The Business End

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The Business End The Business End is a private business intelligence network where we use the lens of sport to sharpen the leadership and performance of our members.

It's built for Owners, Founders, C-suite and senior business executives who share a passion for sport. 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 identify 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.

Benn Robinson played 72 Tests for the Wallabies, remains the most-capped Waratah in history, ran the players’ union whil...
12/10/2026

Benn Robinson played 72 Tests for the Wallabies, remains the most-capped Waratah in history, ran the players’ union while still playing, and has spent nearly a decade since in specialist risk underwriting. Few people have seen pressure and risk from as many angles.

On Wednesday 21 October he headlines Achilles Live Sydney at W Sydney, hosted by Achilles and The Business End. The Business End is a leadership intelligence network built on lessons from elite sport.

An evening of drinks, canapés and straight conversation about leadership, safety culture and performing under pressure, from the Test arena to the supply chain. Justin M. Fitzpatrick, former Ireland international, chairs the panel with Liam Mooney, alongside Katie Ferrier and Daniel Watts of Achilles.

It’s aimed at senior business leaders in procurement, supply chain, safety and risk. Places are limited. RSVP here: https://www.achilles.com/events/achilles-live-sydney-in-partnership-with-the-business-end/

73% of the senior business people in our Monaco room on Wednesday said their biggest risk was coming from outside. AI. T...
09/10/2026

73% of the senior business people in our Monaco room on Wednesday said their biggest risk was coming from outside. AI. The pace of change. Pressure they cannot control.

In elite sport, 86% of what actually broke under pressure came from inside the team. That gap is where businesses get hurt.

On Wednesday we were at Castel Roc, on Place du Palais, for The Business End’s Monaco Leadership Lunch, powered by Van Lanschot Kempen. Before every lunch, each guest tells us the biggest risk to their business. We set those answers against our library of verified findings from leaders and elite performers who have been under real pressure, in sport and in business. We call it the Room Index. Monaco looked outward, at markets, technology and change. Sport points somewhere less comfortable. When teams broke, the cause was how they were run, how much rested on one person, and who was picked and kept on.

Two guests came at it from opposite ends. Jamie Cudmore captained Canada, lost finals with Clermont before he won one, collected more cards than he would care to count, and now coaches at Nissa Rugby. Alain van der Heijden, Head of Wholesale Head of Wholesale Investment Strategies at Van Lanschot Kempen Investment Management, makes decisions with other people’s capital where the outcome is never known in advance.

What was said stays in the room. That is the Chatham House Rule, and it is why people speak openly. The questions are often diagnostic on purpose, and every leader reading this should be able to answer them. What do you change after a loss when the foundations were right? Do you hire for skill or for mentality? Which risks do you leave alone? And when the pressure is at its highest, who in your organisation is genuinely allowed to say stop?

Change hits every competitor at once. Your systems decide who comes through.

We also measure every room by who is in it. On Wednesday 63% of the room were founders, chief executives, directors and partners, and our Room Strength Index came in 12% up on our last Monaco lunch. The room is the product, and we curate it seat by seat.

Thank you to Isabelle Foy and the Van Lanschot Kempen team, to Castelroc, to Nissa Rugby for releasing Jamie midweek in the middle of a season, to Ivor ALEX for sharing the chair, and to everyone who came. The next Monaco Leadership Lunch is on Wednesday 25 November, and every room adds to the Room Index.

Next up is Sydney, 21 Ocotber where are really looking forward to bringing The Business End ⚫ in partnership with Achilles Information Limited to show what business can learn from sport. A new continent, country, market, business culture yet sport is a universal business language and we like pressure :)

We are building something powerful at TBE, every event & podcast, compounds and sharpens the business intelligence for our next room & our members.

Ivor Alex Liam Mooney Jamie Cudmore Justin M. Fitzpatrick John Donoghue Brad Ainsworth Tim Powers Annette-Al Charron Van Lanschot Kempen private banking Jamie Ball

DUBLIN 30 SEPT 2026 - On Wednesday 30 September, Achilles powered by The Business End, brought together a room of procur...
08/10/2026

DUBLIN 30 SEPT 2026 - On Wednesday 30 September, Achilles powered by The Business End, brought together a room of procurement, sustainability, risk leaders, senior business leaders and former Irish international rugby players at Glencairn in Dublin to discuss social value as the new competitive differentiator in Irish procurement.

