Performance is biological first
Performance coaching for founder-CEOs
For founders in Europe and the UK who still lead the big deals themselves, and have noticed that the same output now costs quite a bit more sleep, recovery and evening than it did a year or two ago. We work on what drives it, including the beliefs about pace behind it, and on habits that hold in a real week.
Vlad Andreev
Coaching and education. If something needs a doctor, I'll say so.
On the call we look at whether this is the right kind of help. If it is, the first month is a trial at €2,000, with no commitment beyond it.
Not ready to talk? Take the free 4-minute Biological Debt Audit →
Negotiation consultant at The Gap Partnership, 2018 to 2021 · Client leadership at Nielsen, 2014 to 2018 · Managing Partner at FANATIC, a brand strategy agency · Creator of the Sapiens OS framework
The pattern
Still performing, and paying more for it every quarter
- You wake at 4am already running through the business, and need caffeine to start the day and something to switch off at night.
- You walk into high-stakes meetings already depleted, and some calls get made in a reactive state you later regret.
- The afternoon crash takes your best hours, and by Thursday the week has run out of you.
- Weekends go on recovery, and you're less patient at home than you would like to be.
- You own an Oura or a Whoop and you've read Huberman or Attia, but you still don't know which two things actually matter for you.
If several of these sound familiar, it isn't a discipline problem, and on paper nothing is wrong, which is exactly what makes it quite hard to name. Generally speaking, it means the way you work has started to cost more than your recovery pays back, and that has a mechanism.
The argument
Your decisions run on your nervous system state
Don't get me wrong, strategy, team and capital matter more than anything on this page. But every one of those decisions is made by a person whose prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles judgement and self-control, is quite sensitive to stress and to lost sleep. Decision quality, patience and presence in the room are not fixed character traits. They move with sleep, stress load and recovery, and when those slide for long enough no productivity method makes up for it, which is why you cannot out-discipline a dysregulated nervous system.
None of this is new, and I would rather you check it than trust me. Stress signalling can quickly impair prefrontal function, even when the stress is fairly mild but feels uncontrollable (Arnsten, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2009, a review: doi). The cumulative wear of repeated stress responses is what McEwen called allostatic load (New England Journal of Medicine, 1998: doi). And in a small study, 11 young men limited to 4 hours in bed for 6 nights had lower glucose tolerance and higher evening cortisol than after recovery sleep (Spiegel, Leproult and Van Cauter, The Lancet, 1999: doi). The work is applying this to your week, in the right order.
Why habits don't hold
Under load, people fall back on what they believe about pace
For three years I coached commercial directors, CEOs and founders on negotiation at The Gap Partnership, and what they came in with was rarely a lack of skill or discipline. It was a belief about how the work has to be done. Under pressure people fall back on what they believe about how hard they have to push, and with founders that belief quite often sounds something like "my work is more important than my sleep".
You can build a very good evening routine on top of that belief, and it will usually last until the next big deal is on the line. So we work on both at once: the biology the pattern runs on, and the beliefs about pace that created it, because the habits only hold once those beliefs change too.
The system
Sapiens OS: ten pillars, worked one constraint at a time
Sapiens OS is the framework I built from what worked for me and from the research: ten pillars that together shape how much capacity you have in a given week. The point is not to fix all ten. We work nervous system first and constraint first, meaning that we find the one constraint that limits everything else and change it before adding anything new, since fixing the loudest symptom while the real constraint holds is quite often how good protocols fail.
- Sleep
- Nutrition
- Movement
- Stress
- Social connection
- Light & dark
- Agency
- Meaning
- Rest
- Curiosity
Who you'd be working with
Most of my career was spent selling and negotiating
I'm Vlad Andreev. For most of my career I sold and negotiated for a living: property, advertising, marketing research at Nielsen, then three years as a negotiation consultant at The Gap Partnership, in the rooms where annual contracts were won or lost. Today I'm also Managing Partner at FANATIC, a brand strategy agency. In all of it my energy was part of the product. I was the one who said yes to the extra project and the late call, and I burnt out twice along the way, which I don't recommend.
