Peak Performance

Why organisations work with Robyn Benincasa She gives leadership teams a named, eight-part operating model for extreme teamwork, including Adversity Management, Relinquishment of Ego and Kinetic Leadership, that buyers can install as shared internal language rather than a one-time motivational story. Her credibility is built from active operational roles, not retrospective storytelling: 23 years in the San Diego Fire Department, three Guinness records in 24-hour paddling, and World Championship wins at the Eco-Challenge Borneo and the Raid Gauloises. How Winning Works (HarperCollins/Harlequin) gives buyers a published, peer-reviewable artefact to point at internally when asking a leadership team to adopt the model. She founded the Project Athena Foundation and was named a 2014 CNN Hero for it, which gives her a substance-led reputation outside the speaking circuit and makes her credible to audiences allergic to motivational packaging. She is one of a small group of speakers who can hold both an operations audience (firefighters, healthcare, manufacturing, military-adjacent) and a corporate leadership audience without changing register. Biography highlights World Champion adventure racer; member of the winning Team Eco-Internet at the 2000 Eco-Challenge in Borneo and 1998 Raid Gauloises champion. Three Guinness World Records in 24-hour endurance paddling, including 371.92 km on the Yukon River. Raced at the front of the sport for 17 years as part of one of adventure racing’s most prolific and consistent world champion teams. 23-year veteran of the San Diego Fire Department; part of America’s first all-female full-time fire crew. Author of How Winning Works: 8 Essential Leadership Lessons from the Toughest Teams on Earth (HarperCollins/Harlequin). Founder of the Project Athena Foundation and 2014 CNN Hero. Her adventure racing team was profiled in Fast Company’s “Xtreme Teams,” which examined the world’s most consistently high-performing teams alongside NASA and Industrial Light & Magic. Biography A four-person team has been moving for thirty hours through jungle. One member is hypothermic, another has stopped speaking, the map is wrong, and the next checkpoint is six hours away. The behaviours that hold the team together at that moment are the ones senior leadership teams need when a year-long programme is failing in front of their board. That is the territory Robyn Benincasa works in. She is one of a small number of people who arrived at corporate teamwork through repeated exposure to it under pressure. Her team won two World Championships, at the 2000 Eco-Challenge in Borneo and the 1998 Raid Gauloises, and stayed at the front of the sport for 17 years as one of its most consistent winners. Fast Company studied that record in a feature called “Xtreme Teams,” placing her squad alongside NASA and Industrial Light & Magic as cases of sustained performance under pressure. Across the same years she served 23 years in the San Diego Fire Department, including time on America’s first all-female full-time fire crew, and set three Guinness world records in 24-hour paddling. The lasting contribution is the model she set out in her New York Times bestseller, How Winning Works: the eight elements of extreme teamwork, from Total Commitment and Adversity Management through We Thinking, Relinquishment of Ego and Kinetic Leadership. Each one is a behaviour a senior team can name, train and install, which is why HR and leadership development functions across healthcare, technology, retail and manufacturing have used it. She founded the Project Athena Foundation after two hip replacements forced her to rebuild her own athletic life, and was named a 2014 CNN Hero for it. She describes the payoff of all this as human synergy, the effect of a connected team reaching a goal no group of individuals could reach alone. That is what keeps her being booked into senior leadership rooms: operational credibility, a published framework, and a delivery that translates extreme conditions into board-level lessons without tipping into motivational performance. Key speaking topics Team performance under sustained pressure Leadership in adversity and operational crisis Building World Class Teams Resilience and recovery after setback Cross-functional collaboration in high-stakes environments Women in operational and frontline leadership Change leadership when the plan has failed Ideal for CEOs and executive teams entering a sustained period of operational stress, restructure or transformation COOs, CHROs and leadership development heads installing a shared team-performance vocabulary Healthcare, emergency services, energy, manufacturing and technology leadership audiences Conferences for senior women in operational, technical and frontline industries Audience outcomes A named eight-part vocabulary for the behaviours that hold teams together under pressure, useable in leadership conversations the following week. A working definition of Adversity Management as a leadership skill, separate from generic resilience language. A clearer view of when ego and ownership become operational risks rather than personality traits. Concrete examples of how decisions, trust and pace hold up when a team is exhausted and the plan has failed.

