Built to Scale

Aaron Trahan is passionate about helping leaders think and perform differently. This is why he established Performance Mindset – a firm geared to providing a proprietary business operating system combined with stakeholder-centered executive coaching for outcome-driven, feedback-powered, guaranteed leadership growth. We find out more from Aaron as he celebrates a win in the CV – Corporate Excellence Awards 2025.

Did you know that a staggering 67% of companies featured on the Inc. 5000 list FAIL within 5-8 years?

Performance Mindset helps businesses scale smarter, with systems designed to optimise sustainable revenue growth and profitability, with a methodology that revolves around a modern management operating system tailored for CEOs, founders, and business leaders. 

Born from real-world experience and lessons learned from scaling a billion-dollar organisation, the specially designed management operating system delivers a customised coaching experience that elevates organisational effectiveness and helps businesses adopt a system-driven approach to generating sustainable results by increasing effectiveness in six key areas: Leadership Excellence; Prioritisation; Communication; Organisational Focus; Accountability; and Execution.

“The mission of Performance Mindset is to help leaders and businesses get better at getting better!” states Aaron Trahan, Founder of the firm. “We aim to guide businesses in connecting vision to strategy, and strategy into execution, through a proven operating system that guarantees results.”

Aaron himself is a Performance Coach to Executives and Businesses, guiding organisations with an outcome-driven, feedback-powered approach that delivers measurable results.

With two decades of executive leadership experience, Aaron has scaled businesses across both corporate and startup environments. By age 30, he was leading a billion-dollar, publicly traded organisation, giving him firsthand insight into the challenges leaders face as their businesses grow.

During this period, a single sheet of paper changed the trajectory of his career: a 360-degree feedback assessment. It highlighted the behaviours holding him back, delivering the transparent insights required to grow as a next-level leader.

That moment sparked an obsession with high-performance leadership and the systems that drive real, sustainable change. Today, Aaron leverages Stakeholder-Centered Coaching, the same methodology used in a third of Fortune 500 companies and has proven to generate guaranteed, measurable leadership growth.

Aaron’s approach to helping leaders and businesses get better at getting better, blends the hard-earned lessons of a seasoned operator with the mindset of a performance coach. The outcome: greater focus and prioritisation, stronger leadership effectiveness, and the ability to execute at a higher level.

“The business environment today is too dynamic for a one-size-fits-all solution,” Aaron continues, “In an always-evolving world, you need a system that adapts to you. Most frameworks try to force businesses into a rigid mould. Ours does the opposite: it adapts to you. This isn’t a cookie-cutter playbook. It’s a hands-on, customised partnership. I work inside your business as a true strategic co-pilot – not a passive facilitator.”

Over the last 12 months, Aaron’s biggest challenge has been the same challenge he helps leaders solve: multiplying value without multiplying effort.

As Performance Mindset has continued to grow, the demand, the opportunities, the number of clients, the complexity… all of it has increased for Aaron and, quite simply, he refuses to become the bottleneck!

“I coach founders, CEOs and executive teams every day on finding operating leverage inside their business, so I hold myself to the same standard,” he adds.

By continually innovating how he delivers value Aaron’s goal and challenge is one in the same, not to simply do more – to do less, but at a world-class level.

One recent project which he is incredibly proud of involves a health and wellness company led by a CEO with a medical background rather than a business background.

Aaron explains that, as his client’s company grew, he became more and more overwhelmed. He was working harder than ever – 60+ hours a week – yet profitability wasn’t improving and he was genuinely questioning if he wanted to keep going.

Fast forward two years and, step-by-step, Performance Mindset built the operating system around him that allowed the business to scale without consuming him.

“We made processes repeatable,” enthuses Aaron. “We simplified how performance was tracked and measured. We brought clarity to what success looks like – so his team could show up like owners, not just employees.”

The result? The business is now growing faster than it ever has and he’s projecting 4x profitability in 2025 vs. 2024. He’s even acquired another business to bolt on and he’s now working 40-45 hours a week with his weekends being his again.

“And my favourite part? He’s having fun again!” Aaron adds. “That’s the power of operating leverage and that’s what happens when a leader shifts from being buried in the business… to actually leading the business.”

Here is what the client himself had to say about Aaron and Performance Mindset: “Aaron’s way of coaching is like nothing I’ve had before. I thoroughly enjoy the experience from the way he’s able to simplify the process of prioritisation and help me implement clear programs that result in my exceeding what I originally set out to achieve. Since I began working with Aaron, I’ve been able to consistently challenge myself to get more uncomfortable, take on strategic risks, and have been able to push myself to new levels. This is exactly what I needed to elevate my mindset to go beyond what I initially planned to achieve.”

Aaron places a large emphasis on an organisation’s culture, believing it to be a critical, yet invisible, gravitational force that exists inside every business, quietly shaping how it thinks, acts and performs.

“What I’ve seen through my experiences, is that when that force is strong, it pulls teams together to achieve remarkable results,” he tells us. “When it’s weak, even the best strategies can still make teams feel like they are pushing uphill against a headwind.”

For his dedication and commitment, Aaron recently gained notable recognition as he celebrated a win in the CV – Corporate Excellence Awards 2025 and was named Most Influential Business Coach 2025 – Texas by Corporate Vision magazine.

Aaron has ambitious plans for innovation over the next five years. These include integrating modernised business systems that make growth and scaling simple. He intends to action this by embedding the right operating systems directly into a business that systematically simplifies how to: prioritise what truly matters; communicate clearly; focus on fewer, more meaningful objectives; execute at scale; and stay accountable to outcomes.

Furthermore, he intends to help leaders get better at getting better through stakeholder-centered coaching.

“The coaching industry is full of bold promises,” says Aaron. “But real innovation, in my opinion, isn’t about clever content or catchy frameworks, it’s about guaranteeing behaviour change. Stakeholder-centered coaching does that because it brings a leader’s ecosystem into the process.

“Having feedback loops is a performance-enhancer for leaders at every level. Something interesting happens when leaders start seeing success… they choose to listen more to what they WANT to hear, and less to what they NEED to hear. That’s why high-quality feedback loops aren’t just nice to have, but a critical necessity to improving leadership effectiveness.

“Feedback exposes blind spots; feedback sharpens focus on where to improve; feedback accelerates growth. The best leaders are always improving. And continuous improvement is impossible without feedback. The greatest innovation I can bring to any organisation is creating a culture where people are invested – not just in their own improvement, but in each other’s.”

Now, he has one piece of advice that he wishes to share with others:

“Become obsessed with problems you solve, not with your product. Too many people in this industry fall in love with pitching their background and their methodology – they forget the most important truth: your job is not to sell the product or service… it’s to sell the result someone deeply wants.

“You win by solving the problem that matters most to your ideal customer in a way that’s easier, faster, clearer, or more effective than any other alternative.”

Company: Performance Mindset
Web Address: https://performancemindsetcoaching.co