Our thanks to the panel: Declan Kidney, Katie Ferrier of Achilles, Jeanne Copeland of Greenville Procurement Partners and Suzanne Hickey of Uisce Éireann. The conversation covered how buyers are weighting social value in practice, what separates suppliers who can evidence it from those who only claim it, and why SMEs still find it harder than they should to get a fair hearing in tendering. Declan brought the perspective of team selection and performance under pressure, and the parallels with how buyers assess suppliers were closer than most of the room expected.

It was a strong room, including a number of former Ireland internationals, and the third half was arguably the best of the evening.

We are grateful to Achilles for hosting, to the British Ambassador and the team at Glencairn for a remarkable venue, and to everyone who came, old faces and new. Attendees will receive a short paper drawing together the main themes from the panel and the room.
We are back with Achilles on 21 October, this time in Sydney.

Liam Mooney Justin M. Fitzpatrick Peter Burke Jamie Ball

Great to hear from Canadian rugby legend, Jamie Cudmore today in Monaco who was on fine form. A fantastic afternoon, a f...
07/10/2026

Great to hear from Canadian rugby legend, Jamie Cudmore today in Monaco who was on fine form. A fantastic afternoon, a full house, great venue and a strong room. We explored two different sectors, Sport and Finance, with Alain van der Heijden from Van Lanschot Kempen private banking Both speakers reached the same conclusions about leadership and elite performance. This was our third leadership lunch in Monaco this year. Every time the quality of the room and the audience has grown significantly. More analysis and photos to follow.

Ivor Alex Liam Mooney Justin M. Fitzpatrick John Donoghue Tim Powers Annette-Al Charron

Coming soon to London. Friday 13 November 😉 with Neil Back MBE at The Oxford and Cambridge Club. 50 spots only for this....
06/10/2026

Coming soon to London. Friday 13 November 😉 with Neil Back MBE at The Oxford and Cambridge Club. 50 spots only for this. Full details to be announced soon…

Most leadership assessments tell you what kind of leader you are. We wanted to know something more useful: where a busin...
06/10/2026

Most leadership assessments tell you what kind of leader you are. We wanted to know something more useful: where a business is exposed when the pressure arrives, and what happened to the leaders who faced the same thing.

Members of The Business End ⚫ can now take an eighteen-question Leadership Stress Test. Their answers are coded against the same framework we use for every conversation on our podcast and at our lunches. That is 280 findings so far, from 53 leaders across elite sport and business. Each risk is graded by how much of the business rests on it. Structural means the whole organisation depends on it. Material means it is costing something now. An early sign is a red flag worth watching before it grows.

The result is a private Leadership Profile on our platform. It shows a members risks in their own words, set against the evidence. If your growth depends on one person, you can read how other leaders handled exactly that, and what it cost the ones who left it too late. Our team reviews every profile and writes an initial read with a short action plan. A follow-up call then turns that into a final report.

The image shows an example with invented details. Every members profile is visible only to them and to us.

If you lead a business and would like to see where yours stands, message me. It's a tool not only to develop your leadership, but spot risk patterns in your team and a profiling tool to make sure when you hire, your new recruit will match your working patterns (and if not how to handle them!). If you are a TBE member don't forgot to take it.

Elite sport is unforgiving about pressure. A missed standard shows up on the scoreboard within minutes, in front of ever...
06/10/2026

Elite sport is unforgiving about pressure. A missed standard shows up on the scoreboard within minutes, in front of everyone. Business is slower to deliver the verdict, which is exactly why standards drift. A shortcut in a supply chain, a check skipped because the deadline was tight, a supplier nobody looked at closely enough. None of it costs anything until the day it costs a great deal.

That gap between how sport handles pressure and how business handles it is what we will be talking about in Sydney on Wednesday 21 October, in partnership with Achilles Information Limited

Benn Robinson joins us. Seventy-two Tests for the Wallabies, the most-capped Waratah in history, RUPA President while still playing, and the past decade in sports underwriting, where his job has been to price what happens when things go wrong. Katie Ferrier of Achilles will be in conversation with him, with Justin M. Fitzpatrick and Liam Mooney in the chair.

We ran the same format with Achilles last week in Dublin and in Belfast in March. Over 80% of the rooms were senior leaders, every one through a personal introduction. Sydney will be the same kind of room. W Sydney, 5.30pm. Registration can be found in the comments section below.

05/10/2026

They lost a year’s work in ten minutes.

Years before Kevin Boyle founded WineVistas, he walked into a bar in Burgundy and witnessed something that would fundamentally change the way he thought about w**e.

It was June 2014.

A violent hailstorm had just ripped through the vineyards.

