The highest-performing organizations don’t rely on a handful of great leaders. They build cultures where people at every level think, act, and perform like leaders.

Paul Epstein learned this firsthand during his 15-year career as an executive in the NFL and NBA. While with the San Francisco 49ers, he founded the organization’s Leadership University, an initiative designed to develop leaders throughout the organization and ultimately evolved into a year-round talent academy.

Keynote Sessions:

Lead From Any Position

How High-Performing Organizations Build Leaders at Every Level

The highest-performing organizations don’t rely on a handful of great leaders. They build cultures where people at every level think, act, and perform like leaders.

Paul Epstein learned this firsthand during his 15-year career as an executive in the NFL and NBA. While with the San Francisco 49ers, he founded the organization’s Leadership University, an initiative designed to develop leaders throughout the organization and ultimately evolved into a year-round talent academy.

In this high-energy keynote, Paul takes audiences behind the scenes of that experience and shares the leadership principles that translate from professional sports to any organization competing for talent, performance, and growth.

His framework is simple, actionable, and built to scale:

LEAD SELF: Great leadership starts in the mirror. Take ownership of your mindset, decisions, energy, accountability, and impact.

LEAD OTHERS: Leadership is a relationship. Build trust, strengthen connection, and learn to influence in every direction: up, down, and across.

LEAD FORWARD: Leadership creates what comes next. Connect purpose to performance and create the standards and culture that allow excellence to scale.

Because the answer isn’t asking a few great leaders to carry more of the load…it’s building more leaders.

Leadership doesn’t start with a title. It starts in the mirror, and then it scales.

Participants will learn how to:

• Lead themselves first by adopting a CEO mentality built on ownership, accountability, awareness, and intentional action.
• Increase their leadership EQ to better understand themselves, others, and the situations they face.
• Lead in every direction and increase their influence with peers, managers, direct reports, and cross-functional partners.
• Build trust and connection that strengthen collaboration, engagement, and team performance.
• Connect purpose to performance by translating the bigger mission into everyday decisions, behaviors, and results.
• Create a culture of leadership and excellence where more people take ownership, step up, and perform at their best.

Ideal for: Organizations seeking to build leaders at every level, strengthen accountability and collaboration, develop emerging talent, increase influence across teams, or create a scalable culture of leadership and excellence.

Format(s):

• Keynote (45 – 60 minutes)
• Hybrid Keynote/Workshop (90 minutes)
• Keynote + accompanying “Business Athlete Workshop” (up to full day)

More information on the “Business Athlete Workshop” can be found below:

Winning Customers

Attracting and Retaining Fans that Inspire Trust and Loyalty for Life

How did Paul lead his teams to consistently sell out billion-dollar NFL stadiums with 70,000 fans in historically losing markets? Or transform an NBA team’s revenue performance from 28th to 2nd in the league – despite being labeled by ESPN as “the worst brand in sports”?

The answer lies in a powerful, scalable belief system that can be applied to any sales or service environment: Every seat has a story.

This shift from blanket ‘catch all’ campaigns to a dynamic customer-to-customer approach driven by customization, care, and championship service, led to sold-out stadiums and record-breaking revenue, that didn’t hinge on wins or losses.

In the sports industry, every seat and fan had a story. In your case, every client has a story. The question is: “Will you get to know it?”

Achieving customer success doesn’t depend on perfect market conditions – it depends on consistently making each customer feel valued and seen.

This keynote is HOW to do it, one story at a time.

Participants will learn how to:

• Turn customers into raving fans using a practical and result-driving playbook.
• Apply four trust-building traits that strengthen both immediate and long-term relationships.
• Use strategic listening to uncover what customers value most.
• Align sales and service teams around a shared customer experience.
• Ask better questions so touchpoints turn into transformation points.

Ideal for: Organizations seeking stronger customer loyalty, retention, trust, service consistency, sales-service alignment, or growth in competitive markets.

Format(s):

• Keynote (45 – 60 minutes)
• Hybrid Keynote/Workshop (90 minutes)
• Keynote + accompanying “Business Athlete Workshop” (up to full day)

Better Decisions Faster

Leading with Clarity and Confidence in an Era of Disruption and AI

Your strategy is sound. Your people are talented. And your most important decision has been sitting untouched for three weeks.

Every organization has a decision backlog. The hire nobody will pull the trigger on. The deal that keeps getting one more look. The strategy debate now in its fourth meeting. That backlog is not a thinking problem. It is a speed problem, and it is quietly the most expensive line item nobody tracks.

