Jim Brown

Jim Brown started out studying how people perform.

He took a BSc in Sports Science at Loughborough University, learning about performance through physiology, psychology and the systems around the individual. But rather than going directly into sport or coaching, his career took him into business.

In 1999, he founded executive search firm Round8. Over the following two decades, Brown built businesses in London and Sydney and worked across EMEA, APAC and the US, helping global media and technology companies find and develop senior talent. Along the way, he conducted more than 20,000 interviews – giving him an unusually close view of how leaders operate when the pressure is real.

Eventually, the questions he was interested in began to change.

Brown has described reaching a point where the talent-search business still challenged him, but no longer gave him the same sense of fulfilment. He wanted to bring together interests that had until then sat in different parts of his life: performance, leadership, psychology, physiology, coaching and the experience of building businesses himself.

That became Ground+Air.

Its approach treats performance and wellbeing not as competing priorities but as parts of the same system. Brown now coaches founders, senior executives and leadership teams, drawing on business experience alongside performance science, psychology and physiology to understand not simply what someone is doing, but the conditions around them that make performance sustainable.

Brown started his career studying human performance, then spent 25 years watching people perform inside organisations.

Ground+Air is what happened when he put the two perspectives back together.