About 19 years ago I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune condition, and for years I worked at full pace with it. Interestingly enough, what I noticed was something nobody in business talked about: in the weeks when my sleep, recovery and stress were in order I negotiated better, decided faster and had something left for the evening, and in the weeks when they weren't, no amount of discipline made up for it. I built Sapiens OS from what worked for me and from the research. My own capacity to work changed a lot once I changed several things at once, alongside my medical care, not instead of it.
No PhD and no medical degree, which is exactly why the science on this page names its source, so you don't have to take my word for it. My own experience is not medical advice, and nothing on this page is either.
The longer arguments, with their sources, are on LinkedIn and in the newsletter, if you want to see how I think before you book.
The practice
I publish my own data, including the bad stretch
The framework runs on me first. These are four years of nightly sleep-quality scores from my own tracker, as monthly averages, published as they are, including the mid-2024 stretch that wasn't good.
Nightly sleep-quality score, monthly average. Source: my own tracker, 2022 to 2026. This is one person's data, so it shows the practice and says nothing about what will happen for you.
Working together
Three steps, with the price for each
Step 1
A 30-minute call
Free
We look at where your week is costing you most, whether coaching is the right kind of help, and if it is, what the first month would focus on. If I think you need a doctor or another professional instead, I'll tell you.
Step 2
The first month, as a trial
€2,000
One 60-minute call a week, text support in between, and specific protocols to try in your own calendar. You don't commit to anything beyond this month.
Step 3
Continue if it's working
€2,000 a month
If the first month shows it's useful, we agree together how long to continue. You leave with a short personal system: a few fixed foundations, flexibility everywhere else, and enough of the mechanism to adjust it yourself.
I work one-to-one myself, so I take a maximum of 10 clients at a time. The price is on this page, not set on the call based on how you sound. Probably the most useful time to start is while you're still performing, since adjusting how you work now is quite a bit cheaper than rebuilding after you hit the wall.
There is no outcome guarantee, because results depend on you being willing to change how you work. If you come to every session, do the work and still see no benefit, we can talk about a refund.
Fit
Who this is not for
- Anyone who needs medical or psychiatric care, or is in an acute crisis. Coaching is not the right tool for that, and I'll tell you directly and point you to the right professional.
- Anyone looking for a supplement stack, a gadget or motivation. There are none of those here, and if a checklist could have solved this you would have solved it already.
- Anyone not willing to change their calendar or daily habits. Most of the work happens in your week, between our calls.
- Employed executives without an ownership stake, and founders in their first year. The work is built around founders who carry the company's big decisions themselves, and the constraints elsewhere are quite different.
- Anyone who wants a coach to agree with them. The value is in the mechanism, including the parts that are inconvenient to hear.
The honest comparison
Where the other options stop
A longevity clinic or a lab panel
Gives you the numbers, which can be quite useful. But a result you don't act on doesn't change your Thursday, and the hard part is sequencing the changes and holding them through a real quarter.
Your doctor
Rules out disease, which matters and which you should keep doing. This coaching makes no diagnosis and doesn't replace that check.
Doing it yourself
You already know most of what's in the podcasts, and knowing was never the constraint. Holding it through travel, board cycles and the launch that eats a month is where it usually falls apart.
This isn't therapy, medical care or motivation coaching. It is coaching on how you work, built on the biology that work runs on.
Questions
Before you book
Is this medical care?
No. It's coaching and education, so I don't diagnose or treat anything. If something you describe on the call needs a doctor, I'll say so.
Do I have to commit for several months?
No. The first month is a trial at €2,000, and at the end of it we decide together whether to continue.
How much of my week does it take?
One 60-minute call, plus whatever we agree to change, which is built into the week you already have rather than added on top of it.
Is it confidential?
Yes. Confidentiality is part of the written coaching agreement.
In which language?
English or Russian.
Do you work with leadership teams?
Not at the moment. The work is one-to-one, with founders.
Start with 30 minutes
My invitation here is simple: before you add another protocol or another device, book 30 minutes and we'll look at where your week is costing you most. If coaching is the right kind of help, I'll explain how the first month would run. If it isn't, I'll say so and, where I can, point you to someone better suited.