Corporate brochure · 2026 · For HR, People & L&D leaders
Mara.
Your people already know what to do. Mara trains them to still be able to do it under pressure.
Performance Engineering for high stakes human communication. Evidence based. Data driven. Private by design.
Mara lets leaders rehearse the moments that determine outcomes, presentations, difficult conversations, pitches, negotiations and boardrooms, while analysing what changes in their voice, body, message and behaviour when the pressure rises. Built on the ICOP Method and eighteen years in practice. Individual leaders from Netflix, Deutsche Bank, Sky and the BBC have trained with her, one to one.
Mara is an interactive performance coach built to train what happens when the pressure rises. People rarely fail because they do not know what good communication looks like. They fail because challenge, scrutiny, conflict or visibility changes the way they think, speak and behave. Mara lets them rehearse those moments before they are real, identifies what changes under pressure, coaches the state and the skill together, then measures whether the performance improves.
It is not communication advice. It is performance rehearsal.
01 · The cost of the problem
The cost of the problem.
Senior communication failure is not a soft cost. It is a hard line on the P&L, and it shows up in every market. In the United States it drains over a trillion dollars a year. In the United Kingdom workplace conflict alone, most of it communication, runs to tens of billions. Across Europe the pattern is identical: the same wasted hours, the same stalled decisions, the same lost deals. The most expensive version sits at the top: the leader who is capable when calm and loses it when the room turns. The pitch that does not land. The board that is not carried. And the team that quietly fails, since leadership and team breakdown ends nearly a quarter of all startups.
$1.2tn
Lost every year · US
US businesses, to poor communication. Grammarly · Harris.
£28.5bn
Lost every year · UK
UK workplace conflict, most of it communication. ACAS.
$12.5k
Per employee, per year
The measured cost of miscommunication, in every market. Grammarly · Harris.
1 in 5
Leaders have lost a deal
Business or a pitch lost directly to poor communication. Grammarly.
1 in 3
CEO transitions fail
Within eighteen months. Cause: communication. HBR.
75%
Of senior executives
Carry a hidden fear of high stakes speaking. Chapman.
58
Investors per seed round
Forty detailed meetings, twelve plus weeks to close. Harvard Business School and DocSend.
23%
Of startups die
From leadership and team issues: vision, communication, the ability to scale. Wilbur Labs.
10 sec
Predicts the investment
Brain signals in the first ten seconds of a pitch predicted investor interest and amount, above self report. Neuroforecasting research.
What organisations currently spend
Global executive coaching market
$15bn / year
US corporate L&D spend
$370bn / year
Senior executive coach (FTSE)
£750 to £1,000 / hour
BetterUp · CoachHub (technology plus human)
£5k to £12k / seat / year
L&D communication workshop
£5k to £10k / day
Mara · annual licence · unlimited sessions · scales with your team
£900 / seat / year
Client testimonial
“Mara has completely changed how I communicate and has become my go to communication coach.”
“Mara has been an absolute game changer in how I show up and communicate with prospects, customers and the C suite. Prior to using this unique online coaching tool, my pitch was too long and I struggled to drive my message home.”
“By practising on Mara, I receive invaluable feedback that I have never received from any of my real life coaches in the past. By practising on Mara, I receive invaluable feedback that I have never received from any of my real life coaches in the past.”
“You can practise your pitch in the comfort of your own home or office, with continual feedback on where to improve, until your message is on point. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their communication skills.”
David Homewood · Regional Vice President of Sales · Faro
For investors and the boards that back founders
The variable that predicts the cheque, and nobody is measuring it.
Fundraising is brutally inefficient, and every weak pitch compounds it. Closing a single seed round takes presenting to around fifty eight investors, forty detailed meetings, and over twelve weeks. Team and leadership failure is one of the largest causes of startup death. And the research is now blunt about why: how a founder performs in the room, measurably, predicts the cheque.
"Take one portfolio company that fails to raise its next round because the founder could not carry the room, and crumbled under pressure. Now ask how many of your founders you would honestly back to walk into a hostile board or a competitive term sheet negotiation and come out ahead. The ones you hesitated on are your exposure. Coaching that variable costs a fraction of one written off position, and right now nobody is even measuring it."
