The Business End

The Business End The Business End

Where sport, business, leadership, and elite performance collide. Podcast & business network hosted by Justin M.

Fitzpatrick, former Irish international rugby player turned business leader, and Liam Mooney, ex-professional athlete and m The Business End is a leadership intelligence company. We analyse leadership and performance under pressure by studying elite sport and business environments where decisions are public and consequences are real. Through podcasts, curated events, and applied insight, we identi

fy leadership patterns that hold under pressure — and translate them into practical lessons for modern organisations. This page shares:
• Leadership insight
• Podcast episodes
• Event highlights
• Applied performance lessons

We focus on what works when it matters.

🎙 The Business End | Episode 40 | John Haime | LIVE 🎧Most people think pressure creates failure.John Haime believes some...
18/06/2026

🎙 The Business End | Episode 40 | John Haime | LIVE 🎧

Most people think pressure creates failure.

John Haime believes something different.

Pressure simply reveals what was already there.

A former professional golfer who spent years chasing the PGA Tour before injury ended his playing career, John has since become one of the world's leading performance coaches, working with elite athletes, executives and leadership teams across the globe.

And this conversation is packed with lessons every leader, entrepreneur and high performer needs to hear.

We explored:

🏌️ How an injury changed the narrative in his head and ultimately ended a lifelong dream.

🧠 Why confidence is not something you find.
It's something you build.

🎯 The difference between borrowed confidence and built confidence.

⚡ Why the most dangerous thing leaders do under pressure is delay decisions.

🔄 Why resilience isn't getting knocked down.
It's how quickly you get back up.

👂 Why listening remains one of the most underrated leadership skills in business.

And perhaps the most powerful lesson of all:
Most people don't fail under pressure because they're not capable.

They fail because they abandon their process to protect their ego.

John's perspective is refreshing because it strips away the mythology around performance.

Confidence isn't loud.

The most confident people rarely need to tell you they are confident.

As John put it:

"Built confidence is quiet. Borrowed confidence is loud."

For leaders navigating uncertainty, athletes managing expectations, or entrepreneurs carrying the weight of difficult decisions, this episode is a masterclass in self-awareness, resilience and performance under pressure.

One insight particularly stood out:

Your identity must be separated from your outcomes.

A poor performance does not make you a poor person.

A setback does not define your future.

A difficult season does not determine your worth.

In a world obsessed with results, John reminds us that sustainable performance comes from understanding who you are, protecting your confidence and trusting your process.

A timely conversation with a man who has spent two decades helping world-class performers navigate the moments nobody else sees.

🎧 Episode 40 with John Haime is now live.

17/06/2026

🎙️ THE LIONS LESSON EVERY BUSINESS LEADER NEEDS

In 2001, Matt Perry was selected for the British & Irish Lions.

The best players from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

World-class talent.

World-class experience.

Yet something wasn't right.

Looking back on the tour, Matt said:

"I think what happened on that tour was the philosophy did not work."

Not because the players weren't good enough.

Not because they weren't committed.

Not because they lacked talent.

The reason was far more interesting.

"The game plan wasn't co-designed with the players."

Slowly, cracks appeared.

"There were separate groups. People used to go a separate way."

And that's the leadership lesson.

Most organisations don't fail because of capability.

They fail because people stop believing.
The strategy might be brilliant.
The vision might be compelling.
The talent might be exceptional.

But if people don't feel ownership, commitment begins to fade.

Matt's advice was simple:

"Design the game plan with the team."

Because when people help build something, they fight harder for it.

When they understand the framework, they commit to it.

When they believe in the direction, they pull together.

Too many leaders assume their job is to provide all the answers.

The best leaders do something different.

They create clarity.
They create ownership.
They create belief.

As Matt put it:

"You've got to get everyone believing in the framework."

And perhaps the most powerful line of all:

"The players know how to play."

Leadership is rarely about telling talented people what to do.

It's about creating an environment where talented people can do their best work together.

Because the real role of leadership is understanding how to get the best with, for and from your people.

That's as true in the boardroom as it is on a Lions tour.

Thursday in Monaco. We sit down with an Olympic champion.Monaco is a tiny country, a microstate sitiuated on the Mediter...
16/06/2026

Thursday in Monaco. We sit down with an Olympic champion.

Monaco is a tiny country, a microstate sitiuated on the Mediterranean cost bordered by France. It's too small a nation to field a rugby side at the highest level on it own. So one its sons go elsewhere to chase the summit aged just 14 and against the odds.

Antoine Zeghdar — born and raised in Monaco — pulled on the French jersey and came home an Olympic champion. The principality didn't put him on the podium. But it made him.

