FIT TO LEAD
CEO Coaching and Mentoring
You don't hire a coach because you're losing. You hire one to keep winning. For CEOs of PE- and growth-backed businesses who are delivering - and know there's more.The Character
The PE-Backed CEO
You’re a CEO. Founder, first-time, or experienced. PE-backed, growth-backed, or on your way. The numbers are roughly where they should be. The board is roughly where it should be. From the outside, you’re performing.
You also know you’ve got more in you than you’re getting out. The gap between what you’re delivering and what you’re actually capable of is real, and you can feel it.
And the job is lonely in a way nobody warned you about. The chair has fiduciary duties. The investor director is getting pressure from their IC. Your team brings you their problems, not yours. There’s nobody to think out loud with. Nobody who’ll challenge you without an angle.
What you want:
- To make better calls when the calls are hard.
- To stop carrying it alone.
- To feel as steady on the inside as you look on the outside.
- And someone in your corner who’ll just tell you the truth.
The Villain
Tight Grip
Experience has a shadow side. Pattern recognition is exactly what stops working when the pattern breaks. The grip that worked against a ball machine - predictable speed, predictable angle, lock the wrist, swing - frames the ball every time against a live opponent.
Most capable CEOs don't come unstuck because they're not intelligent enough. They come unstuck because they're locked into a story that used to be right.
The cost shows up in places that don't make it onto a board pack:
Decisions that should take days take weeks. There's no one to think them through with honestly.
The version of you that the team, the board and the market sees is smaller than the one you actually are. They start adapting to that smaller version, which is hard to undo.
The hard people calls get postponed past the point where they're cheap.
Boardroom moments turn reactive. The grip tightens exactly when it should loosen.
You're running on adrenaline. Mental, emotional and physical reserves are draining faster than they're replenishing.
Your reputation drifts in ways you can't see, because nobody is helping you read it.
The bigger mistake
PE and growth investors treat coaching as something for the struggling. It's the opposite. The leaders who get the most from it are the strongest - the ones with the most headroom, the highest stakes, and the most to gain from making slightly better calls slightly faster for slightly longer. Development isn't remediation. It's a compounding lever. The highest returns sit with the people who are already delivering.
The Guide
Who You’re Working With
Both sides of the table
I’ve sat on both sides of the table - as a PE investment partner and as an operator - and I’ve spent the last decade in the room with CEOs at the moments when the calls were hardest. I know what it costs to carry the role alone. I know how invisible that cost is from the outside, until it isn’t.
Pattern recognition
Thirty-plus CEO relationships across the investment lifecycle. Investor and operator background - I speak the board’s language and the CEO’s at the same time. The CEOs I work with tend to share four things: passion, a hunger for honest feedback, the discipline to act on it fast, and resilience under pressure.
Complexity Fitness
In high-stakes PE environments, technical skill is rarely where CEOs come unstuck. Judgement and temperament are. I go beyond standard coaching to strengthen how you make calls under pressure - so you handle complexity with greater clarity and lead with sustainable intensity rather than sheer force.
A lot of this is learning to work with polarities rather than treating them as choices. Short-term and long-term. Push and patience. Holding the line and changing your mind. Standardising and giving people room.
The CEO’s job is full of tensions that don’t resolve - the work holds both sides at once, and knowing which to lean into when. The best CEOs aren’t the ones with the most certainty.
They’re the ones who can stay credible when they don’t know yet, run small bets to find out, and back the answer when it lands. That’s complexity fitness. And it’s trainable.
What Clients Say
“Mark possesses a deep understanding of leadership dynamics and a remarkable ability to guide and inspire. I gained valuable insights into my leadership style and developed a more strategic and effective approach which benefitted my colleagues and investors.”
PE Managing Partner
“Advice is everywhere, but it’s often influenced by commercial interests, personal relationships, or emotion. Mark is different. He brings independent thinking, objectivity and the benefit of genuine experience - without an agenda.”
Alex Johnson
Founder & CEO of a PE-backed business
“Mark’s mentorship has been both strategic and highly impactful. His guidance has directly contributed to advancing key business objectives and developing my own leadership capabilities.”
Kris Owden
CEO, Caremark
“Through patience and persistence, he skilfully helps you find your own answers. And they are the answers you need, rather than the answers you initially think you need.”
Paul Christensen
Co-Founder & CEO
“Having Mark as a coach is like having multiple other CEOs to talk to at the same time.”
Alex Preece
Co-Founder & CEO, Tillo
“Mark brings rare expertise as an investor and business leader. He incisively cuts through noise to unbiased, practical solutions for our thorniest issues.”
Sam Smith
Founder & CEO, PepTalks
The Board You Don’t Have
Two Boards. Only One Exists.
Board for Accountability.
Every PE-backed CEO has a Board for Accountability - chair, investor directors, NEDs. They govern. They hold you to the plan.
Almost no CEO has the other board - the Board for Development.
A Coach
Who keeps your confidence without an agenda.
A Mentor
Who has sat in the same seat.
A Sparring Partner
Who will tell you the thing nobody else will.
Peers
Who get the pressure without competing for the room.
Four roles. None substitutable. I bring the first three. We build the fourth around you.
What We Work On
Three Levels of Leadership
Lead Yourself
Mastering your own psychology, thinking and behaviour so you can withstand the pressures of the role. Self-awareness - not the soft kind, but the kind that lets you see the patterns running you before they cost you a hire, a quarter or a relationship. Resilience and adaptability under pressure. Decisive judgement in ambiguous situations. Navigating the stakeholder tensions of PE ownership. And the physical side - sleep, energy, the baseline you make calls from.
Lead the Team
Building an A-team at pace. Shaping culture on purpose, because it’s getting shaped either way. Installing the operating rhythm and accountability that drive results without you having to push. The communication that turns followership from a hope into a system.
Lead the Company
Clear direction and sharp trade-offs. Customer obsession and the innovation that drives organic growth. A board relationship designed as a high-trust partnership, not inherited as a reporting line. An exit shaped from day one, not scrambled for at the end.
Avoid Failure
The costs above don't stay flat. They compound - quietly, and in the valuation.
Success
As the work takes hold, here is what begins to change:
Board Confidence
The board is more confident in you than the day you started - not because you've charmed them, but because they can see the plan moving and they trust the cadence you've built.
The Right Team
The leadership team is the one the plan actually needs, not the one you inherited.
Operating Rhythm
The operating rhythm runs without you having to push it.
Focus on What Matters
The three to five things that matter are getting done, and the noise around them has been turned down.
You are no longer absorbing pressure. You are directing it. And the sentence the PE partner says about you - in the portfolio review, in the corridor, in the next fund's pitch deck - is the right one.
Who you become
The CEO who kept getting better while delivering - the one the PE firm backs again and again.
For the investors backing them
The partner who treats CEO development as an execution lever, not a soft add-on, and whose portfolio reflects it.
Next Step
Strong CEOs rarely lack advice. What they often lack is someone independent enough to challenge their thinking without an agenda. If that would sharpen the way you lead, let’s talk.
Book a confidential CEO conversation
A conversation about your role, the decisions you are carrying, and whether a sparring partner would help you make better calls.
Schedule a Briefing