Why organisations work with Caspar Craven His Big Bold Mindset® and Big Bold Circle give leadership teams a named, structured framework for changing how they think and act under pressure, not a set of borrowed principles, but a system built and tested through his own experience of pursuing extreme goals in commercial and offshore environments. His background as a KPMG Associate Director and CFO, including a technology business exit to a listed company, grounds the material in commercial and financial reality, making it credible with boards, finance teams and senior executive audiences, not only culture or L&D audiences. The argument he makes is unusual: that the behaviours required to hold a team together on a two-year ocean voyage are the same behaviours that determine whether a leadership team delivers or stalls, and he can evidence that claim from both sides of the equation. The Big Bold Circle’s 20 principles connect individual mindset to team behaviour to organisational execution, giving buyers a framework that extends beyond the event into coaching, offsites and leadership programmes. Organisations including Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Boston Consulting Group and Burberry rebook him, evidence that the material holds up under repeated use with commercially sophisticated audiences. Biography highlights Author of three Bloomsbury-published books: Where the Magic Happens, Be More Human: Rethinking the Rules of High-Performance Teamwork, and The Big Bold Mindset: Re-thinking the Rules of Leadership Former Associate Director at KPMG; former CFO in the technology sector, including a business sold to Private Equity Built, scaled and sold a technology business to a stock market listed company Team leader on trophy-winning yacht in the BT Global Challenge (2000/01) Captain of family circumnavigation (2014/16), leading a crew that included three children under ten Speaker for global organisations including Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Boston Consulting Group, Burberry, Standard Life and BAE Systems Biography Most leadership teams do not lack ambition. They lack the thinking that holds when ambition meets sustained pressure. Caspar Craven has spent three decades studying that gap, in FTSE-boardroom pressure, in the execution risk of building and selling a technology business, and in the conditions of offshore sailing, and building the frameworks that close it. His commercial background is foundational. As an Associate Director at KPMG and then CFO of a technology business sold to Private Equity, Craven worked inside the financial and strategic pressures that boards and senior leadership teams actually face. He then built and exited his own technology company, selling it to a listed firm for a seven-figure sum. That sequence – corporate discipline, then ownership, then entrepreneurial risk – is the basis of his credibility with finance, commercial and executive audiences. The two round-the-world sailing voyages are not adventure narrative. The first, as a team leader on a trophy-winning yacht in the BT Global Challenge (2000/01), tested leadership under competitive pressure and physical exhaustion. The second (2014/16), as captain of a family crew including three young children, tested something harder: sustaining shared values, clear roles and collaborative decision-making over two years in an environment where the cost of poor leadership is immediate and real. Both voyages provided the evidence base for the frameworks he now teaches. That evidence base is formalised in the Big Bold Mindset® and the Big Bold Circle, 20 principles connecting individual mindset to team behaviour to organisational execution, published across three Bloomsbury books. The framework has been applied with leadership teams at Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Boston Consulting Group, Burberry and Standard Life, among others. The core argument is practical: that the gap between ambitious goals and actual delivery is a thinking and behaviour problem, and that it can be addressed systematically. Key speaking topics Leadership mindset and behavioural change High-performance team dynamics Goal-setting and execution under pressure Decision-making in uncertainty Resilience and organisational adaptability Entrepreneurship and business growth Culture change and human-centred leadership Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive committees setting ambitious growth or transformation targets CHROs and L&D leaders designing leadership development programmes, particularly for high-potential talent or senior cohorts Commercial and sales organisations at annual kick-offs or strategic resets Boards and C-suite audiences navigating significant change, M&A, or sustained performance pressure Audience outcomes A named, structured framework (The Big Bold Mindset® and Big Bold Circle) applicable immediately to their own goals, team dynamics and leadership behaviours Clearer understanding of why leadership teams stall under pressure, and what specifically needs to change in how they think and make decisions Practical approaches to aligning teams around ambitious goals, reducing execution friction and sustaining momentum through setbacks A shared vocabulary for discussing leadership mindset and team behaviour that moves beyond generic or abstract concepts Renewed confidence in pursuing bold goals, grounded in evidence and principle rather than motivation alone

Why organisations work with Ebony-Jewel Rainford-Brent She built the ACE Programme from a Surrey initiative in 2020 into a national charity with hubs in six cities, giving boards a working example of how inclusion moves from statement to system. As ECB Non-Executive Director and Surrey’s first female Director of Women’s Cricket, she speaks from inside governance, not as an external observer of it. Her career as the first Black woman to play cricket for England gives a credibility on race, talent pipelines and belonging that few business speakers can match. She translates elite-sport performance habits, preparation under pressure, recovery, decision-making in narrow margins, into language operating teams recognise. Through The Art of Success podcast and her broadcasting work for BBC Test Match Special and Sky Sports, she has interviewed and dissected the methods of high performers across sport and business at length. Biography highlights World Cup winner with England, 2009 ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup, Sydney First Black woman to play cricket for England MBE for services to cricket and charity, 2021 Birthday Honours Founder of the ACE Programme; the charity now operates hubs across six English cities ECB Non-Executive Director; first female Director of Women’s Cricket at Surrey CCC BBC Test Match Special commentator and Sky Sports cricket pundit; host of The Art of Success podcast Honorary degree, Loughborough University, 2023 Biography Most diversity initiatives in professional sport collapse at the first hard year. ACE has not. Founded at Surrey in January 2020 in response to a sharp decline in Black British professional cricketers, the programme became an independent charity and now runs hubs in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield. Its founder built it while serving as Surrey’s first female Director of Women’s Cricket and now sits on the ECB Board as a Non-Executive Director. That operational record is what gives the speaking work its weight. The argument is not that inclusion matters in principle. It is what governance, scouting, scholarships and academy pathways have to look like for the numbers to move, and what stops them moving when the early enthusiasm fades. The performance content draws on a playing career that ended in a World Cup-winning England side in Sydney in 2009 and an Ashes retention later that year. It runs through the BBC Test Match Special commentary box, the