Inside the bar were local w**e producers whose livelihoods depended on the land surrounding them.

Kevin soon realised the scale of what had happened.

The people sitting around him had just lost the majority of an entire year’s work in around ten minutes.

Not because they made a bad decision.

Not because they lacked preparation, commitment or effort.

Because it hailed.

For Kevin, it changed the way he saw the bottle of w**e sitting on a table.
Behind it was a family. A producer. A year of work. And an extraordinary amount of risk that none of them could completely control.

Years later, when Kevin left a successful career in technology to build WineVistas, that afternoon in Burgundy was still with him.

And he draws an interesting parallel with another world he knows well: rugby.

Burgundy is rugby country.

Its producers compete season by season. Some years reward them. Some years absolutely clobber them.

And then they get up and go again.

Perhaps that is one of the most powerful lessons behind WineVistas.

Resilience isn’t believing you can control the storm.
It’s deciding what you do after it passes.

🎙️ Kevin Boyle, Founder of WineVistas | The Business End | Episode 46

Across our conversations with leaders from elite sport and business, two risks come up far more often than the people ca...
29/09/2026

Across our conversations with leaders from elite sport and business, two risks come up far more often than the people carrying them expect. The first is a business that depends on one person. The second is a leader with no one to test the big decisions against. They tend to arrive together.

Both have a measurable cost. Value Builder's research found that businesses able to run without their owner sell for around 4.5 times profit, against 2.9 times where the owner sits at the centre of every relationship, a gap of roughly half as much again. On isolation, RHR International's survey of chief executives found that half experience it in the role, and six in ten of those say it harms their performance. Stanford research adds that nearly two thirds of chief executives receive no outside advice at all.

Neither risk shows up in the accounts until it is expensive. The Leadership Stress Test is designed to find both early. It takes around eight minutes, and participants receive a written assessment within two working days, followed by a consultation. If you are a TBE member don't forget to take the test as the platform some very important upgrades are happening to the platform over the next few weeks.

Many people see The Business End as a business network for business people who love sport. This is of course very important to us, but our ultimate product is business intelligence using the lens of sport. TBE is very much a tech/AI business, where we harnass our findings to strength the business of our members. If you are interested in what we are building or becoming a member DM [email protected] and we can arrange a call to talk you through the platform.

🎙 The Business End | Episode 46 | Kevin Boyle | LIVE 🎧What happens when you walk away from the career you know, back you...
24/09/2026

🎙 The Business End | Episode 46 | Kevin Boyle | LIVE 🎧

What happens when you walk away from the career you know, back yourself, and build something completely different?

Kevin Boyle spent more than two decades in enterprise technology.
He was part of DocuSign’s first international team, helping build its EMEA operation from just six people to more than 250 across four countries on the journey towards IPO.

Then he changed direction.

He left the world of global tech and built WineVistas, an independent w**e business based on something technology can sometimes struggle to replicate:

Relationships. Trust. And knowing the value you personally bring to the table.

Then, just 18 months into trading, Kevin suffered a serious accident.
Surgery. Multiple fractures. Months off his feet. No driving. No customer visits.

For a business built around personal relationships, it could have been catastrophic.

Instead, Kevin used the enforced pause to rethink the business.
One line from our conversation captures it perfectly:

“If I just sell bottles of w**e, then someone else will sell them different bottles of w**e. If I sell myself and what I can bring to the table, that’s a different proposition.”

That applies far beyond w**e.

In a world increasingly obsessed with scale, automation and AI, competitive advantage can still be deeply human.

Your relationships.
Your judgement.
Your reputation.
Your experience.
The trust people place in you.

Kevin joins us for a fascinating conversation about:

🍷 Walking away from corporate life to become an entrepreneur
💻 What the w**e industry can learn from technology
🤝 Why relationships remain a competitive advantage
🔥 What to do when standing still is no longer an option
🧠 Using AI to strengthen human capability rather than replace it
🏉 What sport teaches us about setbacks, resilience and simply getting back up
📈 Building a business for the long game rather than the next transaction

And, importantly, why Burgundy w**e producers may be considerably tougher negotiators than you think.

Kevin is also part of The Business End, looking after the w**e side of what we are building, which made this conversation particularly enjoyable for us.

A very different journey from many of our guests.

But ultimately, the same territory:

Performance. Pressure. Reinvention. Relationships.

🎙 The Business End | Episode 46 | Kevin Boyle
LIVE now.

If you are building something of your own, navigating a career pivot, or thinking about where your real competitive advantage lies, this one is worth your time.

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