The cost of weak founder communication to a venture investor is not a coaching line item. It is portfolio risk that is currently unmeasured and unmanaged. Every other risk in the book gets monitored: financial, legal, market. The one variable that demonstrably predicts whether a founder raises, at what valuation, and on what terms, is the one nobody has tooling for. That is the gap Mara fills, and it is why this is a platform decision, not a training purchase.
02 · The platform
What does Mara do?
One performance system, expressed through different rooms.
Every session is private, scored where scoring belongs, and saved to the leader's own dashboard. You see aggregate engagement and the outcome arc. You never see the content of a session.
The rooms are not separate products.
One loop runs through all of them.
Mara finds the pattern, coaches the response, rehearses the real situation.
Then measures whether the behaviour actually changed.
01
Observe
Mara sees and hears the real performance.
02
Identify
She names what changes under load.
03
Regulate
A physical and psychological intervention.
04
Rehearse
Run it again, while the correction is live.
05
Pressure
Raise the difficulty deliberately.
06
Recover
Train the way back to control.
07
Measure
Compare the performance before and after.
↻ and round again, every session
i · Coaching Room
Coaching built around the live problem.
Not a lesson library. Not a chatbot conversation.
They bring the situation that is actually in front of them.
Mara works the internal response and the external behaviour together.
It ends with something they can use in the room.
ii · Practise Room
The moment, before it matters.
Camera and microphone on, the real delivery.
Voice, pace, pause, presence, clarity, body and impact, all analysed.
Mara raises the pressure, then asks them to run it again.
The objective is not perfection. It is retaining performance when conditions change.
iii · Off the Record · Private
Confide and talk to Mara.
Somewhere to confide, think out loud and resolve it.
NLP coaching techniques, psychology and proven coaching methods.
Private and judgment free.
For the difficult conversation, the hard decision, the moment that knocked them.
Nothing leaves the room. Shred any time. Never reported, never scored.
iv · Mindset & Breathing
Regain cognitive and physical control when the pressure hits.
Reset patterns from two to twenty minutes.
A ten minute pre performance warm up.
The physical layer underneath the words.
The layer most coaching products skip.
v · Voice training
Range, breath and projection.
Range, breath and projection, trained before they walk in.
A focused warm up for the panel, the keynote, the camera.
The voice that carries the room, on demand.
vi · Mara Teams
Coaching for the team, not just the leader.
Works on how the team communicates together, not just the individual.
Built on the meetings they already have. No new meetings.
Relationships get clearer, decisions get faster, the work compounds.
Flagship
vii · Meeting Observer
Find the pattern the leader cannot see themselves.
Mara observes the meeting without storing the meeting itself.
Not who spoke longest, or how many filler words were used.
The behavioural pattern around the moments that matter: challenge, disagreement, authority, interruption, withdrawal, over explaining, decision making, recovery.
A private debrief for each participant, and a rehearsal built around the pattern she found.
No new meetings. No observer in the room. No transcript to leak.
01
Real meeting
02
Pattern found
03
Targeted practice
04
Next meeting
Plus three complete curricula: Be Heard, fifty six guided sessions on workplace communication. Performance, sixty lessons on presence, connection and live delivery. And the signature: The Programme, the complete sixteen session ICOP arc across ninety days. All delivered by Mara, calibrated to each leader's seniority and block type.
New in Mara · For every leader
The communication test.
Before the coaching deepens, each leader takes a six minute test that reveals how they communicate and how they hold up under pressure. It gives Mara the profile she coaches to, and gives the leader a result worth keeping.
New feature
The communication test
Two codes, one type, and the edge to work on.
In about six minutes each leader gets a Communication Code for how they express, influence and connect, a Performance Code for how they hold up under pressure, and the overall type they fuse into. Not a personality quiz: a coaching roadmap that trains Mara to coach the real person in every room.
Two four letter codes and a named overall type, theirs to keep
Built on the ICOP Method and the Performance State Method
Sharpens over time as Mara observes real sessions
Aggregate communication styles roll up to the team view, individual results stay private
03 · Under the hood
What sits beneath every session.
Past the rooms and the courses: the measurement that proves the work, the intelligence that personalises it to each leader, and the safety architecture that lets your people, and your legal team, trust it.
01 · Measurement and evidence
The proof, accumulating.