Sky Sports studio, and seven years of conversations with high performers on The Art of Success podcast. The texture is specific: how teams handle narrow margins, how individuals rebuild after injury and selection setbacks, how a culture either absorbs pressure or buckles under it. The MBE in 2021 and the honorary degree from Loughborough in 2023 are recognition of work already in motion, not the point of the story. The point is a body of practice on representation and high performance that organisations can actually use. Key speaking topics Inclusion as institutional practice High-performance culture in elite teams Resilience and decision-making under pressure Talent pipelines and representation Leadership in male-dominated environments Building programmes that survive their first hard year Performance lessons from elite sport for business Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers redesigning inclusion strategy beyond brand statements Boards and ExCos confronting representation gaps with hard data, not narrative Leadership and talent functions building cross-cultural pipelines Senior teams under sustained pressure looking for usable lessons from elite sport Audience outcomes A clear-eyed view of why most inclusion programmes stall and what design choices keep ACE moving A vocabulary for performance under pressure that elite teams actually use, separated from motivational generalities Specific examples of governance, sponsorship and pathway design that change participation numbers Renewed conviction that representation work is a leadership discipline, not a communications exercise

Why organisations work with Aaron Phipps A first-person account of high performance under genuinely extreme physical constraint, told by a Tokyo 2020 gold medallist on the first GB team to win a team-sport Paralympic gold. Specific stories built around named decisions: continuing the Kilimanjaro climb on hands and knees for four days when the chair failed, returning to elite sport at three Paralympic Games across twelve years. Material that travels into senior leadership conferences without sliding into generic motivation. The talks are structured around setbacks, recalibration, and execution, not slogans. Co-delivered Path to Gold session with performance coach Jon Cooper, which gives senior teams the athlete and coach view of the same elite partnership. Track record with FTSE 100 audiences including PwC, Google, HSBC, Deloitte, Allianz, Salesforce and Nestle. Biography highlights Three-time Paralympian for Great Britain in wheelchair rugby: London 2012, Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024. Tokyo 2020 gold medallist as part of the first GB team to win a team-sport Paralympic gold. Appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to wheelchair rugby. First disabled British person to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, completing the final four days on hands and knees in May 2016 after his adapted wheelchair failed. Lost both legs and most of his fingers at age 15 to meningococcal sepsis after contracting Meningitis C in January 1999. Keynote client list includes PwC, Google, HSBC, Bupa, Allianz, Deloitte, Salesforce, Nestle and O2. Biography A Meningitis C infection on 7 January 1999 put a fifteen year old Aaron Phipps into a two week induced coma. He came out of it without both legs and without most of his fingers, and spent the next year in hospital. The recovery story matters less than what he chose to do with it. He went back into competitive sport, completed two London Marathons by 2009, and was selected for the GB wheelchair rugby squad ahead of London 2012. The Kilimanjaro climb in May 2016 is the story most senior audiences remember. The adapted wheelchair built for the route gave way early. Rather than turn back, Phipps spent four days crawling on hands and knees to the summit, becoming the first disabled British person to reach it. The point that lands in a corporate room is not the heroism. It is the decision architecture: keep going under conditions you did not plan for, with equipment that no longer works, when nobody would blame you for stopping. Tokyo 2020 produced the result that defines his sporting career. Great Britain won the wheelchair rugby final, the first team-sport gold any GB Paralympic team has ever taken. Phipps was central to it, and was appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours. He competed at a third Paralympic Games in Paris 2024, twelve years after his first. He is not a management theorist and does not present himself as one. He is booked because he tells specific stories about staying functional under genuinely extreme conditions, and because senior buyers at PwC, Google, HSBC, Deloitte and others find that those stories survive the translation into a leadership conference room better than most. Key speaking topics Resilience under sustained adversity High performance and elite team partnership Mindset and recovery from setback Goal pursuit when the original plan fails Paralympic sport and disability inclusion Self-leadership through extreme constraint Ideal for Senior leadership conferences and executive offsites where the brief is composure under pressure Sales kickoffs, performance teams and high-stakes commercial groups closing demanding cycles Organisations going through restructure or sustained change where workforce fatigue is the named risk Inclusion and disability-focused programmes that want a substantive lived account rather than a panel Audience outcomes A specific, retold account of a senior person continuing to execute when conditions are worse than planned Sharper language for the difference between motivation and the practical mechanics of recovery A reference point teams use back at work when the discussion turns to whether to push on or stop Recalibration of what counts as a serious obstacle inside the audience’s own commercial context

Why organisations work with Nicholas Janni His Leader as Healer framework provides a named, structured diagnosis – the dominant “leader-as-executor” model produces measurable fragmentation in organisations – and a practical developmental map for what replaces it, validated by a major book award and embedded in IMD executive programmes. His background as a RADA-trained theatre director is the methodological foundation of his work, not a biographical detail – it is why his approach to embodied leadership presence and performance under pressure has a rigour that purely cognitive or academic development lacks. He bridges executive education at one of the world’s leading business schools (IMD) and direct coaching with senior leadership teams, reaching the level of intellectual rigour and applied practice that board-level audiences require. He addresses the specific failure mode that formal leadership development typically cannot: the gap between a leader’s strategic intelligence and their actual capacity to create trust, genuine engagement and high performance in a room. Biography highlights Author of Leader as Healer (LID Publishing, 2022), winner of Business Book of the Year and Leadership Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2023, selected from over 300 nominated titles Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School, Lausanne; previously Associate Fellow at Oxford Said Business School (2010-15); continues to teach regularly at Oxford Said Former theatre director who taught acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), London Co-founded Olivier Mythodrama (2001), an arts-based leadership development consultancy; founded CORE PRESENCE (2013); co-founded Matrix Development (2023) Previous Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management Clients have included Rolls-Royce, Swiss Re, Intel, Microsoft, FedEx and senior UK government figures including Permanent Secretaries Biography Leadership competence and leadership presence are