“We know we’re better when we lift our heads up, pause, breathe, seek other perspectives, look at what’s over the horizon and then back down at what we already have.”

Jim, why did you start Ground+Air? 

Three factors - luxury, practicality, necessity.

Luxury because I wanted to indulge a lot of passions of mine; Practicality, because I wanted to leverage my experience, use what I’d learned and build on it; Necessity, because I still need to earn. I also had a strong desire to make an impact in a different field, and I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t do it.

Before founding Ground+Air, I was running a talent search firm which I’d founded, feeling challenged but not as fulfilled as I had been. I felt I should be leading with more enthusiasm, but was finding that harder to conjure. I had watched too many leaders stay too long in their roles and I was risking doing the same. So, I committed to a new trail.

I wanted to do something around performance, leadership, coaching, psychology, physiology, talent development, building and growing businesses. I wanted to build on the coaching and leadership training I’d already invested in; I wanted to leverage my commercial experience, select my favourite industry connections to keep working with, operate in other markets, learn a chunk of new stuff, become a specialist in a field where my passions lie. I had the funds and the time to indulge myself in a period of reflection, research, and networking. I gave myself the space to steadily build my paid coaching hours. I also dug around various coaching modalities to find the right blend for me, then trained with some genuine experts in different areas of coaching, psychotherapy, emotional intelligence, rest and recovery. 

There was a revolution underway in the worlds of performance and wellbeing. These two areas were seen as being at odds with each other, rather than linked. It struck me that businesses were rarely clear on how they supported their people. We know it makes instinctive and logical sense that if you wrap the right support system around people, to account for the mental, physiological and environmental influences that affect them, they will perform better, more consistently, and for longer. Yet I didn’t know of any firm in the sectors I was in who had addressed the problem with a joined up Performance+Wellbeing approach.

Ground+Air’s core offering delivers this.

Is it more about the journey or the destination? 

The name “Ground and Air” comes from a recognition that we’ve all got some ground to cover, stuff we have to confront, get through, go around or over. We all have a bunch of decisions to make about what routes to take and how to respond. “Ground” is a lot about the reality of the journey. Meanwhile, we know we’re better when we lift our heads up, pause, breathe, seek other perspectives, look at what’s over the horizon and then back down at what we already have. “Air” is about having that lifted perspective. Ultimately, it’s about striking the right blend of realism and aspiration, which is a deeply personal balance.

When things get tough, what do you do?

I haven’t been confronted with any of the big heavy tough stuff yet. On all the smaller challenges, my default position tends to be to think what more can I do to affect my situation. I like being self-reliant and hold a strong belief that it’s down to me to handle what’s in front of me, accept it if I can’t change it, or look to adopt another view towards it if it’s troubling me. A psychologist might label this as my embracing a stoic belief system, and having a strong “locus of control”. 

If I don’t know how to tackle something, I typically flip to: who do I know who does? I’m not shy about asking, but I generally prefer to dish out favours more than ask for them.

Do you crave certainty?

I definitely value a sense of security around the things that are too precious or too personal to question, or too risky to lose. But in work, I generally like a slug of ambiguity, where I need to work things out, make judgement calls that define if we succeeed or fail. That’s the fun bit, when I or the team can assign the credit for things that work out.

Lockdown was interesting in a business sense because planning around the unknown, combined with a greater sense of risk, got me in a really energetic and creative place. As a coach I think you need to be comfortable with uncertainty. A lot of our work at Ground+Air is around helping people to create the conditions that support optimal and peak performance. Science tells us we have to embrace and work with a level of uncertainty, which is just as well because it makes life interesting.

Has founding a business changed you?

I’ve worked for myself for 25 years (most of my adult life) – so it has definitely shaped me. My identity was entangled in my first business, and it is in this one. But I wouldn’t say my work face is much different to my out-of-work one, so there’s no clash there.    

What do you need, now?

I don’t feel I “need” a lot, but I have a few preferences or “handy-to-haves”…which include:

1. A clear, unequivocable answer to whether Ground+Air should secure investment, or continue to bootstrap (like I’ve always operated). The coach in me tells me it depends on the offering, the opportunity, and what I want. The impatient, ambitious child in me tells me it would be a ride. It would be nice to park that itch, without any “what-ifs” either way and crack on.

 2. I’d love to morph into a brilliant presenter, without having to put in the thought and the grind to optimise my capabilities.

 3. A rock-solid mentor. Some wise head who spots my strengths and my blindspots, and has total commitment to my achieving a satisfying, productive career.