Our health and performance services
A multidisciplinary high-performance team supporting individuals and teams across multiple domains.
Someone has to carry the company. Too often, no one is carrying them.
The whole company leans on one person. When they are depleted, everything else they carry is too.
The people who run companies are the least likely of anyone we see to prioritise their own health, and the most likely to be neglecting their greatest asset, their cognitive and emotional function. Being passionate about what you are building often means sacrifice. Sleep goes first, then fitness, then the things that do not announce themselves at all, until it is too late.
That is not just what we see in a consulting room. Our team, delivering our Founders' Performance Programme, have supported more than a hundred founders. In the cohort we surveyed, 93% said they felt overwhelmed by pressure or stress, 92% started the day tired or unrefreshed, and on cardiorespiratory fitness matched for age and sex, more than half sat in the lowest quartile.
82% ate two or fewer portions of fruit or vegetables a day. 4% ate six or more portions of fibre. Almost a quarter had taken five or more days off sick in the previous three months.
Among the founders who finished, average cardiorespiratory fitness rose 13% and blood pressure fell by around 5mmHg in a group that was otherwise healthy. Every one of them said they felt better equipped in their role.
Six months, with the same team throughout.
Afterwards.
Six months is a complete piece of work. It is not a trial and it is not a funnel. Some people finish with what they came for and carry on by themselves. Others move to membership, where the same relationship continues without an end date.
Individuals take the programme for themselves. Where a fund or a company sponsors someone, we will tell you what that costs and how to arrange it.
Request an introductionThe same thinking, for a whole team.
Almost everything else here is built around one person. An offsite is the same work done with a team, somewhere that asks something of them, with the same people behind it.
Performance and resilience, where the demand is real.
The teams we work with operate under sustained demand and at short notice. What holds up under that and what gives way is partly physiological and partly psychological, and in practice the two do not separate: a team that is not sleeping makes worse decisions, and a team that cannot say the difficult thing to each other gets tired faster.
An offsite works on both at once.
Delivered by a team, not a facilitator.
This is not one coach with a workshop. The disciplines behind an offsite are the ones behind everything else here: physicians, exercise physiology, nutrition, sleep and psychology, working on the same group at the same time.
Most team development treats the body as a constant. Most executive health never sees the team. Doing both together is the whole point, and it is the part almost nobody else is set up to do.
You cannot self-report this.
Ask a team how it performs under pressure and you get the version it believes. Put it somewhere genuinely demanding for a week and you stop asking and start watching. That is why the environment is chosen to be hard rather than pleasant, and it is why this does not work as a day in a hotel.
Six days at Finse, taken by one team.
Finse sits at 1,222 metres on the edge of the Hardangervidda plateau in Norway, and we have run it every winter for five years. A team can take the week outright, and that is the version we would argue for. A group who already work together have to rely on each other for six days, in conditions that take no interest in anyone's seniority.
There is no phone signal for most of it, which is part of the point. The work starts before the team travels and continues after they return. The expedition is the middle of the piece of work rather than the whole of it.
They come back having done something hard together rather than separately, which is not a thing that can be arranged in a meeting room.
More about FinseWhat we are building.
Finse is the format we can put a date against today. The wider programme is in build: shorter formats, different environments, and the same multidisciplinary team behind them, for groups who would never choose a polar plateau. Not everything worth doing has to be cold.
When one of those exists we will describe it here with its specifics rather than its ambition. The principle stays the same either way: somewhere that asks something of you, a small group, and time away from everything that usually has your attention.
How to start.
Tell us the team, how many of them, and what you are hoping is different afterwards. We will tell you honestly whether an offsite is the right instrument for that, and if it is not we will say so.
Offsites are priced separately from membership. You get the figure and what it covers before you commit to anything.
Ask about an offsiteIt starts with the Deep Dive.
Most annual medicals are a fixed battery. Everyone gets the same panel, the same scans, and a report at the end. It is thorough, and much of it tells you nothing you needed to know.
Ours starts with ninety minutes with a physician. Your history, what has run in your family, what you are actually worried about, and what you want to still be able to do in twenty years. Only then does anyone decide what to measure.
Some of what follows is standard: bloods, cardiopulmonary exercise testing, body composition. Some depends entirely on you. Imaging is arranged where it is indicated, not because it is on a list. We would rather run six tests that change a decision than twenty that produce a document.
You then sit down with the physician who ordered them and go through what they mean, what to act on, and what to leave alone.
For an individual, and for a company.
Most people take it for themselves. Companies also take it for the executives they depend on, in place of the standard executive medical, and the difference a buyer notices is that nobody here has a reason to recommend a scan that is not indicated.
Inside membership, or on its own.
An annual assessment programme is included in Comprehensive membership. Foundational members arrange it at cost as they need it. And it is available on its own, to people who are not members and may never be.
Request an introduction