not the same thing. Organisations invest heavily in the former – analytical capability, strategic clarity, execution discipline – and then discover that the latter is what determines whether a team actually performs. This gap is the problem Nicholas Janni has spent his career addressing. His book Leader as Healer (LID Publishing) was named Business Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards 2023. It makes a specific argument: the dominant “leader-as-executor” model, built around rational analysis and transactional relationships, produces fragmentation rather than coherence. The antidote is not softer management but a more complete form of leadership – one that integrates “being” with “doing”, emotional intelligence with analytical rigour, presence with performance. As Visiting Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School, Janni works with senior executives inside some of the world’s most demanding executive education programmes. His methodology draws on 30 years of research into peak performance and human potential. It began in his first career as a theatre director: he taught acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and directed his own company, developing a rigorous, practical understanding of presence and performance that he has since applied directly to executive leadership. The practical result is a distinctive approach to developing leaders – one that expands perceptual bandwidth, emotional coherence and depth of presence alongside strategic capability. He co-founded Olivier Mythodrama, a pioneering arts-based leadership consultancy, before building CORE PRESENCE and, most recently, co-founding Matrix Development, a practice dedicated to transformational executive coaching and coach training. Key speaking topics Leadership presence and embodied performance The Leader as Healer framework Transformational leadership and inner development Emotional intelligence and regulation in leadership Peak performance and the integration of being and doing Mindfulness and presence practices for executive audiences Building high-performance team cultures Creativity and the conditions for innovation Ideal for C-suite executives and senior leadership teams seeking to develop the inner dimensions of leadership performance CHROs and executive development leads designing high-level leadership programmes Business school executive education programmes and corporate leadership academies Organisations navigating sustained complexity where the quality of leadership presence is a performance-critical factor Audience outcomes A clear understanding of the “leader-as-executor” versus “leader-as-healer” distinction, and what it means practically for their own leadership approach Practical techniques for developing presence, deep listening and emotional coherence in high-stakes leadership contexts A framework for distinguishing between “doing” and “being” as leadership modes, and how integrating both drives sustained performance Greater self-awareness of how personal perceptual and emotional patterns affect team culture, trust and decision quality Specific practices drawn from Janni’s work that can be applied independently after the session

Why organisations work with Amy Purdy She offers a first-hand account of performance under permanent constraint that senior leaders recognise as substantive, not motivational filler. She has changed the rules of her own sport: co-founded Adaptive Action Sports in 2005 and was central to adding Para snowboarding to the 2014 Paralympic programme, a concrete example of building a category where none existed. Her book “On My Own Two Feet” (William Morrow, 2014) sits on New York Times bestseller shelves and gives her argument a durable reference point buyers can hand to executives before or after a session. She holds audiences that include mainstream corporate, healthcare, and sport: Dancing with the Stars finalist, TED speaker, Toyota Super Bowl commercial subject, which means she is legible to wide leadership groups. Her content translates directly to questions boards are actually asking: how to keep teams performing through sustained uncertainty, and how to lead when the original plan is no longer available. Biography highlights Three-time Paralympic medallist in Para snowboarding: bronze, Sochi 2014; silver and bronze, PyeongChang 2018. Co-founder, Adaptive Action Sports (2005), a 501(c)(3) based at Copper Mountain, Colorado. Author, “On My Own Two Feet: From Losing My Legs to Learning the Dance of Life” (William Morrow, 2014), New York Times bestseller. TED speaker, “Living Beyond Limits” (TEDxOrangeCoast, published on TED.com). Finalist, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, Season 18 (2014); contestant, CBS’s The Amazing Race (2012). Featured in a Toyota Super Bowl commercial and on Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour. Biography At nineteen, a case of bacterial meningitis took Amy Purdy’s legs below the knee, her spleen, and the function of both kidneys. A transplanted kidney from her father kept her alive. Within two years she was back on a snowboard. Within a decade she was on the Paralympic podium. The athletic record is specific. Three Paralympic medals across two Games: bronze at Sochi in 2014 and silver and bronze at PyeongChang in 2018, all in snowboard disciplines she helped argue into existence. In 2005, with Daniel Gale, she co-founded Adaptive Action Sports, the organisation that did much of the quiet work to get Para snowboarding onto the 2014 Paralympic programme. Changing the rules of a sport is a rarer credential than winning inside them. The communication record sits alongside the athletic one. “On My Own Two Feet,” published by William Morrow in 2014 and co-written with Michelle Burford, became a New York Times bestseller and remains her primary reference text. The TEDxOrangeCoast talk “Living Beyond Limits” travelled from conference room to the main TED library. A finalist run on Dancing with the Stars, a Toyota Super Bowl commercial and a place on Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour followed, each adding a different audience to her reach. What she offers a corporate room is narrower and more useful than the biography suggests. Her argument is about operating when the original plan has been cancelled: recovering quickly, finding the next move, keeping a team moving while the ground is still shifting. It is a working account of constraint. For leaders building organisations that have to hold together through uncertainty, that is a reference worth hearing directly. Key speaking topics Resilience as a working practice Leading through setback and reinvention Performance under constraint Purpose and reinvention after disruption Category creation and changing the rules of a system High performance in endurance and sport Ideal for Senior leadership offsites and CEO forums focused on resilience, reinvention, and leading through sustained uncertainty. Healthcare, life sciences and patient-facing organisations where the lived-experience dimension carries commercial and cultural weight. Sales kick-offs and all-hands moments that need a serious anchor point rather than generic motivation. Diversity, inclusion and talent events where disability, advocacy, and category creation are part of the conversation. Audience outcomes A sharper working definition of resilience that leaders can apply to their own teams, not just admire in others. A concrete model for operating when the original plan has been removed and a new one has to be built under time pressure. A reference example of building a category (a sport, a product, a business line) where none previously existed. Renewed clarity about the relationship between personal setback and professional performance, useful for high-stakes leadership transitions. Language and framing senior leaders can reuse with their own people after the session ends.

