FIT TO LEAD
CEO Coaching
Scale Your Leadership, To Scale Your Team, To Scale Your Company
Proven Results
25 years of experience in the start up and scale up ecosystem from all angles
Founder and Business Builder
Founder coaching in the UK and India, and helped build 5+ companies
Business Angel
Finalist in Exit of the Year in UK Business Angel Association Awards, 2 demicorn exits achieved
Venture Capitalist and Private Equity
Created top quartile investment returns over 10 year period, raised over £2bn in equity and debt
Coach & Mentor for Founders & Their Teams
30+ CEOs, founders and leaders coached
Fit to Lead Coaching Benefits
You started with a dream to build something meaningful or to solve a significant problem or maybe you were simply unemployable!
Now you lead something with substance. What got you here is not going to get you to the next level. It’s time to get some help. Bespoke facilitated workshops on strategy setting, designing your culture. You can’t do this alone. With your advisory board member, you have the freedom to curate the relationships you need. Learn with someone who’s been there and scale your leadership with founder coaching in the UK.
Benefits Of Working With Fit to Lead Include:
Learn quickly to be a more effective leader for your company
Understand your superpowers and how to make the most of them
Mitigate your weaknesses through awareness, growth, hiring and delegation
Strategically prioritise your time
Manage the stress and prevent burnout
Become a better decision maker – quicker on some decisions and slower on others
Clarity in your vision, purpose, roles and communication
Learn to build and manage a leadership team
Master the art and science of fundraising
Manage your board effectively
Understand how to get to exit and how to maximise the exit valuation
How CEO Coaching Works
Scale yourself, to scale your team, to scale your company
No Scale Up CEO should have to go it alone
Fit to Lead’s CEO Coaching comes with a unique blend of coaching and mentoring focusing on 3 areas – the self, the team coaching and the company.
Do any of these scale up problems sound familiar?
You don’t really know what leadership is about
Become a Great CEO
The Solution: Become a great CEO by knowing yourself and defining your own style.
It’s one thing to start up a business and another thing to lead a scaleup. The right leadership style for you will come from your unique set of strengths, motivations, values and beliefs. Your job is to define a CEO role that gets the best out of you. I will help you understand yourself, your blindspots, the impact you have on others and develop the set of leadership tools you will need to succeed.
You are feeling overwhelmed, and exhausted and you feel alone
Find the Peak Performer in You
The Solution: Get some help and realise attending to your own well-being is not a selfish pursuit.
The scale up world is GO GO GO! If you are anything like most scale up CEOs you keep saying each day, “I just need a few more hours.” Feelings of overwhelm and stress can lead to burnout and worse. It doesn’t have to be that way. Through my CEO Coaching methodology I holistically use evidence-based performance techniques so you can become a more resilient, healthier, happier high performer.
So many decisions to make, not sure which ones to speed up and which ones to slow down on
Become a Better Decision Maker
The Solution: Understand that decision making is a skill which you can get better at and how to do it.
The choices you have to make at scaling startups get increasingly weighty. Deliberation on whether to hire an expensive expert or to shut down or keep running with strategic choices is intensified by a fast-moving and high-pressure environment with little room for failure. Good decisions will accelerate your company’s growth and bad decisions may literally destroy the company. Learn time-tested tools, frameworks and techniques to create better decision making processes and radically improve your probability of success.
Questioning whether you are going to have to continue to spend so much time dealing with people issues
Create a High Performing Leadership Team
The Solution: Yes you are! Learn the skills to get your team members and teams to fulfil their potential.
A high performing leadership team is almost always lacking in companies which fail and is present within companies that succeed. Getting the team dynamics right will be the key to your success. Most CEOs understand that but actually creating a great team is easier said than done. Use Fit to Lead’s Team Coaching Frameworks and/or bespoke interactive and experiential workshops to develop a team which produces results much greater than the sum of its parts.
The vibes are not what they were in the early days, a few good people have left
Culture by design, not by default
The Solution: Figure the reality of your current culture, and design your Culture 2.0.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast is the commonly heard saying. I don’t subscribe to that as I think strategy is equally as important as culture. You need to create one by design rather than by default. And as with any great design, we need strong foundations. The foundations of a great culture is psychological safety.
You are experiencing growing pains; the growth is so fast you are struggling to keep up
Scale Your Business Successfully
The Solution: Pause, slow done, reflect, figure out the root causes, and solve the issue before pushing down again on the accelerator.
I am also a business builder and have been involved in growing over 15 companies. I can share multiple examples of how to do it and how not to do it! Whether it’s creating a winning company strategy, a funding strategy using my experience of raising over £2 billion or getting the most out of your board.
