Sarah Robb O'Hagan

Renowned Business Leader, CEO of EXOS the Performance Coaching Company, Former President of Equinox, Former Global President of Gatorade, Former Marketing Director at Nike and the Virgin Group
  • The transformative CEO of EXOS, the performance coaching company which counts 30 percent of the Fortune 100 among its clients
  • An influential innovation leader known for navigating turnaround and shaking up legacy products at big brands including Gatorade and Nike
  • An energetic, powerhouse presence who shares game-changing insights for building epic culture and leading teams and individuals to perform beyond their potential
  • Recognized as one of the “Most Creative People in Business” and “Most Powerful Women in Sports”

Play Video View Fees Add to List

Check Fees & Availability

Described by the media as everything from “Superwoman undercover” to “The Pied Piper of potential,” Sarah Robb O’Hagan is an executive, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Extreme Living — a content platform designed to help individuals, teams, and organizations play to their highest potential. She is also the CEO of EXOS, the leading human performance coaching company, which counts 30 percent of the Fortune 100 companies among its clients. In this role Sarah and her teamwork with individuals ranging from C-Suite leaders and their teams, through to pro athletes and elite level military personnel who are looking to improve their performance in work, sport, and life. Moreover, Sarah and her team are leading the conversation around the future of high performance in the modern-day workplace — with research and new methodologies to help clients create cultures that reduce burnout while promoting productivity.

Sarah is a rare blend of fierce businesswoman, cheerleading Mom, passionate women’s advocate, and high-energy innovator. In fast-paced presentations and in her book, Extreme You: Step Up, Stand Out, Kick Ass, Repeat, Sarah lays out a roadmap for becoming the most “extreme” version of yourself by playing to your own unique passions and strengths, and by building highly-collaborative, focused, and successful teams and corporations. Drawing on her decades of experience at some of the world’s most influential brands, she shares practical takeaways including how to get comfortable making bold moves and using failures in work or life to come back stronger, how to discover your most competitive playing field, and most importantly, how to tune your own mind and body for best performance in a fast-paced, hybrid work world so you can also empower the kind of teamwork that brings out the best in everyone else. She is exclusively represented by Leading Authorities speakers bureau.

Professionally, Sarah is widely regarded as a transformational CEO having personally led the development of breakthrough innovation efforts in her corporate career, including: the turnaround of Gatorade from a declining sports drink into an innovative sports performance company; the Virgin Atlantic Airways-Austin Powers movie collaboration in which the airline was rebranded “Virgin Shaglantic;” Equinox’s transformation from a brick-and-mortar gym to an always-on, digital-first fitness business; and the turnaround and transformation of her current company EXOS, in the midst of the global pandemic.

She is also not afraid to talk about what she calls her “canyon of career despair” in her 20s, using major back-to-back failures to learn, to grow, and motivate herself forward to eventually lead a $5 billion global business by the age of 38. Sarah shares firsthand accounts of these peaks and valleys — pairing stories of firings with a behind-the-scenes look at Gatorade’s transformational turnaround under her stewardship — to illustrate what it truly takes to be successful, why you learn more when you play for all or nothing, the importance of humility, and why you must always “play your own game.” She also taps into her own experiences with extreme burnout after giving birth to her third child in the midst of the Gatorade turnaround — and how it informed the work she does with EXOS today helping corporate clients and executives around the world to lead healthy high performing teams.

Robb O’Hagan has been named twice to Forbes magazine’s list of the “Most Powerful Women in Sports,” named a “Woman to Watch” by Ad Age magazine, dubbed one of the “Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company, and named to “40 Under 40” lists by Sports Business Journal, Crain’s Chicago Business, and Sports Goods Business. She also complements her operating experience with board service, having served on the board of Strava, as well as her current role as an independent director for JetBlue Airways.

Sarah is a passionate advocate for an active lifestyle and believes the lessons learned from sports and fitness can be applied to improve performance in the workplace. She has served on Hillary Clinton’s U.S. State Department Council to Empower Women and Girls through Sports and is a trustee of the Women’s Sports Foundation. She is an active member of the World Class New Zealand Network, as she remains committed to helping the country’s development, international competitiveness, and economic growth. In 2016, she was awarded the Sir Peter Blake Trust Award for outstanding leadership, and in 2018 she was named a “WISE” Woman of the Year.

Continue Reading »

Speaker Video

Sarah Robb O'Hagan: How to Have an Extraordinary Impact

Sarah Robb O'Hagan: Tapping Into Your Potential

Sarah Robb O'Hagan's Interview With Gayle King

Extreme You. Step Up. Stand Out. Kick Ass. Repeat.

