Richard Godfrey is the leadership coach for ambitious founders who are ready to stop playing and start leading.
With over two decades of experience in digital, strategy, and leading high-performance teams, Richard is known for his no-nonsense approach to leadership, combining sports coaching principles, agile structure, and sharp strategic thinking to help founders scale their businesses without burning out.
He’s the author of Be The Five, creator of the Syncity Ascend programme, and builder of Hashiru, a platform designed to help leaders stay aligned, empowered, and focused as they grow.
When he’s not coaching inside the Visionary Leaders League, you’ll find Richard hosting podcasts, refining his playbook, or quietly watching football managers lose the dressing room.
About Richard
Richard didn’t come from a traditional coaching background. He came from the real one, leading digital transformation across public and private sectors, building agile teams, and navigating the messiness of growth while still hitting targets.
Over 15+ years, he ran large-scale change programmes, worked inside major organisations, and saw first-hand what happens when leadership lags behind ambition. That’s what led him to create the Syncity methodology, a structured, sports-inspired approach to help founders stop playing every position on the pitch and step fully into their role as head coach.
He’s worked with tech CEOs, local government, scale-ups, and startup founders, always with the same belief: structure beats chaos, but simplicity beats complexity.
His book Be The Five introduces the 5D Agile framework, now built into the Syncity Ascend programme and the Hashiru platform, both designed to help leaders think ahead, delegate better, and lead with clarity.
Today, Richard works with ambitious founders ready to go from reactive operator to strategic leader, not through motivational fluff, but through clear thinking, disciplined execution, and a playbook that actually works.
Syncity
Richard is the founder of Syncity - a leadership and transformation company that helps ambitious founders grow without burning out.
For the past seven years, Syncity has worked with organisations across digital, government, charity, and startup sectors combining strategic clarity with structured delivery. It’s part consultancy, part coaching but always focused on building leaders, not just fixing problems.
Today, Syncity is best known for:
The Ascend programme — helping founders go from player to head coach.
The Hashiru platform — turning strategy into structured execution.
Ongoing advisory and mentoring work with CEOs and digital teams.
Whether it’s designing agile structures or helping teams rebuild trust, Syncity is built on one core belief:
You can’t scale a business until you scale the leader.
The Book: Be The Five
Richard’s leadership approach is built around clarity, structure, and momentum — and Be The Five is where it started.
The book introduces the 5D Agile Framework — Discuss, Discover, Decide, Design, Deliver — a simple but powerful way to lead anything from a weekly sprint to a long-term strategy. It’s become a go-to model for founders who want to scale without losing control or burning out.
Unlike typical business books packed with theory, Be The Five reads like a conversation with a coach — practical, direct, and ready to use. It’s been adopted by tech CEOs, public sector leaders, and first-time founders as the blueprint for growing with structure.
You can buy the book here, or download a free pdf copy here.
The Platform: Hashiru
From the pages of Be The Five came something real: Hashiru - a digital tool built on the 5D framework.
Hashiru gives founders and teams a shared structure to align goals, track progress, and stay accountable without falling into micromanagement. It’s your digital locker room: a space to plan, review, and adapt while keeping the whole team in sync.
Designed on Salesforce but flexible for any growing team, Hashiru is used by leaders who want to scale with visibility and trust, not chaos and guesswork.
Learn more about Hashiru here.
The Podcast: Two Data Dicks
On the surface, it’s a podcast about data. But underneath, it’s about something deeper: how leaders make better decisions.
Two Data Dicks is Richard’s straight-talking show on data, AI, and digital transformation, co-hosted with another Richard (hence the name). But it’s not just tech talk. The podcast explores how smart use of data can unlock better leadership, sharper thinking, and stronger results.
This connects directly to Richard’s coaching philosophy. His book Be The Five focuses on structure and qualitative data, the kind that lives in conversations, retrospectives, and reflection. And his platform, Hashiru, is designed to capture this kind of leadership data, turning insights into action without drowning teams in dashboards.
The thread through all of it? Data isn’t just for analysts, it’s for leaders. Whether you're scaling a business or setting your team up to win, knowing what to measure, how to reflect, and when to pivot is what separates a great coach from a reactive one.
You can listen to Two Data Dicks here for youtube or here for spotify - or better yet, hear how those ideas show up inside the Syncity coaching model.
Work With Richard
Richard doesn’t coach like a typical business consultant, because he didn’t learn leadership from books and boardrooms.
He learned it through sport. Playing it, studying it, and obsessing over how the best teams in the world actually win.
While others quote athletes for motivation, Richard focuses on what happens off the pitch — in the dugouts, the dressing rooms, the pit walls.
Because business leaders aren’t players anymore.
They’re head coaches and that requires a completely different skillset.
Through Syncity Ascend, Richard helps founders make that shift:
→ From trying to play every position, to building a team that can win without them.
→ From reactive firefighting, to structured leadership with rhythm and trust.
→ From micromanagement, to clear decision-making powered by data the kind coaches and team principals use every week.
He blends the strategic discipline of football managers, the agile planning of F1 team principals, and the trust-building of NFL head coaches, bringing it all into a system that fast-growth businesses can actually use.
The tools he’s created, the Be The Five framework, the Hashiru platform, the Strategic Leaders League, all stem from one belief:
If you want to scale, you need to stop being the star player… and start thinking like the coach.
That’s what Richard helps you do. Not just in theory, but with real structure, accountability, and a playbook built for modern leadership.
If you're ready to step off the pitch and into your proper role, this is where it starts.
A Personal Note from Richard
I’ve worked with leaders in tech, government, digital, and beyond. But the ones I get most excited about?
They’ve all got a few things in common.
They love sport, not just watching it, but understanding it.
They want to grow, not just the business, but themselves.
And they know that leading a team isn’t about being the best at everything. It’s about building trust, setting structure, and showing up like a head coach every day even when it’s hard.
If that sounds like you, then I think we’ll get on.
Thanks for checking out the site and if you want to go deeper, I’d love to hear from you.
Richard
What People Are Saying
“Richard manages to combine the big ideas, smart thinking and technical complexities of digital into an easy to understand vision of how things can and should be. He is both strategic in his understanding of the bigger picture and tactical in how to help you implement changes that work for you.”
— Steevan Glover – Founder, Brewd Marketing
“Richard’s name was always at the top of the list when looking for speakers, his no-nonsense approach to his work is refreshing and always stimulates conversations. His knowledge of all things digital marks him out as a true leader within the industry.”
— Rob Simms – CEO, CAMSS World
Press / Recognition
Before Syncity, Richard was already making waves. Recognised as a visionary digital leader, he helped transform public services in Peterborough, earning national press and international awards — including a headline feature in Forbes and an AWS City on a Cloud win.
But he didn’t just talk the talk, he took it global.
Richard has delivered keynotes and panels across the UK, the US, and Germany, challenging outdated thinking and pushing for smarter, simpler leadership in every room he stepped into.
These aren’t dusty credentials. They’re proof of long-term vision — and the same principles that now power the Syncity model: structure, clarity, and leadership that actually scales.