Why organisations work with Matt Le Tissier He spent his entire 16-year professional career at Southampton, scoring 209 goals in 540 appearances, which gives any session on loyalty and culture a rare lived foundation rather than a borrowed example. He was the first midfielder to reach 100 Premier League goals and converted 47 of 48 career penalties, both records that travel well in front of audiences who recognise top-flight football. He was voted greatest Premier League player ever in a 2020 Eurosport poll, which gives him the sort of standing in the UK market that makes him a draw for hospitality, client events, and after-dinner bookings. He spent close to two decades as a Sky Sports Soccer Saturday panellist, so the broadcasting craft, anecdote pacing, and ease in front of a room are already there. His autobiography Taking Le Tiss, published by HarperSport, gives the personal narrative a clear public form to draw on for keynote and Q&A material. Biography highlights One-club career at Southampton, 1986 to 2002: 209 goals in 540 appearances. First midfielder to score 100 Premier League goals; 100 goals and 64 assists in 270 Premier League appearances. PFA Young Player of the Year, 1989-90. Eight England caps, 1994 to 1997. Career penalty record of 47 from 48. Voted greatest Premier League player ever in a 2020 Eurosport poll. Long-running Sky Sports Soccer Saturday panellist until August 2020; subject of Sky Sports’ Le God: The Matt Le Tissier Story. Author of Taking Le Tiss, HarperSport, 2009. Biography Southampton signed Matt Le Tissier in 1986 and never let him go. He spent sixteen years at the club, scored 209 goals in 540 appearances, and finished his career as their second-highest scorer in history. In an era when most top players moved for bigger clubs and bigger contracts, that career stands out on its own. The Premier League records do most of the talking. Le Tissier was the first midfielder to reach 100 Premier League goals, with 64 assists alongside them, and his career penalty record of 47 from 48 is still cited as the strongest in English top-flight football. The PFA Young Player of the Year award in 1989-90 marked him out early, and the 2020 Eurosport poll naming him greatest Premier League player ever gave a generation of fans a chance to make the case again, two decades after he retired. For corporate audiences, the value is in what one career at one club teaches about sticking with an institution through change, relegation fights, and quieter seasons. He played under multiple managers, refused several moves, and stayed visible in the public eye long after retirement. After his playing career he spent close to two decades as a Sky Sports Soccer Saturday panellist, which sharpened the storytelling and the timing that an after-dinner audience or a moderated panel needs. His autobiography Taking Le Tiss, published by HarperSport in 2009, set out the career in his own voice. Sky Sports’ Le God: The Matt Le Tissier Story, made about a player who never left, gives any room he speaks in an immediate point of reference: a one-club Premier League career, on his own terms, in a southern English town that adopted him as its own. Key speaking topics Loyalty and the one-club career Pressure and composure in front of goal Sustained performance across a long sporting career Premier League history and analysis Life as a broadcaster after elite sport After-dinner storytelling Ideal for Hospitality, client entertainment, and brand activation events in the UK where a recognisable Premier League figure is a draw. After-dinner and awards bookings for sales teams, partner events, and incentive nights. Panel guest or moderated Q&A formats at sports business, fan engagement, and football industry events. Senior leadership off-sites and sales conferences where loyalty and long-career discipline are part of the agenda. Audience outcomes A first-hand account of what it takes to commit to one organisation across sixteen years of changing leadership. A grounded view of pressure moments, including penalty taking and high-stakes decisions, from someone with the records to back it up. Stories from the Premier League’s first decade told by a player who lived it and then spent two decades broadcasting it. A sharper sense of what life looks like for an elite performer when the playing career ends and the public role continues.