From Burnout to High Performance: How to Build a Kick-Ass Hybrid Work Culture. When Sarah Robb O’Hagan began leading the turnaround of the $5 billion global Gatorade business amid a global recession, she was also preparing to give birth to her third child. Largely skipping her maternity leave, the combination of extreme hours and late-night childcare led her to experience an extreme and painful “burnout” that changed her perspective and her approach to work life forever.

Years later — taking on the role of CEO at EXOS, the human performance company, at the start of the global pandemic — she decided that a successful business turnaround while burning people out was not an option. As a result, she partnered with the performance science experts on her team, as well as some of the best organizational psychologists in the world to design and implement a far more sustainable and enjoyable way of getting business results while working under immense pressure.

In this talk, Sarah outlines:

  • Why high performance and productivity do not have to happen at the expense of human wellbeing — with proprietary research and data to prove the case
  • How to balance the load of intense work and pressure, with periods of intentional recovery to optimize the human system for higher performance
  • How to design your workplace with simple hacks to improve the wellbeing and performance of your team so that you can attract and retain the best talent
  • How to understand the connection between your mind and your body as it relates to overcoming feelings of intense stress and exhaustion
  • The magical force multiplier of getting into “flow state” to drive greater productivity for the team, and fulfillment for individuals

Epic Teaming: How to Build High-Performance, High-Fun Team Cultures. Sarah Robb O’Hagan has a strong track-record of implementing game-changing innovation and growth strategies, which is why she knows that the only way to bring out the best in ourselves is to bring out the best in others. With her decades-long career, predominantly in the sports and human performance industry, she has seen up close what epic teamwork looks like and how the common characteristics of great teams translate seamlessly from the world of sports to business.

With this talk, she explains:

  • Why we need to understand the most important “unwritten role” we can play on a team to tap into our greatest sense of fulfillment
  • How often people make the mistake of trying to bend the team’s needs to their strengths instead of the other way around
  • Why we naturally see our own efforts improve when we surround ourselves with “worthy rivals”
  • How to build a team dynamic that eliminates imposter syndrome in individuals, to accelerate output and performance
  • How to understand the difference between a team, and a community — and the importance of both in creating cultures that people want to be a part of

With anecdotes from her days working for highly team-oriented corporate cultures (including Nike and Virgin), as well as insight into the strategies she used while transforming major global companies, she describes what it means to build and contribute to an “extreme team,” how to work through intergenerational workforce dynamics, and how to get proximate with those least like yourself to truly understand the unique gifts that individuals can contribute to your team.

Leading Through Turbulence: How to Turn Headwinds to Tailwinds. Sarah Robb O’Hagan is no stranger to huge business headwinds. Stepping into her role as CEO of EXOS in early February 2020, she found herself not in the “dream job” she thought she had just accepted, but in the fight of her life leading a business that consisted of hundreds of brick-and-mortar gym sites around the world, which would be severely impaired by the global pandemic. Despite the complexities surrounding them, she and her team kept the business afloat and evolved it into a far stronger company as they shifted their focused to tackling the next phase of its growth. Earlier in her career, she had successfully led the turnaround of the $5 billion Gatorade business in the midst of a global recession after inheriting what the media called a “flaming mess,”so she knew the playbook and how it needed to be adapted to succeed in the big, long climb ahead of her.

These successful turnarounds, as well as her decades in the human performance industry have taught her innumerable lessons about succeeding in life and business, the most important being this: There is no way to get through life without experiencing adversity; Knowing how to harness the lessons to bounce back stronger is a skill everyone should have.

With this speech, Sarah outlines:

  • How dramatically the business environment has changed — with cycles of tailwinds and headwinds switching on us more quickly than ever before — and why you need to use the headwinds to sharpen your performance to take advantage of tailwinds when they come
  • Why you need to take risks, “crash more,” and use failure to fuel your personal growth
  • Why rejection is the beginning, not the end, on the journey to a personal breakthrough, and how to build the kind of resilience it takes to get great ideas to actually work
  • Why different generations in the workforce have different tolerance for risk and how to foster courage in a workforce where the dominant cohort has only known strong economic conditions
  • How to “change the game” in your competitive landscape so that your competitors need to follow you, and not the other way around

Continue Reading »

Recent newsRecent News

TestimonialsClient Testimonials

booksLatest Books

Extreme You: Step Up. Stand Out. Kick Ass. Repeat.

Extreme You: Step Up. Stand Out. Kick Ass. Repeat.