A talent & growth advisory firm for the Intelligence Age.
LEADERS - FROM SERIES A TO ASX - RELY ON US TO RE-ENGINEER THEIR COMPANIES FOR PROFITABLE GROWTH.
At High Performance People, we are the force-multiplier of your ambition.
We turn your talent & growth strategies into high-ROI levers through our data-first approach and a bespoke, on-demand service ecosystem.
Our talent model, Perform IQ, harnesses predictive intelligence to help you shape a leadership team, workforce, and culture that thrives in dynamic, high-pressure and high-growth markets.
While our growth platform, Forebrite, builds your very own predictive marketing engine to drive revenue, capitalise on current trends and forecast your future with confidence.
Our services can be dialled up, down or off as your priorities shift:
Executive Search: our Perform IQ model identifies the 14% of leaders who can perform today & transform for tomorrow.
People-as-a-Service: our on-demand HR & Talent solutions are tailored to positively impact your bottom & top-line growth.
Growth-as-a-Service: our software & AI-powered platform maximises your marketing ROI & financial performance repeatedly.
Fractional Flying Squad: our scale-up experts bring temporary, targeted, high-growth expertise to your mission-critical projects.
Talent & Skill Development: our coaching, leadership & team programs turn your people’s latent potential into goal achievement.
Create what is next,
right now.
We don’t do different, we are.
We unite the right human expertise with the best use of technology to solve a universal problem: closing the gap between your ambition and operational reality.
Through Perform IQ and our on-demand offering, we provide the talent, culture, processes and systems that accelerate your business goals with precision and cost-efficiency - it’s why many of the world’s most innovative companies rely on us.
Alongside which, our Growth-as-a-Service aligns your leadership and cross-functional teams around a single source of truth – your North Star Metric (NSM) – the strategic blueprint for creating and operationalising your predictive marketing & financial forecasting engine.
Our Fractional Flying Squad is the enabler - our rapid deployment team ensures your marketing, product, and operational strategies are working in lockstep and your executional rhythm delivers real, NSM-aligned profitable growth. We’ve handpicked experts who have launched unicorns, led billion-dollar brands, owned P&L’s, and scaled high-impact functions.
Our vision is to turn our clients’ ambition into predictive, intelligence-driven growth – giving leaders capital-efficient, enterprise-grade access to the talent, tools, and technology that accelerate performance and unlock market advantage.
Areas of focus:
Digital Media, Sport & Entertainment (incl. streaming, gaming & content creation)
eCommerce (incl. online retail, marketplaces & related logistics)
Software & Cloud Computing (incl. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, VR & AR)
Venture Capital, Private Equity & Portfolio Companies
HealthTech
FinTech
GreenTech
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (incl. application across industries)
Creative Agency & Creator Platforms
Digital-First & Digitally Ambitious Brands
People-as-a-Service matters.
PaaS, our on-demand HR & Talent solution, provides your business expert support without the full-time price tag.
Whether you’re building your first HR function, navigating AI integration, need a tailor-made L&D solution or hiring for hypergrowth, we can tailor a solution that’s perfect for all your people needs.
Our multi-disciplinary team brings deep proficiency, empathy, and insight, having guided innovative ventures from Series A to the ASX and taken organisations of scale through award-winning, transformational change.
Our core advantage lies in Perform IQ’s predictive analytics, leveraged to optimise your HR processes, streamline operational workflows, recruit the top 5% of talent, and shape a high performing leadership team, workforce and culture.
PaaS delivers precisely what you need, exactly when you need it, check out our full e-brochure here.
Benefits include:
Economy: we run HR & Talent health checks to identify core objectives & develop a proposal around your budget.
Expertise: we bring Australia’s finest HR & Talent practitioners to you who achieve real outcomes vs. box-ticking.
Strategy: we provide a flexible approach to your People strategy to adapt to your changing needs & environment.
Impact: we harness AI-powered tools & Perform IQ’s data-driven insights to optimise your HR & Talent workflows.
Support: we provide a range of additional services including L&D, ER, workplace law, WH&S compliancy & training.
Growth-as-a-Service delivers.