Let's get started
Think we’re a good fit? Contact me with a few details, and I’ll be in touch.
How Fit to Lead Helps You, Your Team and Your Company
CEO and Founder Coaching
Transition from start up to grown up
We have identified the essential elements which any purpose-led Founder needs to succeed in the scale up phase. It begins with scaling you (the CEO/Founder), the ‘whole’ person, sustainably ahead of the growth of your company.
Team Coaching
Turn your team into a competitive advantage
Through mastering the 7 key characteristics of a winning team, reap the rewards of working in a team that functions better than the sum of its parts.
Facilitated Workshops
Accelerate your learning from the scale up experts
When it comes to your scale up, whatever your most pressing need is right now – honing your strategy, designing your culture or getting more out of your team – our network of experts can help.
Advisory Board Member
Wisdom not short term fixes
Expert coaching, mentoring and advice from someone with 25 years of experience in the start up and scale up ecosystem. Learning never stops in my world!
Founder Team Due Diligence
Helping investors increase their success rate
Underestimate the importance of founder due diligence at your peril! Use my proven methodology developed over a 25 year track record of assessing founders and their teams.
Meet The CEO Coach, Mark
I have been obsessed with performance and reaching my potential since I was 9 months old when I started walking. That was soon followed by running! My mission is now to support one million ambitious CEOs to fulfil their own, their team’s and their company’s potential. I have been fortunate to experience the entrepreneurial ecosystem for the last 25 years from multiple perspectives, founder, executive, angel investor, venture capitalist, private equity partner, coach and mentor. These different perspectives have shown me what it takes to succeed. But not at all costs. My role is to support you in getting the best out of yourself and your team in a sustainable way.
Meet The CEO Coach, Mark
I have been obsessed with performance and reaching my potential since I was 9 months old when I started walking. That was soon followed by running! My mission is now to support one million ambitious CEOs to fulfil their own, their team’s and their company’s potential. I have been fortunate to experience the entrepreneurial ecosystem for the last 25 years from multiple perspectives, founder, executive, angel investor, venture capitalist, private equity partner, coach and mentor. These different perspectives have shown me what it takes to succeed. But not at all costs. My role is to support you in getting the best out of yourself and your team in a sustainable way.
Check Out My Free Resources and Assessments
Scale Up Leader - How To Be An Effective CEO
I have created a short quiz to see how well set you are for the scale up journey. It’s free and quick. And you get a free personalised report along with 40 practical tips on how to succeed.
Peak Performer - How To Thrive The Scaleup Journey
Having been burnt out myself and seeing too many CEOs burning themselves out, I have created the PERMS Energy Framework to help you thrive not just survive. It’s not just some clever theory, it gets results! Take the PERMS Energy Check-in to find out where your energy deficits lie. And use the bespoke guidance I’ll send you to start managing your energy more effectively straight away.
Mark’s Scale Up Essays
Never miss monthly essays, insights and practical content to help you navigate your scale up sustainably and successfully.
How To Run Effective One-On-Ones?
One-on-one meetings with your direct reports are the most powerful engagement and productivity tool you have as a leader.
Create Your Winning Strategy With 5 Key Questions
This framework will not only prevent burnout but will help you thrive; it is not just some clever theory, it gets results!
See What My Clients Say
CEOs who have coaches achieve ROI by 700%. Results speak volumes. Hear from my clients how leadership coaching positively impacted them, their teams and their companies.
When it comes to the challenges faced by leading a start-up and a scale up, as a successful entrepreneur and investor himself, Mark simply “gets it”.
Mark is a gifted individual. He brings experience, perspective and humanity to every conversation.
Mark is the Swiss-army knife of guidance, supporting, and empowering me to achieve both professional outcomes and personal growth.
As he is talking to Founder CEOs all the time and understands the journey so well, having Mark as a coach is like having multiple other Founder CEOs to talk to at the same time.
CEO Coaching Blog
Are You Cut Out To Be A Scale Up CEO?
Not many Founders make the transition from start up to scale up CEO – take the short quiz below to see if you are on the right track
Investor vs Independent Board Members – What’s The Right Mix?
Great founders consciously create a board with the right balance and diversity of character and capability. Most founders in my experience don’t want a board until they are forced to which is usually when they accept third-party money. Entrepreneurs often see boards...
Six Ways To Develop Confidence In Negotiation
Dysfunctional teams can destroy a business, but you need to understand the root causes of the issues to ensure your solutions work in the long term. Discover how to find those root causes and how to transform your team into a top-performing one using The PERILL Model.