Five days to remember why you started.
Reconnect with the fire that built this business, before pride convinces you to keep pretending it's still there.
A retreat for founders who have built something real, and can't quite admit, even to themselves, that the love for it is gone.
Founder Reset Retreat
Duration: 5 days
Location: Andalusia, Spain
Investment: £5,000 all inclusive
Available: Sep – Jul (not August)
You already know something isn't right
You built your business. Whatever it is now, you made it happen when it didn't exist before, and everyone around you still sees you as the one who did that. The founder. The one with the vision, the drive, the answer.
And somewhere underneath the role you still play well, there's a question you haven't said out loud, not to your team, not to your leadership team, not to the people at dinner parties who ask how the business is going.
Do I still want this?
Not a crisis. Nothing you could point to in the numbers. The business might be doing fine, even better than fine. Just a growing gap between how invested you look and how invested you actually feel, and a quiet fear of what it means if the fire inside which built it may have gone out or is looking for a new direction.
Why this feels harder to unpack than it should
You built your identity into this business years ago. Your name is on it, your reputation runs through it, and your team, your leadership team, the people at those dinner parties, all of them need you to be the one who still believes in it, even on the days you don't.
So you keep playing the founder. Competent. Reliable. Quietly disconnected from the thing you built, while everyone around you reads your performance as passion.
Admitting the fire's gone quiet can feel like admitting you failed, or that you're about to let down the people who depend on you, or unravelling the story you've told for years about who you are. It isn't failure. But pride doesn't always know the difference between "this needs to change" and "I've failed," and it will defend the story long after the feeling underneath it has already moved on.
The forces that built the universe also built you.
That is where coherence begins.
What this retreat does
This is not a coaching weekend or a wellness break. It is five days of work that goes beneath the achieving, to the place where you actually decide who you are. 3 days for you and 2 for your business and your connection to it.
Working with elemental archetypes: fire, air, water, earth, we map your natural energy and character. Not a personality test to file away, but a living picture of how you operate under pressure, where your strength actually comes from, and where you've been overriding yourself to keep performing.
Then we work with that. Using creative practices drawn from the Japanese philosophy of Boro and Kintsugi, the idea that what is broken can be made more beautiful in the repair, we surface what success has been costing you and find the parts of yourself that got put aside to build it. We find what you're actually here to do, underneath what you've been doing.
You do not need another achievement. You need to know what the achieving has been covering up.
Why Andalusia does what daily life cannot
A full life leaves no room to hear yourself think. The mind needs space before it can change, and big skies do something to a person that a diary full of meetings never will.
Almost everything happens outside. In the warmth of the Spanish sun, in the landscape, in the kind of unhurried conversation that only becomes possible when there is nowhere else to be. Good food, open air, time to think, this is what creates the clarity that normal life never allows.
Distance from home is not incidental. It is part of the work. You cannot see your own life clearly from inside it.
What shifts. And what you take back.
Your relationship to yourself
The performing eases. You stop measuring your worth by output and start trusting what you actually feel.
How you make decisions
Clearer, faster, less second-guessed. When you trust your own instincts, you stop needing everyone else's approval first.
Your energy
No more running on the adrenaline of achieving. A steadier, more sustainable rhythm that the people around you can feel too.
The business shape
The changes needed to bring it back into alignment with who you are and your purpose and the why of the business.
Your relationships
You show up differently with the people closest to you. More honest. Less armoured. More there.
Your relationship to change itself
The fear loosens. Not because the future gets less uncertain, but because you're no longer defending a version of yourself that was never quite you.
The 30-day plan
The retreat doesn't end when you leave Andalusia. Within three days of your return, you receive a bespoke plan built around everything that emerged during the five days.
It covers your energy balance, what needs to change and in what order, and how to hold what shifted through the weeks when the pull of old habits is strongest. Especially if you have decided to make major changes, for yourself or the business.
This is the bridge between the insight and your actual life. Most retreats give you clarity and send you home. This one gives you clarity and a plan for what to do with it.
The Opening and The Integration
The retreat doesn't begin when you land and doesn't end when you leave.
Before the work starts, you receive The Opening: a small, curated collection of items chosen for you and the elements at play in your life. Not a welcome pack. A signal that this is already different.
When the four days are over, The Integration is waiting. Elemental, tactile, practical objects designed to anchor what shifted in Andalusia into the life you return to. Things to use, to return to, to hold on a difficult morning.