Six scored dimensions every session: Pace, Vocal Range, Energy, Clarity, Presence, Impact
The recordings library: every take saved, the session one baseline permanently archived
Side by side comparison: week one next to now, objective video evidence of change
Video upload with timestamped feedback on recordings from the real world
Auto generated reports, weekly and monthly, in Mara's voice, in app and by email
Session journal and free text goals, the documented development record
02 · The intelligence layer
Why no two people get the same coach.
Five tier seniority reading: the CEO is never coached like an individual contributor
Real time calibration from the first three exchanges: language, pace, processing channel
Five block types diagnosed: State, Clarity, Authority, Pattern, Transition
ESL Leaders framework: two extra dimensions, Fluency Under Pressure and Personality Transfer
Inter session memory: patterns, goals, upcoming events, the last edge, carried forward
Calendar context: Mara opens by referencing the real event in the diary
03 · Safety and trust
Built for scrutiny.
Four level safety protocol: from holding light emotional charge to immediate crisis referral
Honest scope: Mara is a performance coach, not a clinician, and says so
Individual consent and organisational DPA before anything is analysed
Audit log of every administrative action
Aggregate only reporting: engagement and trajectory to you, content to no one
What Mara is actually training
Performance only becomes visible when something changes.
A person can look excellent when the conditions are easy. Performance only becomes visible when something changes. Mara introduces the conditions that expose the real pattern.
The interruption.
The hostile question.
The sceptical buyer.
The senior person who disagrees.
The clock running down.
The sentence that does not land.
The moment they lose their place.
The goal is not to prevent those moments. It is to train recovery. The strongest performers are not the people who never lose control. They are the people who know how to get it back.
The measurement
Completion tells you somebody trained. Mara is designed to show whether they changed.
Every session creates a comparable performance signal, from the first baseline to current behaviour. The organisation never receives the conversation itself. It sees the movement: whether leaders are becoming clearer, more authoritative and more capable of retaining their performance when the stakes rise.
Scored every session
Pace · Vocal Range · Energy · Clarity · Presence · Impact
Performance under pressure
Baseline Performance
How they perform before any difficulty is introduced.
Pressure Performance
What remains when challenge, interruption or scrutiny is added.
Recovery
How effectively they regain control after disruption.
Pressure Delta
The gap between the normal performance and the pressured one.
These additional indices are introduced as Mara's longitudinal performance dataset develops.
04 · The methodology
A method, not a feature list.
Most tools coach the output. ICOP works on the state producing the output as well.
Every room and every course expresses the same framework: the ICOP Method, the four stage somatic coaching arc developed by Session across eighteen years of professional performance, psychology and executive coaching practice. What blocks senior people in high stakes communication is not just a lack of skill. It is a nervous system response. ICOP addresses both layers, in sequence, every session.
I
Identify
What actually changes when the pressure arrives?
→
C
Clear
Reduce the interference: tension, threat, overthinking, avoidance or reactivity.
→
O
Outer skill
Build the voice, structure, body, message and behaviour on top of a more usable state.
→
P
Performance State
Make it repeatable. The aim is not to need Mara forever. It is to own the state yourself.
The method was built in real rooms, with real stakes. Session has worked with leaders at Netflix · Deutsche Bank · Channel 4 · Vodafone · Hilton · Sky · BBC · HBO · Audible
05 · What your organisation gets
The work shows up where the business can see it.
Mara is not a workshop that fades by the next board cycle. It is a coach your leaders reach for every week, a set of courses that build the skill underneath, voice and camera work for the public moment, and a meeting layer that turns the conversations your team already has into the clearest picture of how they communicate you have ever held. Communication strengthens. Relationships hold. And for the first time, you can see it happen.
For every leader
Coaching that strengthens how they show up.
Voice, presence, storytelling, the difficult conversation, authority on screen. Coached live, scored across six dimensions every session, tracked from the first baseline to now. The leader who froze in the board meeting carries the room. The one who avoided the hard conversation has it.
Mara Meeting Observer
She listens, and transcribes nothing.
Mara works from a transcript, or she listens live to the meeting itself. In live mode she transcribes nothing and records nothing: she observes the communication and hands back a detailed report on how the team really talks. Who holds the floor, who concedes it, where the decision got made. Each member receives a private debrief, and the team gets a coaching protocol for the weeks ahead.
