A business intelligence platform
The Business End is a business intelligence platform that shows you where your business can break under pressure. We use elite sport to show it, because sport is played under pressure and the results are instant.
For owners, founders and senior executives. Membership is £500, €500 or $500 a year.
In the evidence
Where we work
Headquartered in Monaco. Every point on the globe is a city where we have recorded evidence and brought leaders together.
Drag to turn the globe
The evidence
We analyse conversations with elite leaders across sport and business to identify how performance holds under pressure, and where it breaks. Every finding traces back to something a leader actually said.
Long interviews on our podcast and talks at our lunches, with leaders who have performed under real pressure.
48 podcast episodes, all coded
Each transcript is read line by line and coded against a fixed codebook: what happened, how serious it was, and the exact words used.
Severity rated from 1 to 3
Every quote is checked word for word against the full transcript before it goes live.
655 findings, every quote checked
Each finding is tied to one of eight patterns that show how organisations break under pressure.
58 leaders, 8 patterns
Then the answersDecision Intelligence is a structured intelligence retrieval system built from verified findings. It picks out the findings relevant to each question and answers from them, naming the leader and the source every time. It adds no outside statistics, and when the evidence is thin it says so.
And it keeps growingWith a member’s consent, the lessons from their Stress Test become anonymised notes that sharpen the intelligence for every other member. They never include a name or an organisation, and they are never shown to other members.
What the evidence shows
The same eight patterns keep returning, in dressing rooms and in boardrooms. Each ring shows how many of the 58 leaders in our evidence faced that pattern.
Nobody is ready to step in.
If one person leaves or one contract ends, the business loses capability or revenue overnight.
The bar is slipping, and nobody decided it should.
Results can look fine while quality slips underneath, so the problem shows up late and costs more to fix.
Everything runs through you.
The business can only move as fast as that person, and it stalls when they are busy, ill or away.
You are carrying more than you can see.
Decisions slow down and standards slip, and the strain often shows only when something gives.
Trust that holds in calm times and cracks under change.
It holds while things are stable, but new people or a change of direction can break it quickly.
Hard things get put off until they cost more.
Problems come back in a different form, and each delay makes them more expensive to deal with.
The story you tell yourself hides the problem.
Problems grow quietly because the story feels true, until they are too big to explain away.
Plan A has always worked, so there is no Plan B.
When the one route fails there is nothing ready to replace it, and recovery takes far longer.
Members take the Leadership Stress Test to find out which of the eight apply to their business, and get a 90-day plan to deal with them.
Membership
Members use the verified findings three ways: Stress Tests measured against the 58 leaders in our evidence, Decision Intelligence and Curated Connections. They are built for leaders who have to make judgement calls under pressure. There are four Stress Tests: for an owner, for a senior leader, for a whole team and for one team member. All four are included in membership, and each comes with a 90-day action plan.
Example question
A senior manager keeps missing the standard and nobody has dealt with it. What is the risk?
“I think I failed as a leader sometimes where I didn’t step up and call some of those people out”
Al Charron, former Canada captain, four Rugby World Cups. The Business End podcast, episode 12.
Up to 15 findings per questionEvery quote checked against the transcript
Find out where your business could break under pressure, and how it compares with the leaders in our evidence.
Ask it about any decision in front of you. It is a structured intelligence retrieval system built from verified findings. It retrieves the findings that bear on your question and answers with what the leaders actually said, read against your own profile.
Tell us once what you need and what you can offer. Every morning we check you against new members and guests, both ways, and nothing is shared until you and they agree. You can also search the network yourself and have an answer in about a minute. A month and three months after an introduction, we ask whether anything came of it.
Before a lunch, members can see who is in the room and the table plan, and Curated Connections suggests who is most worth meeting, and why. Afterwards the people at your table appear in your own follow-up list, so the conversations do not go cold.
Other ways in
The same evidence and the same network, for your company, your business club or your clients.
01For one leader, a leadership team or a whole company, read against the evidence. The team version shows the gap between what the leaders think and what their people say.
From £250 for one person, £1,500 for a teamSee the Stress Tests →
02Our platform, white-labelled under your club’s name, with the lunches behind it.
Live with a rugby clubTalk to us about your club →
03A private lunch for your clients and senior people, built with you from the guest list to the speaker.
A written report from every roomTalk to us about an event →Stress Tests, with or without membership
Every Stress Test is read against the 58 leaders in our evidence, and everyone who takes one receives a 90-day action plan.
From £1,500per company, the whole team is tested
From £250per person
Members: every Stress Test is included in your membership.
Book a Stress Test
At our London lunch, May 2026
“You can’t see everything, you can’t do everything, you can’t be everything all the time. You just can’t. You need a group of people.”
Martin Johnson CBEEngland’s 2003 Rugby World Cup-winning captain
Where the evidence is recorded
The lunches are where members meet and where new evidence is recorded. Around 60 senior leaders and a speaker who has led under pressure. Guests answer a few questions before they arrive, and what the speaker says is coded into the evidence afterwards.
Members book at the member rate on the platform.
2003 Rugby World Cup winner and former England captain
This lunch is sold out.
Retired U.S. Army Brigadier General
Tickets €125. Members €85.
The evidence starts here: long conversations with people who have led at the highest level of sport and business, about what pressure did to them and to their teams. Every episode is coded.
Latest episode
The founders
Liam founded Blue Pencil Legal, the specialist legal search firm, in 2002. It now places lawyers across 44 jurisdictions, with a focus on the offshore and Middle East markets, and he has built and led businesses in the UK, Monaco, Dubai and Guernsey. Liam built The Business End Intelligence Platform from his own experience of doing business across the world.
A Cambridge economics graduate and Solicitor of England and Wales, he played professional rugby for London Irish and Exeter Chiefs, and represented Ireland A and the Barbarians.
Justin M. Fitzpatrick is the Managing Partner and Founder of The Business End, a business intelligence platform that shows where a business can break under pressure, through the lens of elite sport.
A former Ireland rugby international with 26 caps and a European Cup winner with Ulster, he also played professionally for London Irish and Castres Olympique. He has built and led high-performance programmes, teams, and businesses across the UK, Europe, and North America.
News
Every Monday, each member receives a brief built around their own position, and can answer it in one tap.
Read more →Members mark each step done, under way or stuck, and a coach is offered when a step stalls.
Read more →One question first: do you own the business, or lead part of one that someone else owns?
Read more →Senior operators on the rooms, the people, and the intelligence behind them.
I signed up to The Business End expecting a good look at high performance in sport and business, with its shared mindset, habits and skills that drive success in both, plus a chance to network over decent food and company. It’s all that, and more. The members-only Intelligence Platform adds real depth, with useful decision-making tools, speaker analysis, and genuine engagement with others keen to learn and share.
My third Business End Live, and they’ve got better each time. Venue, food, drink, attendees, all top drawer. Martin Johnson was brilliant: insightful, with incredible stories and anecdotes laced with genuine leadership gems.
The networking before the event is what makes it valuable. Instead of turning up to a business lunch and hoping for useful conversations, you arrive knowing who you want to meet and why. A good lunch becomes a far more productive one.
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