Sixteen years in: lessons from building tèn company

Starting tèn company in 2009 during a financial storm was one of the best professional decisions. Sixteen years of lessons on reinvention, resilience, and building meaningful client partnerships.

I still remember the call. It was early 2009, weeks after we launched, and a trusted contact at Unilever said to me: 'Perhaps this is a very good time to start, Paul. It forces you to be creative.' I wasn't so sure. But he was right.

Key takeaways

We launched tèn company in the middle of a financial crisis. I had just stepped out of a corporate career and was asking myself: will anyone hire us? Within weeks, we had our first requests for guidance. The uncertainty, it turned out, was not the problem. It was the point. We weren't coming from a training house or a business school. We came from the seat our clients now sit in — and that, it turned out, mattered enormously.

Today, September 30, 2025, marks sixteen years of tèn company. I want to share the lessons that have stayed with me — the ones that shaped how we work and how we think about leadership.

Lesson 1: Starting in adversity builds something a calm start cannot

A crisis strips away everything that isn't necessary. It forces you to ask: what do we actually offer that people genuinely need? We had no choice but to answer that question quickly and honestly. The clarity it produced has stayed with us ever since.

Leaders who have built through difficulty tend to be more grounded, more creative under pressure, and more resourceful than those who have only operated in favourable conditions. Adversity is a hard teacher — but a thorough one.

Lesson 2: When circumstances change, you must change faster

In the first quarter of 2020, COVID hit. Our entire pipeline for the rest of the year dried up almost overnight. At one point we were facing the loss of more than half our revenue. Those were sobering weeks.

We moved part of our work online, invested more deeply in the Ikigai project, and rebuilt. It wasn't perfect — but it worked. The lesson I've carried since: conditions will shift without your permission. Your response time is the variable you control.

Lesson 3: Let the work evolve with your clients

When we started, the work was primarily one-on-one executive coaching. Today we work holistically with leadership teams, boards, and organisations — on strategy, execution, and the performance of entire leadership cultures. The individual leader is still central, but we now operate at a higher level of systemic impact.

That evolution wasn't planned. It followed the questions our clients were bringing us. And what those questions kept returning to was the same thing: does this connect to our strategy, our execution, our bottom line? The moment we made that connection explicit in everything we do, the relationships deepened — and the results became more measurable.

Lesson 4: Going independent is not for everyone — and that's perfectly fine

I made the move after a long corporate career at a Fortune 500 company. It was the right decision for me — for my specific situation, my risk profile, and where I was in life. But I would never recommend it universally.

A senior corporate role can be deeply meaningful. The real work, before any career decision, is knowing yourself: what risk genuinely concerns you, where you can mitigate it, and what kind of environment brings out your best. Answer that honestly before anything else.

Lesson 5: The long game requires protecting your focus

The leaders we work with today face an extraordinary convergence of pressures: integrating AI, building climate resilience, competing for talent, and honoring commitments to stakeholders — all while the short-term urgencies pile up daily. The ones who navigate this well are not the ones working hardest. They are the ones who protect their attention most deliberately.

Focus is not a personality trait. It is a discipline. And it is increasingly the deciding factor between leaders who move things forward and those who are simply very busy.

One thing I know for certain

Reinvention is always possible. I've seen it in clients at 35 and at 62. I've lived it myself more than once. The question is never whether you can change direction — it's whether you're willing to be honest enough to ask for it.

It's an honour to have contributed to the success of leadership teams over these sixteen years. Some of our clients have been with us since the very beginning — and that continuity is, to me, the most meaningful measure of what we've built. My hope is to continue for many more — moving the needle together, in genuine partnership.

And wherever you are in your own journey: pause, reflect, and ask yourself — am I building the future I actually want?

Over to you.

PS — If you're at an inflection point in your leadership journey — whether personal or organisational — and you'd like to think it through with someone who has seen a few of these before, reach out. We'd be glad to explore it with you.

Over to you.