Why organisations work with Stuart Pearce He has captained under genuine national scrutiny, 78 England appearances and nine as captain, and can describe the mechanics of holding a dressing room together when results go against you. He is one of the few speakers who can credibly speak to recovery from a high-visibility failure. The 1990 World Cup penalty miss and the 1996 redemption are documented in his Sunday Times bestseller Psycho and in tournament footage that audiences already know. He has run teams at three different altitudes: Premier League club (Manchester City), national youth development (England U21) and one-off elite tournament (Team GB at London 2012). Few speakers cover that range from direct experience. He sits inside the British media on Sky Sports and TalkSPORT, which means his framing of leadership stories is sharp and current rather than nostalgic. Biography highlights 78 England caps, 9 as captain. MBE for services to football, 1999. 12 years at Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough, the majority as club captain. Manager of Manchester City, 2005 to 2007. Head coach of England U21, 2007 to 2013. Manager of the Team GB football squad at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Author of Psycho: The Autobiography, Headline 2001, a Sunday Times bestseller. Regular pundit on Sky Sports and TalkSPORT. Biography The 1996 European Championship penalty shoot-out is one of the most watched moments in English sporting memory. Six years earlier, Stuart Pearce had missed his penalty in the World Cup semi-final against Germany. In 1996 he scored, and the photograph of his celebration is in most archives of the tournament. That arc, public failure followed by public composure under the same pressure, is the spine of what he speaks about. Pearce captained Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough through 12 years, and the bulk of his 78 England appearances came in that period. Nine of those were as captain. He finished his playing career at Manchester City, winning the Championship in his final season. The MBE arrived in 1999 for services to football. The post-playing CV is unusually broad. He managed Manchester City in the Premier League, then ran England U21 development for six years, and took the Team GB football squad to the London 2012 Olympics. Each of those roles required a different kind of leadership: club authority, talent development under a federation, and one-off tournament command. He has since worked as an assistant manager and as a regular Sky Sports and TalkSPORT pundit. For corporate audiences, the substance is captaincy and recovery, not nostalgia. He has fronted campaigns for Direct Line, Carlsberg, Sony and others, and his 2001 autobiography Psycho was a Sunday Times bestseller. The material that travels best into a leadership room is the part most ex-players cannot offer: a documented account of failing in public, holding the role, and getting another shot. Key speaking topics Captaincy and on-pitch leadership Recovery from public failure High-performance team culture Coaching elite talent Dressing-room management under pressure Resilience and mental discipline Ideal for Sales conferences and annual kick-offs needing a leadership-anchored keynote Senior leadership offsites focused on resilience and composure Sports and entertainment businesses, sponsors and broadcasters After-dinner and awards audiences where authority and recognisability both matter Audience outcomes A first-hand account of leading a team through the worst public moment of your career Concrete examples of how captains hold a dressing room when results go against them Insight into how Brian Clough built and sustained an elite culture at Nottingham Forest A sharper read on what separates international tournament management from club management

Why organisations work with Darren Hardy He has run the operating seat, not just studied it. He led SUCCESS magazine as publisher and founding editor for eight years and built businesses before that, so the material lands with founders and CEOs rather than feeling like borrowed theory. The Compound Effect gives audiences a single, durable mental model for how small daily choices become outsized business outcomes. It survives long after the keynote ends, which is what organisations actually pay for. His 2016 Master of Influence award from the National Speakers Association places him in a lineage of fewer than a dozen people, alongside Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. Few current keynote speakers carry that specific credential. He has spent two decades interviewing the operators behind large companies, including Richard Branson, Howard Schultz and Jack Welch, and brings those case studies into rooms without name-dropping for its own sake. DarrenDaily gives him a live, ongoing feedback loop with hundreds of thousands of high-performers, so the content is stress-tested against what is actually working in the field rather than recycled from a book written years ago. Biography highlights New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Compound Effect, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster and Living Your Best Year Ever. Publisher and Founding Editor of SUCCESS magazine, 2007 to 2015. National Speakers Association Master of Influence Award, 2016. Former executive producer of The People’s Network and chairman of The Success Training Network. Founder of DarrenDaily, a daily mentoring platform for entrepreneurs and executives. Has interviewed leaders including Richard Branson, Howard Schultz, Jack Welch and Steve Wynn. Biography Most performance problems in founder-led businesses are not strategy problems. They are execution problems dressed up as strategy problems, and they compound quietly until a growth plan stalls. Darren Hardy has spent twenty-five years working on the side of that equation that boards rarely discuss directly: the daily habits, operating rhythms and personal disciplines that separate the operators who build something lasting from the ones who do not. His argument is built from two sources. The first is his own operating career. He started his first business at eighteen and ran a company generating material annual revenue before he was thirty, before spending eight years as Publisher and Founding Editor of SUCCESS magazine, relaunching the title and running it as a business. The second is editorial. Through SUCCESS and the networks he ran before it, he interviewed a long line of senior operators, including Richard Branson, Howard Schultz, Jack Welch and Steve Wynn, and distilled what he learned into The Compound Effect, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller still in active circulation more than a decade after publication. The 2016 Master of Influence Award from the National Speakers Association is the credential that most senior buyers notice. It has gone to roughly a dozen people in the history of the profession, including Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy, and it is not given for platform skill alone. It signals durability of ideas, something Hardy has since extended through DarrenDaily, a daily mentoring programme followed by hundreds of thousands of founders, sales leaders and executives. What a room gets from him is not motivation in the old sense. It is a specific mental model for how decisions compound, delivered by someone who has run the P&L, built the audience, and stress-tested the ideas against a live community of operators every working day. