The clarity for what comes next.
Helping founders and CEOs elevate how they lead — with the same rigour they bring to how they build.
The founders and CEOs building scaling businesses are, by almost any measure, among the most driven and capable people in any room. They make high-stakes decisions at pace, carry complexity that most people never encounter, and sustain it for years. What they've already achieved is remarkable.
But the same qualities that make them exceptional — the relentless commitment, the refusal to slow down, the drive that feels like it should be limitless — are also what make sustained high performance a genuine discipline. Not because they're failing. Because the demands are genuinely extraordinary, and the line between operating at the highest level and pushing past what's sustainable is hard to see from the inside.
This is what neuroscience confirms: EEG research shows that people experiencing high cognitive load can still perform well on the outside — but their brains are working significantly harder to produce the same output. More neural resources recruited. Slower processing. Greater internal strain. The surface result looks normal. The cost is invisible — until it isn't.
Clarent's Human Performance practice exists because of this reality. It helps founders and CEOs bring the same deliberate investment to how they perform as they bring to how their business performs — sharpening cognitive capacity, strengthening decision quality, and building the conditions for sustained effectiveness at the highest levels of demand.
The research is clear. How a leader functions shapes how a business performs.
of founders report that burnout directly impairs their decision-making.
WithDouble / Foundology, 2024 — UCL-supported research
of founders report that leading a scaling business has affected their mental health — and 81% don't openly share it.
Startup Snapshot, 2023/24
Founders with low resilience are four times more likely to feel overwhelmed — and twice as likely to consider quitting.
Foundology / UCL, 2025
Founders who proactively invest in managing their health and performance are twice as likely to project 10%+ business growth.
Bupa Global Executive Wellbeing Index, 2025 — n=500
Performance science and commercial reality, working together.
Clarent's Human Performance advisory works at the intersection of performance science and commercial leadership. It's individual, private, and built around the specific demands of the person in front of us — not a programme or a framework applied uniformly.
The work addresses what actually determines sustained leadership performance: cognitive capacity, decision quality, energy architecture, and recovery. These aren't lifestyle topics. They're the operating conditions that determine whether every decision, conversation, and strategic call a leader makes is as clear as it should be.
Each engagement is led directly by a senior advisor with genuine experience in both the science and the commercial reality of leading a scaling business. The relationship is confidential, sustained, and shaped by what the leader actually needs — not by a predetermined curriculum.
Interested in what an engagement could look like for you? Start a conversation →
When a leader is performing at their best, everything downstream is better.
The ventures they back are more rigorously validated. The operations they build are more resilient. The growth they pursue is more sustainable. That connection between how the people lead and how the business performs is the thread that runs through everything Clarent does — and it's why Human Performance sits at the foundation of the firm's model.
I built this practice because of something I noticed — first in myself, and then in almost every founder and leader I worked with. The most driven, capable people are the ones whose dedication puts them most at risk of pushing past what's sustainable. Not because they're failing — because they're wired to keep going. I know this because I've lived it. That experience, combined with a background at the intersection of commercial strategy and performance science, led to a conviction: how a leader functions isn't separate from how a business performs. It's the foundation.
Carl Buik, Founder
Frequently asked questions
Who is Human Performance advisory for?
Founders, CEOs, and senior leaders of scaling businesses — people who are performing at a high level and want to sustain and elevate that performance over the long term. Whether you're thriving and want to go further, or navigating a phase that demands more than you expected, the starting point is what's already working.
How is this different from executive coaching?
Clarent's approach is grounded in performance science — the cognitive and physiological dimensions of how leaders actually function under sustained demand. It's commercially oriented, evidence-based, and delivered by an advisor with genuine operational experience. The work addresses decision quality, cognitive capacity, and sustained effectiveness — not personal development goals or behavioural frameworks.
What does an engagement look like?
Each engagement is shaped by the individual's situation. Typically it involves sustained advisory over several months — regular sessions, ongoing access, and a relationship that deepens as the advisor builds context. The work is private, confidential, and led directly by a senior advisor.