Tides is a senior executive coaching practice for the founders, leaders and operators of growing UK businesses. Coastal base, UK-wide work, considered and quiet by design.
Senior leadership is a strange seat. The expectations on you grow, the room for honest conversation narrows, and the people closest to the work — investors, executive peers, even close colleagues — usually have a stake in the answer you give. The work of leading well becomes harder to think about, not easier, the further up you go.
Tides was built to be a different kind of room. A senior coaching practice with no agenda about your business, no commercial interest in any direction you might take, and no audience for what you say. Just the time and the attention to think well about the things that actually keep you awake.
The practice is deliberately small. The coaches who work under the Tides name are senior practitioners with operating experience — not graduates of a six-month programme, not people building a side income. The bar is set there because the people in the chair opposite carry real responsibility, and the work has to be worth their time.
Most of the people we work with are running, or about to run, a UK business between roughly fifteen and a few hundred people — founder-led companies past the first crunch, PE-backed firms with a board to answer to, divisions of larger groups with a P&L to carry. We also work with senior leaders inside corporates buying coaching privately, on their own contract, where the work needs to be properly separate from the employer.
What ties them together is not a sector. It is the shape of the seat: real accountability, real consequences, real complexity in the people around them, and not many places to think honestly about any of it.
One-to-one engagements are typically ninety-minute sessions, every two to three weeks, by video. The video default is deliberate — it keeps the work integrated with the week rather than something you have to leave town for — but in-person sessions are available in Cornwall and London, and the occasional off-site can be arranged where it earns the cost.
Leadership team work has a different rhythm. Sometimes it is a full day each quarter, sometimes a half-day a month, sometimes a residential at the start and shorter sessions across the year. The cadence is shaped to the team, not lifted from a brochure.
Group supervision runs monthly, in small confidential cohorts, for ninety minutes, online.
Everything is contracted before it begins. Scope, shape, confidentiality and — where the organisation is sponsoring the coaching — a clear three-way agreement with sponsor and coachee about what will and will not be reported back. There are no surprises about what coaching here is or isn't.
Confidentiality is not a line in a contract. It is the condition that makes the work possible. Nothing said in a session is shared with a sponsor, an investor, an HR partner or a board without explicit, agreed permission — and that includes the fact that a session took place where the engagement is private.
Where the coaching is paid for by the organisation, we hold a three-way contract: the sponsor names the outcome they hope to see, the coachee owns the work, and we report only on the agreed terms. It works because everyone signs up to it before session one.
Tides is based at the Launchpad Venture Studio at Falmouth University, on the south coast of Cornwall. It is a deliberate base. There is something useful about thinking about senior leadership a little way out from the cities where most of it happens — the same way it is useful to take an important conversation outside.
In practice the work is UK-wide. Most sessions are by video. We see clients in London on a regular cadence, and offer in-person sessions in Cornwall for clients who want to combine deeper work with a day away from the office. Group supervision is online, by design, so cohorts can be drawn from across the country.
We will not coach in a direction we do not believe in, to keep an engagement going. We will not act as a consultant in coach's clothing — if what you need is consulting, we will say so and, where we can, point you to people who do that work well. We will not take on work that should properly be done with a therapist, an executive search firm, an investor or your board.
The practice is small enough that it can afford to be careful about what it takes on. That is the point.