On Thursday he sits down with us at The Business End ⚫ — not to tell war stories, but to open up to the business community on the things that separate the people who deliver under pressure from the people who freeze.

How do you make the biggest call of your life in a heartbeat, with a nation holding its breath — and get it right? How do you lose in front of your country, feel it land, and walk back out to go again? And why is staying calm under fire is not a nice-to-have trait for a leader, but is essential as the consequences of not having it are real and instant. We're not handing you the answers in a post. That's what the room is for.

We'll do the lunch in two languages, French and English, side by side, for the first time. Because pressure feels the same in every language. Sport is the one truly universal business language. It is the best educator for leadership and performance in business. On Thursday we will prove it again in a different country and culture.

Expect the unexpected and welcome to all who will be attending.

80%+ of professionals are avoiding at least one difficult conversation at work right now.The promotion ask. The underper...
16/06/2026

80%+ of professionals are avoiding at least one difficult conversation at work right now.

The promotion ask. The underperformer. The co-founder who's outgrown the role. And underneath all of it, the cost of saying nothing.

This isn't a soft skill. It's the most consistently avoided, most expensive behaviour in professional life — and avoidance never holds the line. It compounds. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. Tolerated becomes authorised. Authorised becomes culture.

The trap most leaders fall into isn't silence — it's the half-measure. Being upfront, then softening it until the message disappears. The research is explicit: withhold to stay 'nice' and you fail at being both honest and kind. You owe people the clarity, delivered well.

We brought in Ben Franks — double Rugby World Cup winner, All Blacks 2011 and 2015 — to lead a private session on exactly this, then tested it against the leading research in the field. His instincts on performance under pressure held up.

The full framework went to members on 11 June. We don't publish the method — but if there's a conversation you're weighing up, send it over and we'll run it against the framework.

13/06/2026

"I played every meaningful game on the road to the final. Then I got dropped."

Most people think resilience is about enduring hardship.

Sometimes it's something far harder.

Putting your disappointment to one side and supporting the team anyway.

In this clip, Matt Perry reflects on being left out of Bath's 1998 European Cup Final despite playing a major role in getting them there.

At 21 years old, he could have focused on what he lost.

Instead, he focused on what mattered.

"All I ever wanted was to see the club win."

It's a perspective that extends far beyond sport.

The promotion that goes to someone else.

The project you're no longer leading.

The opportunity that doesn't come your way.

The leaders people trust most are rarely the ones who never experience setbacks.

They're the ones who refuse to let setbacks become their identity.

Because real leadership starts when your personal interests and the team's interests no longer perfectly align.
The question is simple:

Can you still contribute when you're not the one being celebrated?

🎙️ Matt Perry on resilience, perspective and why the bigger picture matters more than personal disappointment.

10/06/2026

Most people think leadership happens in front of the crowd.
Often it happens in a quiet moment before anyone else sees it.
Before his first England cap, Matt Perry wasn't standing in the middle of the dressing room delivering a speech.

He was sitting alone in the toilet.

Nervous.
Overwhelmed.
Trying to process the enormity of representing his country for the first time.

Then the bathroom room door opened.

Martin Johnson walked in, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulled him into the team huddle and delivered three simple instructions:

"You're one of us now. Know your role. Do your job. We'll look after you."

No motivational speech.
No grand gesture.
No complicated leadership framework.
Just clarity.

The best leaders understand something many people miss.
Under pressure, people rarely need more information.

They need certainty.
They need simplicity.
They need to know they belong.

Matt walked out onto Twickenham that day, made his England debut against Australia and somehow finished as Man of the Match.

The lesson?

Leadership is often measured in moments, not meetings.
Sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is remind someone they are ready.

🎙 Matt Perry on The Business End

08/06/2026

Matt Perry won everything there was to win at Bath. He made 221 appearances for the club and played in 8 of their 9 games in the 1997–98 Heineken Cup run, when Bath became the first British club to win the European Cup.

That team dominated for a decade. Then Perry said something most leaders skip past: that team never really played together again — about 80% were either retiring or moving on.

The standard at Bath was real, but it wasn’t written down. It lived in the senior players: how they trained, what they tolerated, what they demanded of anyone new. As long as they were in the building, it looked permanent.

Then they left.

The uncomfortable bit, especially if you run a business, is this: the results didn’t drop straight away. Performance held just long enough for everyone to assume nothing had changed. The numbers reassured a system that had already lost the people who built it.

That’s the Monday morning problem. In a lot of high-performing businesses, the real standard doesn’t live in the systems or playbook. It lives in a few irreplaceable people: the partner who just knows how to win work, the operator who fixes problems before they surface, the person everyone else quietly calibrates against. Because the numbers still look good, nobody feels urgent about capturing what they actually do.

