My Story:
Finding the Wrong Path
I started out in the London insurance market at 21. Good salary, respectable career, no real sense of purpose. What I noticed quickly was that the part of the job I actually enjoyed had nothing to do with the job itself.
It was the people. Helping colleagues progress, watching friends land something they'd worked for — that's where I came alive.
That instinct led me into recruitment. I joined a recruitment company learned the industry properly, and eventually launched my own company — OV Recruitment, specialising in the insurance market. The business was profitable. The trajectory was good.
But I wasn’t.
Great on the outside, dying on the inside
The business was profitable. The trajectory was good. And in 2022, I picked up an award for paper I wrote in the Insurance Market.
From the outside, everything was working.
What Was Really Happening
Behind the scenes, I was falling apart.
London has a drinking culture. I got DEEP into it. I was trying to be the life of every room while slowly destroying myself on the inside. I was escaping a life that didn't feel like mine through alcohol.
Eventually I had to make a decision. Stay and keep going the way I was going or leave and start again.
I chose to leave. I came to Asia.
The Rebuild
I knew I was starting again from scratch. So I went back to my roots — back to what I loved as a boy.
I'd always been a keen boxer. That's where I started. I found a gym, laced up, and made a decision to fight again. Alongside that I got sober, built a routine, and began putting myself back together one piece at a time.
(Young Oli in 2011)
No shortcuts. No quick fixes. Just the daily work of becoming someone I could respect again.
That process gave me everything. The mental performance I have today wasn't handed to me — it was built through that experience.
And it showed me something I've never forgotten: the tools that rebuild a person aren't complicated.
They're just hard. Structure, standards, accountability, and the willingness to show up every single day.
Muay Thai opened my eyes to something I hadn't fully understood before — mental performance. Not as a concept, but as a lived experience.
I started to see the same patterns I'd witnessed in business. The entrepreneurs who struggled weren't struggling because they lacked ability. They were struggling because their mental performance wasn't built to carry the weight of what they were trying to do.
That's when everything connected. My years building and running a business. The breakdown and the rebuild. The fighting. The sobriety. All of it pointed to one thing — I understood what it took to perform at a high level, and I understood what happened when that foundation cracked.
I knew I could help entrepreneurs and business owners build what I had built. Not from a textbook. From experience.
WHY
SUMMERS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
EXISTS
I built Summers Performance Management because I know what the gap between potential and performance feels like from the inside.
The people I work with come from different places. Entrepreneurs and business owners building something and feeling stuck. Professionals who've lost their direction. Employees who show up every day but feel disengaged from the work and disconnected from their own potential. Leaders who are performing on the outside but running on empty on the inside.
I understand all of them. Because I've been all of them.
This isn't theory. It's a process tested in real life, built from real experience, and refined through working closely with the people I coach.
Everyone can move towards the life they want. It's just a case of breaking it down and doing it one move at a time.
ABOUT OLIVER SUMMERS
Oliver Summers is a high performance and personal mastery coach working with entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals across the world. As the founder of Summers Performance Management, he specialises in helping individuals close the gap between where they are and where they are truly capable of being — through structured coaching, accountability, and a proven performance system built from real experience.
Alongside his individual coaching work, Oliver works with organisations on employee engagement and workplace performance. Drawing on his background in business and his deep understanding of what drives human performance, he helps teams and leaders build the standards, focus, and culture required to operate at a higher level. In a world where disengagement is one of the most costly and overlooked problems in business, Oliver brings a practical, no-nonsense approach to helping organisations get the best out of their people.
Based in Asia, Oliver coaches remotely and works with clients across the UK, Europe, and beyond.