And it is getting worse. AI was supposed to make decisions easier. Instead, it hands your team more options, faster, with more perceived confidence attached to every one of them. The analysis is instant. BUT the choice is not.

Meanwhile the window to decide keeps shrinking, because your market is moving at the same accelerated pace you are.

Here is what has changed. AI can produce the analysis. It cannot produce the conviction to act on it, or the accountability that comes after. The scarce skill is no longer gathering information. It is deciding, committing, and moving while everyone else is still generating one more scenario, leading to the company killer known as paralysis.

In this keynote, based on his bestselling book Better Decisions Faster, former NFL and NBA executive Paul Epstein reveals the three-step process (head-heart-hands) he used to turn around major sports franchises, from the locker room to the boardroom. Your audience will learn to cut through the noise, spot the decision traps that stall momentum, move faster with clarity and confidence, so that you can avoid the worst decision of them all…

Indecision.

Participants will learn how to:

• Make decisions better and faster around strategy, people, dealmaking, budget, tech, AI, and more.
• Apply the head-heart-hands equation that factors in logic, emotion, and action—at scale.
• Give every leader a shared decision framework, so speed does not depend on who is in the room.
• Separate signal from noise when AI is producing more options than any team can act on.
• Build the conviction to commit, move, and remain accountable for the outcomes.
• Walk away with a clear playbook for what to prioritize, what to delegate, and what to decline.

Ideal for: Executive and leadership teams facing high-stakes choices; organizations navigating AI adoption, transformation, restructuring, or rapid growth; and sales or high-potential teams that need to move faster without sacrificing judgment.

Ideal Format(s):

• Keynote (45 – 60 minutes)
• Hybrid Keynote/Workshop (90 minutes)
• Keynote + Better Decisions Faster Workshop (half day to full day) or Leadership Retreat (one to two day)

Workshop:

THE BUSINESS ATHLETE

Customized experiences for teams, departments, and organizations that are committed to scale business athletes (mindsets, habits, systems, and identities) to build a championship culture that produces repeatable results.

The end game: 100% of the room leaves BELIEVING “I am a business athlete” and they have the gameplan and action plan for the next 52 weeks.

Mastering a High-Performance Mindset and Habit-Building System that Drives Consistent Growth, Repeatable Results, and Championship Culture

Participants will learn how to:

– Leave with a team and organizational training development model that can be executed at

scale, 365.

– Think and perform like elite athletes by building a system instead of relying on motivation.

– Plan with intention so the week is decided before it begins, leading to fewer status meetings

and wasted time.

-Practice the plays that matter most, building the reps that separate high performers from everyone

else.

– Perform under pressure with a repeatable weekly WIN MONDAY® cycle of commitment, execution,

and review.

– Produce compounding growth through actions that track gaps and improvement week over week.

-Create an accelerator ramp for new hires and new managers to onboard and take ownership of

their top priorities.

– Eliminate wasted effort and low-value activity that silently costs months of production every year.

– Elevate individual performance while contributing to a stronger, more connected championship culture.

– Build an all-encompassing scorecard (personal, team, company) that turns habits into measurable,

lasting results.

Every participant receives the “Business Athlete Toolkit”, practical tools they can implement immediately including:

– The Business Athlete Playbook

– 30-Day Action Plan

– Weekly Performance Template

– The Stat Line: a personal, team, and company weekly scorecard

– Film Session: a structured self-review framework

– Championship Calendar for tracking weekly wins and continuous improvement

Every participant will receive merch, gear, and books as a part of the experience. This establishes the business athlete identity and commits everyone to 52 weeks of action.

Video:

Bio:

PAUL EPSTEIN is a former NFL, NBA, and Super Bowl chief sales officer, now two-time bestselling author and award-winning speaker named one of SUCCESS magazine’s top thought leaders that get results—alongside Tony Robbins, Brené Brown, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Mel Robbins—and his work has been featured on ESPN, NBC, Fox Business, and in USA Today.

Paul’s 15-year career in professional sports shaped him into a business athlete. He built a track record as a “fixer” for revenue growth and team performance, helping transform numerous NBA teams from the bottom of the league in sales to the top two, shattered every premium revenue metric in Super Bowl history while in the league office, opened a billion-dollar stadium, and founded the San Francisco 49ers Leadership University.

Today, Paul is the Founder & CEO of WIN MONDAY®, a habit-building company that scales high-performance, momentum, and growth for business athletes and championship cultures. The official WIN MONDAY® playbook, proven across 50+ industries, releases January 2027.

Offstage, he is a proud father of PJ and Lucca, married his best friend on the field at Levi’s Stadium, and has a slight obsession with bacon. Just don’t make it too crispy.