We help you build better, faster - with industry-shaping results.
A TALENT & GROWTH ADVISORY FIRM GUIDING TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS FROM STARTUP TO ASX & FORTUNE 50.
At High Performance People, we’re the force-multiplier of your ambition.
We turn your talent & growth strategies into high-ROI levers, through our data-first approach and an on-demand service ecosystem as unique as your goals.
Our Perform IQ model uses predictive insights to help you scale a leadership team, workforce and culture that excels in high-growth and high-pressure markets.
While our analytics platform, Forebrite, transforms your data into a decision-making powerhouse to accelerate revenue growth, capitalise on future trends, and maximise profitability.
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 drives your marketing ROI & financial performance systematically.
Fractional Flying Squad: our scale-up experts bring temporary, targeted, high-impact expertise to your mission-critical projects.
Business & Executive Coach: our bespoke programs unlock & translate your leaders potential into measurable goal-achievement.
Create what is next,
right now.
We don’t do different, we are.
Our vision is to be the ‘go-to’ talent & growth advisory firm for ambitious innovators, who want to win in today’s intelligence economy.
On one hand, we stand up your team's ability to outcompete your competitors through Perform IQ, our talent assessment & development model that guides your decisions with precision - measuring and shaping skill sets, and mindsets.
On the other, we engineer your company's Predictive Marketing & Financial Forecasting Engine through our hybrid analytics & consulting platform, Forebrite, changing the way you make investment decisions – aligning every functional leader around your North Star Metric.
Our talent & growth services are available on-demand too, scaling in synch with your needs and budget.
Our areas of focus include:
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
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (incl. application across industries)
Creative Agency & Creator Platforms
Digital-First & Digitally Ambitious Brands
Our People-as-a-Service matters.
PaaS is our on-demand solution, to access HR & Talent expertise without the full-time price tag.
Our top-tier experts have guided innovative ventures from 0 to 1,000+ people globally and taken organisations of scale through transformational change.
Whether you’re building your first HR function, need a custom-fit L&D solution or hiring for hyper-growth, we can tailor a pinpoint strategy that positively impacts your bottom and top-line.
Our advantage? Perform IQ’s predictive analytics, harnessed to optimise your HR processes and operational workflows, recruit the top 5% of talent, and build the foundations of a high performing leadership team, workforce and culture.
Delivering exactly what you need, only when you need it.
Benefits include:
Economy: we run HR & Talent health checks to identify your objectives & develop a proposal around your budget.
Expertise: we hand-select from Australia’s finest HR & Talent practitioners to support your specific People needs.
Strategy: we design & execute a scalable roadmap to ensure your People strategy facilitates your business goals.
Impact: we leverage Perform IQ’s analytics & implement AI-powered tools to optimise your HR & Talent workflows.
Focus: we free-up your team’s time & resources to concentrate on product innovation & mission-critical objectives.
Growth-as-a-Service, for winning.
Our software & AI-powered data-analytics platform, Forebrite, took over 5-years to build.
We know how critical a ‘growth engine’ is to a company’s success, so we built a universal one with the capability & predictive horsepower typically out of reach for 90% of companies.
Fast, custom-fit, and hard-wired to maximise your marketing ROI & financial performance, Forebrite turns your growth plans into measurable outcomes.
Our value-add? We don’t simply crunch your data, our seasoned growth strategists work directly with you to action and optimize every insight.
Delivering a continuous, data-driven advantage that scales with your ambition.
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 to Fortune 50:
Turn vision into reality, ignite your growth engine.
Our who and ‘why’?
Our mission is to turn our clients' talent & growth strategies into the highest-ROI levers in their business, helping ambitious innovators move through to the forefront of their industries.
We do this by bringing together the right human expertise with the best use of technology to help define, design, and accelerate the delivery of more valuable, data-first solutions that drive sustained competitive advantage.
We're deeply committed to levelling the playing field for visionary entrepreneurs, leaders, and founders, while also building pathways to opportunity for disadvantaged communities. This commitment is what 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 & Head of Talent
James Burke is the driving force behind High Performance People. After launching executive search firm The Ladder in 2003, James gave it a bold makeover in 2013, rebranding to embrace the firm’s expanding suite of leadership advisory services.
Never one to shy away from innovation, James created Perform IQ alongside notable psychologists – a model that doesn’t only accurately predict a leader’s ability to perform right now, but also assesses their potential to transform businesses for the future. Adoption of Perform IQ has manifested into masterclasses for start-ups, growth ventures, and digitally powered enterprises, equipping HR professionals with a holistic strategy to identify, develop and retain high-potential employees.
Head of the firm’s executive search & recruitment practice, James has subsequently designed a client-centric playbook that sets the industry’s benchmark, with a guarantee that’s overseen the firm’s 100% placement rate across 1,200+ assignments. As the catalyst behind our breakthrough Talent-as-a-Service and Growth-as-a-Service, he’s brought about a powerful synergy that’s proving instrumental to the success of industry entrepreneurs, disruptors, and innovators across the region.
When he’s not building partnerships with pre- and post-IPO companies, James can be found enjoying his passion for sport, music and next renovation project. If there’s a decent wave nearby, you can also find him still trying to surf.
Emma - Partner & Head of Operations
Emma Delory is our not-so-secret weapon and mastermind behind our operational symphony. A research and operations specialist, Emma rewrites the 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 Talent-as-a-Service partnerships – she specialises in identifying, screening and interviewing candidates through Perform IQ for junior to mid-level roles.
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.
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 a new ‘pedal to the metal’ world
Business leaders faced an all-time-high rate of change in 2024, spurred by rapid advancements in generative AI according to Accenture’s new Pulse of Change index, and the pace will accelerate 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.
Growth Partners : 8 skills, beliefs & behaviours shaping law firm leadership in 2025.
Law firms have always had to adapt to change to remain profitable and relevant to clients, but 2025 looks to be the year in which law firm leadership experiences a transformative shift.
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