Executive Presence
A negotiation is lost in a shift of posture before it is lost on price
Presence treated as a commercial discipline. What the room receives, measured against what was intended.
$2,500 to $30,000
Delivered by Rufus Baker, Director of Operations, MLE Advisory.
A borrowed idea, and business borrowed it badly
Executive presence came from the stage. Actors have spent four centuries studying how status moves between two people in a room, how a body contradicts a sentence, and how behaviour holds or collapses when the pressure arrives.
Business discovered the same questions recently, gave them new names, and filed the whole subject under confidence.
Filed there, it becomes personal development and it prices like personal development. Filed correctly, it is a commercial discipline with two measurable capabilities underneath it. Reading a room accurately, and controlling emotional and physical state on demand so that what the body communicates is what was intended.
Leaders are trained in neither, and it decides outcomes they attribute to other causes.
Where it actually costs money
A raise closes at a lower number because certainty left the room ninety seconds before the objection did.
A board stops backing a chief executive it still rates, because what it sees under questioning contradicts what it reads in the pack.
A team stops raising problems because of what happened on somebody's face the last time they did. That one compounds, and it is the direct link into the Blind$pot work.
A technically excellent leader is passed over repeatedly and nobody can articulate why, so the feedback they receive is about things that are not the reason.
None of that shows up in a performance review. All of it shows up in the numbers, attributed to something else.
“The room reads the body before it hears the sentence, and it believes the body.”
The work
THE DIAGNOSTIC
$2,500
The Presence Read
For a leader who is technically excellent and still not landing. Two recorded 60 minute sessions, analysed frame by frame, across four dimensions: status, state, subtext and recovery. A written report on what the room receives against what was intended, and a 45 minute debrief.
Bundled with the Blind$pot Assessment at $4,500, which is the fullest picture of a single leader available anywhere.
ONE EVENT
$15,000
The Set Piece · Six sessions across a fortnight
For a leader with a single room that matters. A raise, a board vote, a sale process, an annual general meeting, a town hall after a hard decision.
The Presence Read is included. Six 90 minute sessions across the two weeks before, two of them live recorded rehearsal. A state protocol that can be run in the ten minutes before walking in. A debrief afterwards, because the next one is easier only if this one is examined.
SIX MONTHS
$30,000
The Presence Partnership · Twelve sessions
For a leader building presence as a permanent capability rather than for one event. Opening and closing Read. Twelve 60 minute fortnightly sessions. On-call preparation before named events. A written mid-point read at month three.
THE TEAM
$18,000
The Room · Executive team, full day
For an executive team that is about to be read by a buyer, a board or an investor. Status, state, and what the leadership team's behaviour is teaching everybody below it.
Built on live observation of a real working session rather than a workshop exercise, read back to the team on the day, with a written team read inside a week.
How this fits with the rest of the firm
Two diagnostics, two entry points, the same price. They answer different questions and they reach different people.
DIMENSION
OPTION 1
Measures
Behavioural patterns over time
OPTION 2
What the body and the room actually do
Reaches
A leader who knows they have a behaviour problem
A leader who knows they have a room problem, or an event coming
Method
Delivered by
Instrument, completed privately
Two recorded sessions, analysed frame by frame
Hacia Atherton
Rufus Baker
INVESTMENT
$75,000 to $225,000
$175,000 to $375,000
Inside a Scale Code engagement, presence work is delivered as part of the Expansion system at no separate fee. It is also how an installed interim executive lands well rather than badly, which is the answer to the reasonable question of why this firm's operator will work when the last one did not.
RUFUS BAKER
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
An actor by profession. The training is in behaviour. Reading what a room is doing rather than what it is saying. Working in the gap between what a person says and what they mean. And the harder half of the craft, which is controlling emotional and physical state on demand.
Alongside the stage, five years in operational management across property, security and personal performance, running teams in environments where misreading a room carries an immediate cost.
He runs the firm's operations. The same attention that reads a room reads a business, and put inside one he finds the broken parts, usually the ones worked around for so long that nobody in the building can see them any more.
What the room did differently
Held for leaders describing a specific outcome. A negotiation, a board meeting, a raise. Recorded before and after footage is the strongest possible proof here and should be used where permission exists.
Request a conversation
Twenty minutes. What the last two years have actually looked like, and what has already been tried. If a smaller piece of work would do it, that is what you will be told.
Read by Hacia directly. A reply inside two business days.