The Founders
Drew Knowles and Dr Simon McKenzie-Nickson came to the same conclusion from opposite directions.
Drew arrived through nearly three decades of working directly with founders, executives and leaders, watching capable, intelligent people repeatedly undermined not by a lack of skill or strategy, but by patterns they couldn't see in themselves. Simon arrived through neuropharmacology, stress physiology, and the science of how the human organism actually functions under pressure. What they found, when they compared notes, was not two different bodies of work. It was one.
Sapient is built on that convergence. Drew brings the behavioural and relational depth: the practitioner's understanding of how humans operate in the real conditions of leadership, pressure and change. Simon brings the biological and neurological systems intelligence: the science of what is actually happening in the body and brain before behaviour ever appears. Together they produce something neither delivers alone, an integrated approach to human development that begins where most programmes end, with the organism itself.
Drew Knowles
Drew has spent nearly thirty years in the field of human performance and behaviour, not as a theorist, but as a practitioner.
He has coached, consulted and advised thousands of founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, the UK, Europe, the UAE and the United States. The question that has driven all of it is deceptively simple: why do capable people consistently get in their own way?
Always fascinated by human behaviour, Drew began his career at 19, running a personal training business while studying exercise physiology. Over five years working across New Zealand, London and Melbourne, he saw how mindset and mental performance often prevented people from sustaining healthy habits.
He then joined a global personal-development company, coaching individuals and leading programmes - often for 80–90 hours a week. The burnout that followed when he left this company sparked his specialisation in, and enduring fascination with, the effects of stress on performance.
Drew went on to establish a mind-coaching consultancy, advising CEOs and executives from some of New Zealand's largest companies on chronic stress and mental performance. He later became Vice President and partner at Influential U, where he helped expand the company across ten countries.
In 2023, Drew exited Influential U and moved to Queenstown, returning to what he does best: serving as a personal advisor and behavioural consultant to influential leaders, founders and changemakers - and their businesses.
Drew has also been designing and delivering immersive retreats and programmes. It is in that format, removed from the noise, in the kind of environment the body responds to before the mind catches up, that his work tends to go deepest. Sapient is the next chapter of that work: a methodology built from the ground up to develop the human capacity for accurate self-perception, and the ability to act from it.
Dr Simon McKenzie-Nickson
Simon doesn't offer motivation. As a performance architect, he rebuilds the infrastructure that makes sustained performance possible in the first place using biology and physiology as the force multiplier.
A neuropharmacologist with a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Simon's foundation is the science of how the human system actually works: stress physiology, neurological function, cognitive performance, and the biological conditions that either enable or undermine them. After completing his doctorate he held a post-doctoral research position at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, focusing on therapeutic solutions for cognitive disorders. That work gave him an unusually precise understanding of what the brain requires to function well, and what erodes it over time.
Simon has since built an equally rigorous career in data science and analytics, most recently leading AI and data work as a director at McGrathNicol. The combination is rare: the biological systems knowledge of a research scientist, and the analytical precision of someone who works at the intersection of complex data and real-world decision-making. At Sapient, Simon brings that precision to bear on the performance challenges that matter most, helping leaders understand not just what they're experiencing, but why, at the level of the organism. That understanding, grounded in evidence and translated into practice, is what makes the change durable.