The report you receive
The communication data HR has never had.
An aggregate read of how your team actually communicates when the stakes are real, built on the Five Systems of Presence. Where the team is strong, where it concedes, how the dynamics move across the programme. Not sentiment scores. The first hard evidence of a soft skill.
The courses
Three complete curricula, always on.
Be Heard, fifty six guided sessions on workplace communication. Performance, sixty lessons on presence and live delivery. The Programme, the sixteen session ICOP arc across ninety days. All calibrated to each leader, all there the moment they want them.
The movement, dimension by dimension
An illustrative cohort arc across the six scored dimensions, week one to programme end. The kind of movement participants feel in the room, made visible.
Clarity
52 → 81
Presence
48 → 84
Vocal Range
55 → 79
Energy
50 → 77
Pace
58 → 82
Impact
45 → 86
Week oneProgramme end
What you see, and what stays private
Six
Scored every session
Pace, Vocal Range, Energy, Clarity, Presence, Impact. Objective movement, baseline to now, not a self report.
Five
Systems of presence
The team read: State, Signal, Clarity, Attention, Authority, tracked meeting to meeting as the dynamics shift.
Private
Content stays theirs
You see engagement, the outcome arc and the team report. You never see anyone coaching content. That boundary is why the data exists at all.
Start with a pilot
Five to ten leaders, ninety days, £300 a seat. Every pound is credited to your annual licence the moment you continue. A ten leader pilot is £3,000, and one round carried or one relationship repaired pays for it many times over.
06 · The numbers, live
Run the ROI on your own cohort.
Move the sliders. The model is deliberately conservative: it counts only the cost of a single failed senior promotion and the coaching spend you would otherwise commit, and sets both against your Mara pilot and full licence, priced per seat so they scale with your team. The return is communication that holds and relationships that strengthen across the cohort. Use it before any internal budget conversation.
And a human coach is only as good as the match. Traditional coaching can spend its first sessions building rapport, and a personality mismatch wastes the whole engagement. Mara removes the compatibility gamble: it calibrates to each leader from the first exchange, coaches consistently from session one, and never has an off day.
Your cohort
Senior leaders whose communication carries financial or strategic weight.
25
Per cohort member, including bonus and on costs.
£180,000
FTSE senior coach benchmark: £750 to £1,000 an hour.
£875
A typical senior engagement: one hour a fortnight.
24
What the model says
Equivalent human coaching spend / year
£0
Your cohort, at your coach rate, at the human cadence.
Cost of one failed senior promotion
£0
Conservatively 1.5 times salary: search, ramp, lost momentum. One in three senior transitions fails on communication.
Mara pilot · 90 days · fully creditable
£0
Your whole cohort for the full ninety days. Every pound credited to the annual licence the moment you continue.
Mara full licence / year
£0
Unlimited sessions, every room, all three curricula, the portal, Mara Teams and the renewal pack included. Priced per seat, so it scales with your team.
Coaching coverage ratio
0×
What the same budget buys in coaching availability: every leader, unlimited sessions, all year, against the booked human hour.
The model deliberately excludes the harder to attribute lines: the discount applied to an underprepared pitch, the deal that went quiet after the board meeting, the regretted attrition under a leader who avoids hard conversations. If any of those numbers belong in your case, the argument only strengthens. Figures update live; nothing you enter here is stored or transmitted.
07 · The category
Different tools solve different layers of the problem.
Communication analytics
Can show patterns in speech and delivery.
Roleplay tools
Can simulate the conversation.
Human coaching
Can explore behaviour with depth.
Learning platforms
Can distribute knowledge at scale.
Mara connects the layers. It observes the performance, identifies what changes under pressure, works on the internal state and the external behaviour together, creates repeated rehearsal and measures the movement over time.
Poised / Yoodli
Interactive communication analysis and practice
BetterUp
Human coaching, technology enabled
CoachHub
Human coaching, technology enabled
Mara
Performance Engineering
What it actually measures
Real audio and video signal analysis
Processing the actual voice and presence signal, not a transcript of words
~Delivery analysis plus eye contact and visual presence scoring. Not the state underneath it.
~Human coach perception. No signal processing.
~Human coach perception. No signal processing.
✓On device. Measures the actual voice and presence signal, not a transcript.