Our GaaS solution is built on Forebrite, our powerful growth analytics platform that took over 5 years to engineer.
It brings the data-modelling horsepower typically out of reach for 99% of companies and builds your custom Predictive Marketing & Financial Forecasting Engine.
Whether you're looking to increase CLTV, reduce CAC, or grow market share, Forebrite provides the clarity and foresight to fuel your next breakthrough. The key difference is that we do all the heavy-lifting analysis, turning complex insights into weekly actionable reports and growth workshops for your team.
Our early success in online retail, healthcare, pet care and member associations has given Forebrite a life of its own, check out our full e-brochure here.
Our goal is to unite your marketing & finance teams around a single source of truth for maximising profitable growth.
Benefits include:
Alignment: we unite functional leaders around your North Star Metric to ensure your revenue growth is profitable.
Foresight: we prioritise visibility into future market trends & customer behaviour to enable strategic adjustments.
Acceleration: we action insights in near-time so you can capitalise on market opportunities faster than your peers.
Scalability: we build-in repeatable growth loops to ensure your expansion is sustainable & profitable at every stage.
ROI: we ensure every $ of marketing & financial investment is optimised to maximise your return & minimise waste.
Partnerships from Series A, ASX to Fortune 50:
Ignite your growth engine,
with Forebrite.
Who are we?
We scale ambitious companies faster, smarter, and with less risk by embedding predictive intelligence into your two most powerful growth levers – talent and revenue.
By uniting the right human expertise with the best use of technology in an on-demand model, we turn growth from an aspiration into a predictable, repeatable, and ROI-driven system.
It’s how we level the playing field for visionary entrepreneurs, leaders, and founders - while also creating pathways to opportunity for disadvantaged communities. This is the commitment every member of our team signs up for.
Our mission is underpinned by our core values:
Daring to Disrupt: We challenge the status quo and seek groundbreaking solutions.
Courageous Innovation: We embrace bold ideas and conscientiously push boundaries.
Standing Up for Diversity: We champion inclusive environments and opportunities for all.
Valuing Progress Over Perfection: We prioritize building and flying our plane simultaneously.
Meet our creators.
James – Founder, Commercial Director & Head of Talent
James Burke is the irrepressible, ambitious driving force behind HPP’s evolution. After launching The Ladder in 2003, a globally recognised executive search firm, James risked it all and gave it a bold makeover in 2013, rebranding to embrace the firm’s expanding offering.
At the centre of which is Perform IQ, which James co-created with PhD-level psychologists and launched in 2017 – a model that brings the science of human performance and emerging world of predictive, data-driven insights together. After successful trials with HPP’s partner clients, adoption of Perform IQ quickly manifested through HR & Talent Acquisition masterclasses for scale-ups, PE & VC firms, growth ventures, and digitally powered enterprises.
Not they type to sit still, alongside his day job as Head of Talent James has gone on to devise and launch People-as-a-Service in conjunction with Australia’s foremost HR Leaders. Changing the game further, he also leapt into the opportunity to develop Forebrite with Vlad, leaning into software and AI early on to help industry entrepreneurs, disruptors, and innovators across the region pull on their biggest growth levers.
In quieter moments he’ll occasionally writes about ‘Growth Leadership’, synthesising what he’s learning working with world-class clients, but he’s more likely to be found learning the art of renovation, having a Guinness, working-out or flapping about in the water still trying to surf.
Emma - Partner & Head of Operations
Emma Delory is our not-so-secret weapon and the mastermind behind our operational symphony. A research and operations specialist, Emma rewrites the ground rules of efficiency – orchestrating the infrastructure that fuels our growth, conducting day-to-day workflows, and composing valuable content for our marketing and social media.
An early adopter who is ‘at one’ with emerging technology, Emma has taken the reins of leveraging artificial intelligence at High Performance People, spearheading the integration of tools including ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, and Gamma. Emma’s many talents don’t just end there either – a key cog in our fast-expanding People-as-a-Service & Growth-as-a-Service partnerships – she’s as adept at interviewing candidates as she is writing proposal documents.
