Speaker

A map you cannot fully read, a crew you have not tested yet, and an island that might not even have treasure on it. And you are the one who has to get everyone there alive. Sound familiar?

That is the feeling nearly every entrepreneur or business leader has on day one. The difference is, once we get stuck into the daily grind, most business leaders forget they are on an adventure. The map gets buried under spreadsheets, board packs, and the relentless noise of running a company. The crew starts pulling in different directions and one day the leader looks up and realises they have no idea where they are heading anymore.

In this keynote, Matt takes the audience on a voyage through the world of Treasure Island and their own leadership journey. Finding the map, choosing who gets on the boat, addressing the potential mutiny that nobody saw coming. The storm that changes everything, and the moment you finally sight land and must question whether the treasure was what you thought it was.

Every stage is brought to life through the unconventional leadership lessons from building and selling two businesses and rowing 3,000 miles across the Atlantic. But the power of this talk is that your audience starts mapping their own journey alongside it. They see where they have drifted, where the crew needs attention, and what the treasure actually looks like for them. The lessons from their own life, the risks they took, the storms they weathered, the people they trusted, start to make sense as leadership education for the first time.

Audiences will leave with:

• • A clearer sense of where they are on their own map, and where they've drifted
• • A practical framework for the journey ahead
• • The confidence to stop navigating blind and start leading with purpose

Available as a keynote or a 3-hour interactive workshop (with delegate workbook and map).

There is an uncomfortable and often ignored truth: the most valuable leadership lessons you will ever learn will not happen in a training room. They will happen at 3am when you cannot sleep because you have just bet your house on a business you are not sure will survive. Or in the middle of an ocean when a Boxing Day storm is trying to capsize your boat. Or maybe even on a pavement when your body finally tells you what your brain refused to accept.

Your audience has had their own versions of these moments. The presentation that went wrong. The hire that cost them six months. The conversation they avoided until it was too late. The joy of building something from nothing. The grief of watching something fall apart. Every one of those experiences contains a leadership lesson, but most people file them under "things that happened" rather than "things that taught me how to lead." This session helps them recognise those experiences as genuine leadership education, not just memories.

Instead of starting with theory and hoping it survives when challenged, this talk starts with reality: the mistakes, the gambles, the moments of genuine vulnerability, and pulls out the lessons that stick. Your delegates do not just hear about unconventional leadership lessons. They start to value the ones life has already given them.

Audiences will leave with:

• • A fresh perspective on where their real leadership education has come from
• • The courage to trust their own unconventional journey over someone else's textbook
• • Practical, immediate takeaways they can apply to their own business and team, not theory they will forget by Friday

Available as a keynote or a three-hour interactive workshop with delegate workbook and map.

Your audience faces a question most of them are avoiding: could their business run without them? This talk takes leaders inside the reality of building a business that can operate, grow, and sell without the founder. The central lesson is simple: buyers do not buy businesses, they buy leadership teams.

Every leader who runs a business or manages a team will recognise themselves in this talk. The decisions they are still making for their people. The pressure they have absorbed instead of distributed. The commercial capability they have not built because it felt easier to do it themselves. The unconventional leadership lessons from a PE exit and an Atlantic crossing illustrate these principles, but the real impact comes when leaders start seeing the patterns in their own business and recognising what their own experience has already taught them about building teams that last.

Ideal for: Owner-managed businesses (two million to thirty million pounds), PE-backed leadership teams, Vistage and peer groups, industry conferences focused on growth or exit.

Your leadership team applies The Uncharted Framework™ directly to their business. The four stages — Dream, Plan, Execute, Evolve — are mapped across four layers: Vision, People, Process, and Management. Delegates do not just hear about the framework. They use it to assess their own commercial gaps and build a plan to close them.

These workshops are often booked as follow-ups to keynotes, or as standalone sessions for leadership teams preparing for growth, exit, or succession.

Young audiences hear a frank, honest account of what happens when you reject the conventional path and enter the workforce at sixteen. But more importantly, they are encouraged to look at their own experiences, the challenges they have already faced, the setbacks that felt like failures, the moments of happiness and disappointment, and to see that life is already teaching them how to lead. The session emphasises empathy, compassion, and kindness, and reassures young people that exam results do not dictate lifetime success, while being completely honest about the challenges along the way.

All required protocols are adhered to at all times.