearly before their competitors do, and to act on it without waiting for certainty that isn’t coming.
Selection is not readiness.
An entire industry exists to tell an organisation whether you can do the job. Assessment. Benchmarking. Psychometrics. By the time you were appointed, more had been written about your capability than you will ever read.
Then nobody built you.
You learned to lead in conditions that no longer apply — in the calm, with time, with the information more or less in. What you’re paid for now is the other thing: the call that has to be made while the picture is still moving, in front of people who will remember how you made it.
Skills are what you know. Capacity is whether you can reach them when it counts. Most leaders at your level have plenty of the first. Nobody has ever worked on the second.
The four rooms this work is in.
Private equity. Chief executives and finance directors in the hold period. Five years, one clock, and a board that reads every quarter as evidence.
Magic Circle and international law. Partners and practice heads selected for technical excellence, then handed a leadership job with no training and no cover.
Critical national infrastructure. The directors who are accountable when it fails, in public, on the news.
International luxury. Executives whose brand promise is absolute, and whose conditions keep moving anyway.
Different industries. One client. The pressure is real, it’s usually public, and the plan will not hold.
You’re not in trouble. You’re carrying more than you were built for, and the next twelve months decide something.
Ninety days. Defined, and finished.
Long enough to change how you see. Short enough to stay a push rather than a habit. It starts with your real situation — a decision you’ve been sitting on, a team that isn’t telling itself the truth, a transaction with a clock on it — and it ends with something different, not a certificate.
We start with half a day, in person. Where you actually are. Not where the org chart says you are.
Then six sessions, fortnightly. Ninety minutes each. No curriculum. Your live situation is the syllabus.
I’m reachable in between. When something is live, you get me the same day. Judgement is needed on the day the decision lands, not a fortnight later.
You keep the tools. My field guides — short, usable, no theory. The four-way read. The sixty-second read. The change-my-mind trigger. The four-line debrief. Written to be used at a desk on a bad Tuesday, not studied.
And the wider library. I’m a Certified Heroic Coach, so you get those tools and a curated set of Philosopher’s Notes — six or eight matched to what you’re actually carrying, not a reading list.
RESeT runs underneath. Structured recovery — the capacity your judgement runs on. Short of sleep, judgement degrades measurably, and the people most affected are usually the last to notice. Not wellness. Operational, not optional.
There’s a fuller version that brings in the people around you — stakeholder conversations at the start, a day with Sophie Plato on the physical foundation, a session with your leadership team — for when the change needs to outlive your office door. And a retained option for afterwards, if you want the instrument maintained rather than rebuilt.
I hold two of these at a time. Eight a year. That’s what the fortnightly cadence and the same-day access allow.
Why me
Twenty years leading where the cost of being wrong was measured in more than money — and the years since, in boardrooms. EMCC Master Practitioner in Executive Coaching. Visiting Professor, Leadership Faculty, Glion Institute of Higher Education. Author of Think Like a Marine (Pavilion Books). MBE. Ten private equity houses. Five consecutive years inside Linklaters’ global talent programme. Board crisis exercises for the Lloyd’s insurance market. Tested with Olympians and special forces.
The first conversation is not a pitch.
Thirty minutes on your real situation. You’ll do most of the talking. By the end you’ll know whether this is the right work — and if it isn’t, I’ll say so, and it will have cost you half an hour.
Questions first? The honest answers →