Professional athletes often find themselves facing a unique and potentially unnerving dilemma, namely what do with when they come to the end of one hugely successful career and have to work out what to do next. Some turn to the media, some to coaching and others head back to college or move into industry. In truth many struggle to reconcile their pasts with the present, a fact Olympic gold medallist and boss of fast-growing management consultant Lane4 Adrian Moorhouse freely acknowledges.

‘When you retire it becomes really difficult because, as a sportsman, you’re used to people telling you that you’re great at what you do, but when you have to find something else you loose that,’ recalls Moorhouse, who won gold at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. ‘There is nothing worse than being an ex-sports person and feeling that your best days are already behind you.

‘When I retired from swimming in 1992 I initially became involved in talent development, helping not only swimmers but members of other Olympic teams too and that enabled me to develop skills, like the ability to organise, for example, which have been useful to business.’

Lane4 was formed in 1994, when Moorhouse and sports psychologists Graham Jones realised that many of the mental tools used in the sporting world were actually rather useful in a wider context.

‘Things like developing self-belief are obviously hugely important to the business community,’ Moorhouse ventures. Compared with traditional business psychology, sports psychology has other benefits too. ‘It provides something people can relate to,’ he continues. ‘One of our consultants works with the England cricket team and his experiences can really bring things to life for people. They can ask, for instance, how Michael Vaughn managed to bounce back from that first test defeat against Australia.’

Proving the concept was by no means easy

‘When we started out people really liked the idea but they weren’t sure whether or not they should take a risk on us. Our first client had a group of 50 individuals who the course was relevant too, but said to us ‘I’ll give you the hardest nine first, including all the sceptics, and if you can do anything with them you can do it with anyone. We won most of them over and moved on from there.’

Twelve years on and the initial inertia appears to have been overcome. The initial triumvirate of Moorhouse, Jones and a third partner has swelled to some 50 people, alongside several freelance consultants. The likes of Coca Cola, Deutsche Bank and the UK Atomic Energy Authority are counted as customers with annual sales topping £5 million.

Eager to expand things further (though not in a ‘megalomaniac’ manner) Moorhouse adds that ‘we’re starting to do a bit more overseas. We’re now winning 20 per cent of our business outside of Europe and we’re doing very well in the Asian and US markets too. Hopefully that should enable us to service some seven-figure projects before too long.’

The challenge now is to balance the sport with the business. ‘If we play the sport card too much, you develop a reputation as niche player, but we think this is something with far wider implications,’ he assets. ‘If you hire a guy like Clive Woodward to come and talk to your managers, they’ll take a lot from it, but they’ll only have an hour session and it’s tough to pick up anything really practical in that time. By providing, say, ten days with a sports psychologist, we think we can deliver much more.’

See also: Do motivational speakers help boost morale at work? – What are the benefits of hiring a motivational speaker for your workplace? Here, we investigate the upside for your business.