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurial performance and founder psychology Habit compounding and long-term execution discipline Leadership in fast-changing, multi-generational workplaces Productivity systems of high-performing operators Sales team performance and commercial discipline Personal leadership and daily operating rhythm Ideal for Founder-led and founder-stage businesses facing the transition from hustle to operating discipline CEOs, COOs and sales leaders running performance-driven commercial organisations Annual kick-offs, leadership offsites and sales conferences where the brief is execution, not strategy Audience outcomes A clear, durable model for how small daily choices compound into commercial outcomes A sharper view of the specific habits and rhythms that separate top operators from competent ones Case material drawn from real interviews with leaders such as Branson, Schultz and Welch, applied to the audience’s own context A concrete shift in how leaders structure their own days, weeks and quarters on returning to the business

Why organisations work with Brendon Burchard He brings a named, testable framework. The six High Performance Habits (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) are drawn from his research with the High Performance Institute and its validated High Performance Indicator Assessment. The research scale is unusual in this field. Survey work across more than 30,000 respondents in 190 countries, followed by structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects, gives leaders a source of advice that is not anecdotal. He has built and run the organisations he speaks about. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, founder of the High Performance Institute, architect of the Certified High Performance Coaching programme operating across 100 countries. His content travels inside companies. Fortune 500 leadership teams and Vistage member groups have used the High Performance Habits material as a shared language for team standards, not a one-off keynote. Three-time New York Times bestselling author with a fourth title, High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017. Biography highlights Three-time New York Times bestselling author: The Motivation Manifesto, The Millionaire Messenger, and further titles, with High Performance Habits reaching Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. Founder and CEO of GrowthDay, a personal development platform, and founder of the High Performance Institute. Architect of Certified High Performance Coaching, operating across 100 countries with over 150,000 logged coaching sessions per Institute figures. Led the research programme behind High Performance Habits, including survey work across 30,000-plus respondents in 190 countries and more than 100 structured interviews with top-scoring performers. Twice profiled on the cover of Success magazine; named by Success and O, The Oprah Magazine as one of the most influential leaders in personal growth. Earlier career at Accenture before moving into performance research and executive coaching. Biography Most leaders know what to do. The harder question is why capable teams, with the right strategy and the right people, still underperform their potential. Brendon Burchard’s research argues the answer lies in a set of daily habits that sustained high performers practise and that most organisations leave to chance. That research is the backbone of his work. With the High Performance Institute, Burchard surveyed more than 30,000 people in 190 countries using the High Performance Indicator Assessment, then ran structured interviews with the top-scoring subjects. The output is a six-habit model (clarity, energy, necessity, productivity, influence, courage) published in High Performance Habits, selected by Amazon editors as a Top 3 Business and Leadership Book of 2017 and a Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has also built the organisations he talks about. As founder and CEO of GrowthDay and founder of the High Performance Institute, Burchard runs the Certified High Performance Coaching programme, operating in 100 countries with over 150,000 logged sessions according to the Institute’s own figures. Earlier books, including The Motivation Manifesto, The Charge, and The Millionaire Messenger, each reached New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, giving him a readership and coaching network few performance researchers can match. For an executive audience, his value is specific. He gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary and a measurable standard for what sustained performance looks like, then ties it to the decisions senior people actually make: where to spend energy, what to cut, and how to hold a team to a clearer standard than comfort allows. Key speaking topics High performance habits Executive and team performance Personal and organisational productivity Leadership development Motivation and behavioural change Coaching culture and performance standards Influence and communication Ideal for CEOs and executive committees setting performance standards for a full leadership team Heads of sales and revenue leaders running large annual kick-offs or incentive events Chief learning officers building a coaching culture or leadership development programme Founder-led businesses scaling from owner-operator mode into managed performance Audience outcomes A shared six-habit model leadership teams can use as a common performance vocabulary A clearer view of which habits correlate with sustained results versus short-term output Specific daily practices senior people can apply to protect energy and clarity during high-load periods Language for holding teams to a higher standard without defaulting to pressure or burnout A research-backed case for treating performance as a set of trainable behaviours, not a trait

Why organisations work with T. Harv Eker His core material is built from his own operating experience, including a retail fitness chain scaled to ten locations, a subsequent financial collapse, and a methodical rebuild; this is not theory cribbed from other authors. