Executive coaching for leaders who are done carrying it alone
The leaders I work with are not struggling. They are performing — often very well — under conditions that would stop most people. What they want is not encouragement. It is someone who will engage with the actual situation, ask the questions their team cannot ask, and stay honest when the honest answer is uncomfortable.
That is what the coaching is. Ninety days. Fortnightly sessions. The work builds from your real situation, not a model applied to it.
How it works
We start with a discovery call — thirty minutes in which you describe where the pressure is highest and what it has cost you so far. I tell you honestly whether this is work I can help with and what I would do first. If it is not the right work, I will tell you that too and tell you who to speak to instead.
If we go ahead, the engagement runs for ninety days — one financial quarter. Fortnightly ninety-minute sessions. A brief check-in by message between sessions for anything that cannot wait. No recording by default. Notes retained only with your explicit agreement.
The underlying method is RESeT® — not as a programme delivered to you, but as the performance foundation we maintain throughout. Sleep, recovery, the quality of your thinking time, the relationships you are relying on and the ones that are costing you: these are not soft concerns. They determine the quality of every decision you make and every conversation you have. We treat them as operational.
Who it is for
Chief executives and founders in PE-backed businesses. Senior and managing partners in law firms. Managing directors in international luxury brands. Directors of high-consequence operations. And the people responsible for building them — operating partners, managing partners, chairs and non-executives carrying significant oversight responsibility.
If you are earlier in your career, the right entry point is probably a programme rather than individual coaching. The Human Curriculum and the Agent Supervisor Development Programme are designed for that stage.
Credentials
EMCC Master Practitioner in Executive Coaching. Accredited. Supervised by an EMCC-accredited supervisor. Five years delivering to PE-backed executive cohorts. Programme and coaching clients include the senior leadership of a Magic Circle law firm, the Corporation leading the Lloyd’s marketplace, and a £8.2 billion energy provider. Visiting Professor, Glion Institute of Higher Education.
Pricing
Six sessions across ninety days: £3,000 + VAT.
Longer-term engagements and team coaching: by enquiry.
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.
Where I work.
Private equity. Senior Leadership teams and CEOs. Five years, one clock, and a board that reads every quarter as evidence.
Magic Circle and international law. Global Talent programmes with those 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.
Why me
Twenty years leading as a Royal Marines Commando Officer, where the cost of being wrong was measured in more than money — and the years since, from commercial experience to executive education and coaching. Hult Ashridge EMCC Master Practitioner in Executive Coaching, Certified HEROIC coach.
Four years as Visiting Professor in Leadership, Ethics and Professional Practice, I started the Naval Service Ethics Programme for the Royal Navy and have seen at first hand how leadership can fail at scale.
Visiting Faculty and Leadership Expert, Glion Institute of Higher Education. Author of Think Like a Marine (Pavilion Books). MBE. 5 years with Private Equity Senior Leaders. Five consecutive years inside Linklaters’ global talent programme. Board crisis exercises for the Lloyd’s insurance market. Tested with Olympians and special forces.
Certified Mindfulness and Breath work Instructor and qualified personal trainer.
Questions first? The honest answers →