What would need to be true to develop leaders in business, the same way we develop elite athletes in sport?
I’ve been obsessed with this question since crashing my tech company in 2018.
Some people know me as Leigh Sherman, while others know me as Coach Leighroy.
Here's the story about how I became a coach, for the 2nd time in life.
I’m the founder of Hillspeed Group, an international coaching company that merges my background in elite sport with my experience as a founder, builder, and advisor in high-growth companies.
Hillspeed is an environment designed around the CEO, built on the same principles we use to develop elite athletes in sport - because that's where my career story starts.
From athlete.
I competed at senior level in triathlon and swimming as a junior, and my vision was to represent my country at an Olympics.
But at some point, that dream felt out of reach, burnout set in, my training habits changed, and I began questioning how my development as an athlete could have been different.
To coach.
That led me to study sports science, where I spent years working alongside Australia’s top sports scientists, coaches, and administrators.
Back to athlete.
Eventually, my career shifted - from sport to retail, then from retail to digital business.
🔶 By 2010, I was running hackathons and building startups.
🔶 By 2014, I built a VC-backed tech company.
🔶 By 2016, I moved to Berlin as one of the first Australians in a tier-1 accelerator.
🔶 By 2018, burnout struck again - this time as a founder, stuck in a game I was never prepared to play.
The crash.
I lost my company, my stability, and my identity.
Not being able to return capital to your investors, and the people who back you is a deeply frustrating, embarrassing, and life altering experience for entrepreneurs.
The turn.
Starting over, I mentored and advised other founders through the networks I was part of with Techstars and the startup hubs around Melbourne where I lived at the time.
It became obvious to me that on some level all founders were badly injured (to use a sport metaphor), yet the ecosystem would enable them to ignore the fundamentals and run faster.
One thing you learn as a sports coach is that you have a fiduciary responsibility to prevent your athletes from injury - and based on what I now knew, I felt compelled to disrupt the concept of how we develop athletes in business.
Back to coach.
From 2018, I spent a few years refining my Company Model framework while enjoying some time as an employee inside scale up companies and then working alongside different industry leaders in eduction and coaching.
During this time I upgraded my already long list of coaching and training certifications over the past 20 years in every aspect of human performance that we teach.
The Hillspeed protocol
In 2022, I started playing with the first iteration of the Hillspeed Protocol - a coaching system that puts the CEO at the centre of their growth model, so we can look at performance objectively through the lens of constraint.
I’ve refined this protocol across thousands of calls with founders and industry specialists.
This is me as the Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) at Techstars Sydney 2024 - having supported the brand since 2016 as an alumni.
Today.
I live on the Northern Beaches of Sydney with my beautiful family in place called Dee Why - the San Diego of the south.
I work with athletes all around the globe on 4 different continents.
Coach Leighroy is my professional alias;
- a reminder to myself, and a commitment to my athletes,
- that I’m here to win with you, at speed, without burnout.