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind put his argument into mainstream circulation, a New York Times bestseller and number one on the Wall Street Journal business-book list, which gives audiences a common reference point before the session starts. His Money Blueprint framework translates abstract wealth mindset material into a concrete diagnostic that individuals can apply to their own decisions and habits. Peak Potentials Training, the company he founded, has run entrepreneurial and wealth-mindset programmes at scale for more than two decades, so the material has been refined in front of large, mixed audiences rather than a single executive room. He speaks directly to founders, owner-operators and ambitious individuals, which is a different audience to the corporate keynote circuit and a better fit for entrepreneurial and franchise events. Biography highlights Canadian-American entrepreneur, businessman and motivational speaker Author of the New York Times bestseller Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (HarperCollins, 2005), number one on the Wall Street Journal business-book list Founder of Peak Potentials Training, acquired by Success Resources in 2011 Developer of the Money Blueprint framework for understanding individual wealth behaviour Creator of the Millionaire Mind Intensive and related programmes delivered internationally Biography The practical question behind most wealth advice is why the same information produces very different outcomes for very different people. T. Harv Eker’s working answer is the Money Blueprint: a set of internalised beliefs, set early, that governs how someone earns, saves, invests and loses money. His career has been an extended test of that argument, first on himself and then in front of large rooms of entrepreneurs. He is Canadian-American, born in Toronto in 1954, and started working at thirteen. After more than a dozen unsuccessful businesses, he opened one of North America’s early retail fitness stores and scaled it to ten locations, selling part of the company to a Fortune 500 buyer. He then lost most of the proceeds within two years. The rebuild is the source of the framework: a deliberate study of the psychological patterns that separate people who make money from people who keep it. That work became Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, a New York Times bestseller and number one on the Wall Street Journal business-book list, and Peak Potentials Training, the seminar company he founded and later sold to Success Resources in 2011. The Millionaire Mind Intensive remains the flagship programme. Eker’s natural audience is entrepreneurs, business owners and individuals building financial independence, rather than corporate boards. For growth conferences, founder communities, franchise events and wealth-focused audiences, his draw is the combination of a directly applicable framework, a mainstream bestseller and an operator’s willingness to talk about the failures as well as the results. Key speaking topics Wealth psychology and the Money Blueprint Entrepreneurial mindset and personal finance Building and rebuilding businesses Habits of high-earning individuals Motivation, action and execution Ideal for Entrepreneurs, founders and owner-operators scaling or restarting a business Franchise networks, sales organisations and business-opportunity communities Growth-focused conferences and private wealth events After-dinner and headline slots where a direct, plain-spoken commercial voice is required Audience outcomes A working diagnostic of the beliefs driving their current earning and spending behaviour A concrete view of the habits shared by high-earning entrepreneurs, drawn from Eker’s own research and teaching Specific prompts for changing patterns that have previously capped income or business growth A direct, action-oriented call to implement, consistent with his operating style

Why organisations work with Michelle Rozen She brings peer-reviewed research on why goals fail, published in the Journal of Social Sciences, into a room of operators wrestling with stalled transformation. Her national study of 5,000 US professionals on AI adoption reframes the resistance problem from a technology question to a psychology question, which is where most enterprise AI programmes are actually losing ground. Branded, teachable frameworks (The 6% Club, the 0-10 Rule, The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI) give a leadership team shared language to use after the keynote, not a one-time message. A repeat client list across Fortune 100 and 500 organisations, including Pfizer, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and Merrill Lynch, signals she translates the research into something senior leadership groups will sit with for ninety minutes and then apply on Monday. Biography highlights PhD and Master’s in psychology; founder of the Dr. Rozen Institute. Author of The 6% Club (Wiley, 2024), a USA Today bestseller. Author of 2 Second Decisions and The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI. Research on goal execution published in the Journal of Social Sciences. Huffington Post contributor; quoted across NBC, ABC, FOX News and CNN. Repeat speaker for Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Merrill Lynch, IKEA and Illumina. Biography Most change programmes do not fail at the strategy layer. They fail at the point where a senior team has decided what should happen and a wider workforce, already worn down by previous change, has to make it real. Rozen’s work sits squarely on that point of failure. She is a behavioural scientist trained at masters and doctoral level in psychology, and her published research in the Journal of Social Sciences was the empirical basis for what became her best-known framework, The 6% Club. The headline finding from that research is uncomfortable for any leadership team running a transformation: of people who publicly commit to a change, only six percent sustain it past a month. The 6% Club, published by Wiley in 2024, took that finding into the boardroom. It became a USA Today bestseller and the spine of how she now works with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients including Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Cisco, Johnson and Johnson, and Merrill Lynch. Her newer work follows the same logic into the AI conversation. A national study of five thousand US professionals, summarised in The Change Doctor’s Playbook for Adapting to AI, treats the AI adoption problem as psychological rather than technical. The point a senior buyer cares about is that this reframes where the bottleneck sits: not in the technology stack, but in the human response to it. What distinguishes her from the broader change-keynote field is the apparatus around the talk. Named frameworks, peer-reviewed research, a publishing record at a major business press, an institute under her name, and a Huffington Post column give a leadership team something to reach for after the room empties. The 6% problem is the one she has built her career on naming. Her contribution is giving senior leaders a defensible, research-grounded way to do something about it. Key speaking topics Behavioural science of organisational change The psychology of AI adoption and resistance Decision-making under pressure Goal execution and follow-through inside large organisations Leadership through restructure and uncertainty Motivation and influence at the team level Ideal for CHROs, transformation leads and change directors running multi-year restructures with stalled adoption. CIOs, CDOs and AI programme owners trying to move enterprise AI from pilot to operational use. Senior leadership offsites where the agenda is execution, not strategy. Sales and commercial leadership groups working on influence, decision-making and habit change in client-facing teams. Audience outcomes A research-backed account of why most change initiatives stall after the launch moment, and what a leader can do about it. Named frameworks (The 6% Club, the 0-10 Rule) the audience can use in their own teams without further translation. A specific reading of where AI adoption is actually breaking inside their organisation, drawn from her 5,000-professional study. Sharper language for talking to a tired workforce about another wave of change without losing credibility.