On device processing
Raw audio and video never leaves the their device
✕Cloud processed.
✕Cloud hosted sessions.
✕Cloud hosted sessions.
✓Processing stays on device. Signal data never transmitted.
Pacing, tone, and presence data
Genuine biometric markers vs word per minute estimates
~Pacing, fillers, eye contact and visual presence. Delivery focused rather than state focused.
~Coach observation only. Subjective.
~Coach observation only. Subjective.
✓Voice waveform, resonance, and presence markers measured directly from signal.
Coaching depth and method
Proprietary performance framework
A structured method, not a generic conversation or a transcript summary
~Rubric and methodology adherence scoring.
~Whole Person Model. Wellbeing focus.
~Behavioural science framework. Generic.
✓ICOP Method. Built over eighteen years of performance direction. Not available anywhere else.
Performance psychology embedded
Nervous system response, pressure patterns, behavioural science in every session
✕
~Wellbeing and resilience only.
✕
✓Invisible infrastructure in every session. Never surfaced as a label.
Personal communication profile
Deep diagnostic built on 70 to 80 question assessment. 16 profiles.
✕
~Basic assessment included.
~Limited diagnostic.
✓Dual diagnostic system. Empowering user profile plus invisible coaching engine data.
High stakes scenario coaching
Pitch and investor preparation
Coaching specifically for fundraising conversations
~Roleplay scenarios, not investor specific.
✕General leadership only.
✕
✓Dedicated module. Built for the investor room.
Board and executive presentation coaching
Preparation for the room where decisions are made
✕
~General executive coaching.
~General executive coaching.
✓Core use case. Pressure simulation included.
Difficult conversations and negotiation
Roleplay for the conversations leaders avoid
~Guided roleplay, delivery and adherence focused.
~Human coach facilitated only.
~Human coach facilitated only.
✓Dedicated module. Pressure simulation. Behavioural feedback after every session.
Performance Under Pressure module
Specifically engineered for high stakes, time critical moments
✕
✕
✕
✓Unique to Mara.
Availability and access
Available 24/7, no scheduling required
Ready before any meeting, pitch, or conversation
✓
✕Sessions must be booked. Typically 6 to 12 week onboarding.
✕Sessions must be booked. Typically 6 to 10 week onboarding.
✓Instant. Same day deployment.
Live meeting analysis
Feedback during the actual meeting, not just in practice
~Live prompts during the call, delivery focused.
✕
✕
✓Meeting Observer. Signal based. In build.
Enterprise and data
Data residency and GDPR compliance
Recordings user owned, held in the UK, never used for model training, deleted on demand
~SOC 2 Type II. Cloud processed.
~US headquartered.
✓ISO 27001, GDPR, EU based.
✓Stored in the UK (London), hosted in the EU (Frankfurt). User owned. Never used for training. Deleted at 90 days or on demand.
L&D admin dashboard and cohort reporting
Measurable outcomes L&D teams can report upward
~Team dashboard and analytics.
✓
✓
✓Full cohort management, progress reporting, and completion artefacts.
5 to 7×
Average return on coaching investment for organisations that measure it
ICF / PwC Global Coaching Report
Competitors do useful pieces. Mara's difference is the loop.
The distinction is not software versus human coaching. It is learning about performance versus actually training it.
08 · Blended delivery
Workshops with Session in the room. Mara holds the daily practice.
Session holds the live work. Mara holds the rhythm between. Workshops are delivered in person or hybrid, tailored to your organisation, and run by Session personally. Together they build a leadership team that communicates with authority on demand.
i · Intensive
Presence Under Pressure
A half day or full day on landing in the room, holding the silence, and recovering when the moment goes sideways. Live practice with feedback, individual diagnostics, Mara access afterwards so the work compounds.
ii · Intensive
Story & Articulation
Distilling complexity into the line that lands: narrative structure, the power line, the clean ask. For leadership teams who present the business to the people who fund it.
The next step
Twenty minutes, and you will know.
One call with Session. We will not spend forty minutes talking about the technology. We put someone into a
real moment, show you what the pressure does to the performance, regulate it, run it again, and show you what
changed. On your own scenario, live. If it is useful you leave with a proposal: a pilot is one cohort, one
problem and a measured baseline, ninety days from £300 a seat, every pound credited against the licence
the moment you continue.
