Matt Porter

I’m an ICF Professional Certified Coach with over 4,500 hours of coaching experience, working with senior leaders, directors and founders across the UK and internationally.

My work is often with people carrying significant responsibility who need space to step back from the day-to-day, think clearly and work through what comes next. That might be navigating growth or transition, making difficult strategic or people decisions, strengthening their leadership, or finding a more sustainable way to lead without losing sight of themselves or life beyond work.

I bring more than 30 years of commercial and leadership experience alongside over a decade as a professional coach. My earlier career included senior commercial roles with AstraZeneca and Oxford Innovation, as well as building and leading my own multi-million-pound business. I understand something of the realities of leadership from the inside: responsibility for people and performance, uncertainty, difficult decisions, competing priorities and the pressure that can accompany being the person others look to for answers.

My coaching combines thoughtful challenge, curiosity and commercial understanding. I’m not there to tell someone how to run their business or lead their team. I create the conditions for them to slow the noise, examine assumptions, see situations from different perspectives and make choices they can genuinely stand behind.

Clients have described my style as calm, grounded and appropriately challenging. I pay attention not only to what someone is thinking, but also to what they may be feeling, noticing or avoiding. This can open up conversations that go beyond solving the immediate problem and help leaders understand how they are showing up, what is driving them and what they want their leadership to become.

I have coached leaders from entrepreneurial and SME environments through to major international organisations, across sectors including technology, science, healthcare, professional services and the third sector. I am also an experienced coach educator, mentor coach and assessor.

Although commercially grounded, my approach recognises that leadership does not exist separately from the rest of life. Family, health, purpose, identity and the world beyond work can all influence how we lead and the choices we make.

I’m based on the Devon coast and work with clients online, in person and, where appropriate, through outdoor coaching. Time by the sea and in nature is an important part of my own life and informs my belief that sometimes the clearest thinking happens when we create enough space to see things differently.