Departments and organisations aligning people, leadership and culture. We build the structures that connect strategy to daily operations, drawing on department builds and rebuilds across professional rugby, Major League Baseball and national unions.
Five distinct areas, though most engagements draw on several. The starting point is always your context.
How a performance department should be structured, staffed and led. Simon has built a department from zero in a start-up league, spent eight years at the Crusaders with the final four leading its performance department through four consecutive title seasons, then moved into overseeing staff across seven affiliate sites in Major League Baseball. His published Role Architecture work turns that experience into a repeatable design method covering role definition, reporting lines and the delivery-versus-leadership balance most organisations get wrong.
Structured mentoring for heads of performance, coordinators stepping into leadership and executives inheriting technical departments. The approach is built around leadership architecture rather than technical prescription: growing judgement, communication and the discipline of leading from the balcony instead of operating on the floor.
Simon's theming methodology spans eight documented seasons across Canterbury, the Crusaders and Major League Rugby, several of them championship years. The principle is constant: the group must own the theme because they helped build it. Engagements cover values definition, the gap between stated and lived culture and frameworks for constructive conflict and psychological safety.
Coaches and performance staff are high performers too, and they almost never have around them the structures they build for everyone else. They monitor athlete load and ignore their own. They plan athlete development and have no plan for their own. This service installs for the staff what the staff install for the athletes: workload visibility, development pathways, review rhythms, recovery expectations and someone whose job is their progression. Delivered either as ongoing support to an existing group or as a system designed and installed then handed to you to run.
Independent review of an existing performance system, or a full framework build where none exists. The Brazil Rugby engagement built a complete national framework for sevens and fifteens toward a home Olympics, combining remote advisory with quarterly on-ground audits. The same structure scales down to a single department review.
Every performance department builds careful architecture around its athletes. Load is monitored. Development is planned. Recovery is protected. Progress is reviewed on a rhythm, and somebody owns each person's pathway.
Almost none of that exists for the staff who build it. Coaches, physios, analysts and performance practitioners are high performers operating under real load, and they are usually doing it without a single one of the structures they provide to the people in their care. The monitoring stops at the athlete and so does the development plan.
This service closes that gap. It puts the same support architecture around the staff that the staff put around everyone else.
Simon works with your performance and development staff continuously, as the external structure they do not currently have. Regular contact, individual development and a person outside the reporting line they can be honest with.
The system is built for your context, installed with your leaders, then handed over for you to run. Simon steps back deliberately, because a structure that depends on an outside consultant is not a structure.
Strategy, culture and the structural decisions that shape how an organisation performs. Sessions built for people who will act on them.
Keynotes and workshop engagements for conferences, summits and staff gatherings, shaped to the audience in the room.
Working sessions with the group who deliver day to day, on standards, communication, role clarity and the way the department actually operates.
Written independently by practitioners at different levels of the New Zealand rugby system, in support of a national performance support role.
“He brings a rare combination of deep NZ Rugby knowledge and broad international experience.
Shaun CurryLead S&C Coach, Crusaders · Head of Performance, Canterbury Rugby
“What sets Simon apart is his ability to see beyond the needs of a single team and think about how the wider system can improve. He has a genuine passion for developing practitioners and creating environments where people and performance can thrive.
James DoyleHead of Performance, Northland Rugby Union
For departments and organisations wanting continuity rather than a one-off engagement, the Enterprise membership provides deep guided mentoring, coaching and collaborative group work across your teams.
Larger and bespoke engagements, including audits, framework builds and advisory retainers, are scoped directly. Start with a discovery call and we will design around your context, your season and your constraints.
National framework builds, department reviews, advisory retainers and leadership programmes are all scoped case by case, in person or remote. Book a discovery call and tell us where you are trying to go.