Both are included. Both chosen for you specifically, not assembled from a list.
“You are so soothing to talk to yet alive and bold. It really helps to know that you are unfazed by anything I could tell you.
I feel so much better having worked with you.”
“When we started working together I had no idea where things would lead. I certainly never saw the outcome coming nor how it would have such a positive impact on me”
This is not for everyone
This retreat is for people who are genuinely ready to look at themselves, not just their circumstances. Who suspect the flat feeling isn't about needing a new challenge, or a new house, or a new anything, it's about needing to find who they actually are underneath what they built. And to decide if the business still fits or needs a remodel.
If you want a relaxing few days that leaves everything intact, this isn't the right fit. If you're willing to look at what success has been costing you, it is.
Find out if this is right for you
A short conversation before you commit. We'll talk about where you are, what you've already tried, and whether this is the right next step. No obligation, no sales pitch.
What is included
Five days of facilitated work
All accommodation
All meals
Non-alcoholic drinks throughout
Airport transfers for all participants
Elemental profiling
The Opening and The IntegrationCreative practice materials
30-day bespoke plan (post retreat)
The only thing to arrange is your flight.
£2,500
All inclusive
What the days actually feel like
There's no schedule to keep, no one to perform for.
Mornings hold one-to-one time with Helen, going wherever the day needs to go. This isn't coaching in the conventional sense. It goes further, and faster, because the setting already creates a different quality of honesty.
Afternoons are for creative work and elemental practice, the parts of this that thinking alone can't reach. Then time that's genuinely yours: to sit with what's emerged, to write, to rest in a way normal life never allows.
Evenings are easy. Good food, good conversation, nowhere else to be.
By the end of the five days, most people find it hard to say exactly when the change happened. That's how it's supposed to work.
We start with you and then move to the intersection of you and the business and how that fits you. Deciding what needs to change as we go.
Big changes happen best when we allow nature to be our coach and simplify everything
Questions people ask
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That your business needs you that much is telling. When do you get to be you and consider what you want and need?
If you need to make a few calls or write a few emails that can be accommodated but it will hold up the flow of transformation. -
Not the kind that requires crystals or a particular belief system. Energy here means the way each person naturally operates, their instincts under pressure, the pace they work at, the way they take in information and make decisions, what drains them and what restores them. Every leadership team has a dominant energy, usually the founder's and everything else organises around it, often at the expense of people whose natural strengths are different. When that imbalance goes unaddressed it shows up as conflict, stagnation, poor decisions and good people quietly disengaging. We map it, name it and work with it. The language is elemental because it is simple, universal and, unlike personality frameworks, it connects people to something they already instinctively understand.
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Probably more so than you think. The people who get the most from this work are often the ones who arrive most sceptical, because they have spent years being extremely good at rational analysis and have quietly noticed that rational analysis alone has stopped being enough. The creative practices we use are not about artistic ability. They are about accessing a different kind of intelligence,the kind that knows things before you can articulate them, that holds the answer to problems your spreadsheet cannot solve. You do not need to enjoy it. You just need to do it. Most accountants leave surprised at what came up.
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No. The location is not a backdrop, it is part of the work. The distance from your normal environment, the scale of the landscape, the warmth, the pace of life in rural Andalusia. These things do something to people that cannot be replicated in a conference room two junctions from the office. You need to be far enough away that the office cannot follow you. Surrey is not far enough. Your office, nice as it may be, does not have the right qualities for this work.
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The depth of what happens here requires physical presence: shared meals, shared landscape, the non-verbal things that happen between people in the same space that a screen simply cannot carry. If you are not ready to commit to four days in person do you really want the change?
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Your logical mind may not know the problem. Your unconscious mind knows all to well. That’s the part that we will be engaging with on the retreat.
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Andalusia does have both. The snakes are shy and want nothing to do with you. The spiders are mostly decorative. In years of working and living here, nothing requiring medical attention has occurred. Sensible footwear for the walks is recommended, less because of wildlife and more because the terrain is uneven and beautiful and you will want to look at it rather than where you are putting your feet.
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Which are you more afraid of - that nothing shifts or that something monumental will?
Give yourself the chance to change and magic is likely to happen
Now you’re interested, here’s what to do
Get in touch. Let’s have a short conversation before you commit. We will talk about where your team is, what has already been tried, what you want to achieve and whether this retreat is best suited to you.
We all want good results, so a conversation is important to check that we are the right partner for you in this important transition you are looking for.