By the time the P&L finally shows the damage, those people are already gone — and the window to codify how they worked has closed.

A standard that only lives in people isn’t a standard. It’s a generation. And generations leave quietly.

So here’s the test for this morning: if your three best operators walked in the next six months, would your standard still show up on Monday, or just stories about how things used to be done?

If your honest answer is a list of names rather than a system, you don’t have a strong culture. You have a concentration risk wearing one.

The full diagnostic on how high-trust systems drift before results fail is in the private member layer at The Business End.

🎙 THE BUSINESS END | EPISODE 39 | MATT PERRY | LIVE 🎧Most people think high performance is about talent.Matt Perry's car...
04/06/2026

🎙 THE BUSINESS END | EPISODE 39 | MATT PERRY | LIVE 🎧

Most people think high performance is about talent.

Matt Perry's career suggests otherwise.

A Heineken Cup winner.
England's most-capped fullback at the time.
British & Irish Lion.
One club. One city. One jersey.

Yet one story stood out above all the achievements.

At 21 years old, Matt played every step of Bath's journey to the

1998 Heineken Cup Final.

A week before the final, he was dropped.

Jonathan Callard came into the team.
Matt moved to the bench.

Bath won the European Cup.

When we asked how he processed the disappointment, his answer revealed more about leadership than any trophy ever could.

"You get over it quickly. You move on. You focus on the team."

No bitterness.
No excuses.
No drama.

Just perspective.

Throughout this conversation Matt returned repeatedly to a principle that applies equally to sport, business and life:

The team comes first.

Whether it was surviving England's infamous "Tour of Hell" in 1998, starting all three British & Irish Lions Tests in Australia, or spending his entire professional career at Bath, the pattern never changed.

Focus on your role.
Control what you can control.
Look after the people around you.

One line particularly stayed with me:
"Trust is earned through consistency. Alignment is sustained by clarity."

In an age obsessed with personal brands, shortcuts and instant recognition, Matt's story is a reminder that the people who endure are often the ones who quietly commit themselves to standards long after the spotlight has moved elsewhere.

Pressure doesn't create character.

It reveals it.

This is a conversation about resilience, humility, leadership, decision-making under pressure and what high-performing teams really look like behind the scenes.

A masterclass from one of rugby's finest professionals.

🎧 Episode 39 with Matt Perry is now live.

On 18 June, we are bringing a room of senior business leaders in Monaco into a private lunch with an Olympic champion.An...
03/06/2026

On 18 June, we are bringing a room of senior business leaders in Monaco into a private lunch with an Olympic champion.

Antoine ZEGHDAR won gold in rugby sevens at Paris 2024 — in his own country, in front of his own people with the weight of expectations on him and his team. We have spent our entire business and sports careers studying business leadership and performance under pressure, and let me tell you: what happens in the mind of someone in those final seconds of an Olympic final is worth more than any business school case study could ever write or teach.

Harvard and McKinsey spend hundreds of millions theorising about leadership and performance. We do something they can't. We sit with the people who have actually done it — at the absolute pinnacle — and we pull out the playbook. No theory. Lived experience.

Because here's the truth: every founder, every CEO, every investor in that room has faced their own version of the moment when everything is on the line. The pressure is the same. The lessons are universal. They've just never heard them from someone who stood on an Olympic podium.

This is what we build at The Business End. Elite sport as the sharpest lens there is on leadership, performance culture, and decision-making when it counts and everything matters ...at "The Business End". Expect to be surpised.

18 June · Monaco · 🇲🇨

02/06/2026

At some point, every leader finds themselves flying a plane they are no longer sure how to land.

As Simon Harling put it on The Business End:
"It’s like learning to fly a plane at 30,000 feet. You don’t really care where you’re going. All you care about is keeping the thing in the air."

The uncomfortable truth is that many businesses look successful from the outside while quietly operating in survival mode on the inside.

Revenue is growing.
The brand looks strong.
The team is busy.
The social media posts are positive.

But beneath the surface, leaders are firefighting.

Responding rather than directing.

Reacting rather than designing.

Working harder rather than thinking differently.

The danger is that survival can feel like progress.

You become so focused on keeping the plane airborne that you stop asking where it is heading.

The meetings keep happening.
The invoices keep getting paid.
The wheels keep turning.
Yet somewhere along the way, intention is replaced by momentum.

That was one of the most powerful lessons from our conversation with Simon.

Sometimes the greatest risk in leadership is not failure.

It is becoming successful enough to avoid confronting the questions that matter.

Are you still playing the game you intended to play?
Or are you simply keeping the thing in the air?

🎙️ The Business End with Simon Harling

Because pressure does not create performance.
It reveals it.

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