Multi-lingual, everything comes easily to Emma. After travelling the world previously as a senior marketer and business consultant, hiring teams across continents and running workshops for hundreds of clients on growth strategy, High Performance People is really just home from home.
When she’s not making the magic happen at work, Emma’s a wannabe yogi, fashionista and devoted dog-lover, with an unnaturally healthy attitude to food. Except for weekends, when there’s no holding her back.
Sophie - Partner & Head of People
Sophie Needham embodies the centre of excellence that sits behind our People Practice and defines the firm’s social conscience and cultural ethos. Authentic and results-driven, Sophie is our go-to for cutting-edge HR strategy, organisational design, all things HR operations, learning and development, change management, people & culture and transformation.
Well versed in the complexities of driving change across the technology, digital, media, and business consulting landscape, Sophie’s superpower is turning ambiguity into clear and actionable plans that deliver impact. An accomplished communicator, collaborator and relationship builder, Sophie is a hands-on operator across the full talent lifecycle, excelling at aligning people strategies with business goals and cultivating high performing teams and engagement.
Now playing the roles of mentor, coach and confidante to many of our clients’ CEOs and leadership teams, not only when it’s time to ‘course correct’ but also on challenging issues around diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing, Sophie’s straight forward counsel is widely sought. A champion of the business case for DE&I, Sophie’s ability to weave a powerful solution into a killer HR strategy is helping our clients to attract top talent from around the world.
When she’s not humanising the function of HR, Sophie supports great causes and heads up HPP’s for-purpose mission. You’ll find her on weekends spending quality time with family and friends, enjoying the outdoors, catching a live music act or trying a new dining experience.
Vlad – Partner & Head of Growth
Vlad Mehakovic is the growth strategist every founder, innovator and leadership team needs to have on speed dial. Part technologist, innovator, data analyst and strategic marketer, Vlad is the sum of diverse and impressive in-depth expertise, amassed in leadership roles from Series A to ASX 100.
A visionary, Vlad pioneered the early prototypes of Forebrite’s predictive marketing platform with ventures including Laundromap, Providoor, MoleMap, MedView and Hanrob to find perfect product-market fit. A long-term ally of James, it made sense to join forces and break down the barriers that typically prevent clients’ success – which beyond having a smart team, in his case means helping clients to engineer a winnable growth strategy and to drive profitable revenue.
In truth, Vlad breathes predictive intelligence. Whenever he’s bending statistical software, artificial intelligence or building ML tools, he’s only looking to automate model building, evaluation and deployment so there’s more time to focus on customer behaviour, future trends, and monetisation. Which as a former CMO, CTO and CEO, he has a remarkable capacity to synthesise into a language that’s quickly relatable.
When he’s not talking all things North Star metrics, Vlad is a proud health & fitness fanatic, an adoring husband, and a newly minted father of two. Free time? Let’s just say weekends are now officially booked solid.
Our latest thinking…
Articles
Growth Leadership: New Leadership for the Intelligence Age
Business leaders faced an all-time-high rate of change in 2024, spurred by rapid advancements in generative AI according to Accenture’s Pulse of Change index, and the pace will continue throughout 2025 and beyond.
40 Habits of Growth Leaders
Worst First: Start your day by tackling the most unpleasant task. Getting it out of the way early sets a productive tone for the rest of the day.
Peak Times: Figure out when you're most productive and schedule your important tasks during those times. Save less demanding tasks for your off-peak hours.
The Marketing Growth Engine: Supercharging Performance
We live in a time of abundant growth potential. However, the same proliferation of marketing channels, data and activities that create this growth potential can make it difficult to prioritise marketing budgets and efforts. Marketers are spoilt for choice and drowning in data. And that can be more crippling than enabling.
Enough about us, let’s talk about you.
Are you readying your business to thrive in an increasingly digital and interconnected world – or launching something new?
We appreciate hearing from our clients and network. If you would like to contact us to discuss any of our services, ask for career advice or to simply provide confidential feedback on your experience with our business, please send us a message.
Make an enquiry
Ways to get in touch
If you're not a forms-kinda-person, simply email us - hello@hppeople.com