OUR STORY
Root Astro was founded on a single observation: the people responsible for leading companies, families, and communities have lost access to the stillness required for clear thinking. We build the conditions for them to find it again.
KEYSTONES
The vocabulary matters. These are not interchangeable phrases for the same idea. Each names a different thing, and the work depends on keeping them distinct.
The instrument. Six fixed dimensions used to read where a leader actually is, against terrain that does not flatter. Method, not metaphor.
What the instrument measures. Presence, Connection, Capability, Clarity, Resilience, Reverence. Each is a real reading. None is a slogan.
The work itself. Not motivation, not optimization. The return of a person to themselves, by way of stillness and strength applied in the right order.
OUR STORY
Lee Arthur saw what was being lost — leaders doing the hardest work, depleted by the machine that was supposed to serve them. Marsha Prospere had been watching the same depletion from inside her coaching practice, wanting a place where those leaders could rest the strategic kind of rest. Both had been circling the same ground from different directions, for years.
Root Astro began with Lee Arthur's sense that something essential was being lost. The leaders doing the hardest work were losing themselves to the machine that was supposed to serve them. So were most of the rest of us. Lee wanted to build a place that brought people back to their humanity. Back to their bodies. Back to their own minds. Back to one another.
That vision found its partner in Marsha Prospere, whose own work had been circling the same ground from a different direction.
Marsha had been watching the same depletion from inside her coaching practice, Adept Flow. For years she has sat with founders, executives, and mission-driven leaders at the exact moment their excellence began to cost them too much. She had been wanting, for a long time, to build a place where those leaders could rest. The strategic kind of rest. The kind that returns a person to their own thinking, their own energy, their own clarity. She and Lee had a practice developed over years: long conversations about what something like this might look like, often at the beach, often at fires that burned their course with no predetermined end. Those fire conversations were the door she walked through to join him in the work.
Lee brings the strength. The philosophy of ordeal, challenge, and the earned confidence that comes from doing hard things. This is his terrain, captured in his book Hard and from the years of living and thinking it took to write it. He knows, because he has lived it, that leaders do not need to be pampered. They need to be challenged.
Marsha brings the stillness. Years of coaching have taught her that most of what leaders cannot figure out is waiting for them under the noise, and that it will not come up unless the noise goes quiet. She brings attention to the interior life. The intellect to know what to listen for. The capacity to hold space for what has not yet been said. A trust in silence that most agendas will not allow. She knows, because she has practiced it, that rest is not a luxury. Rest is strategic. It is an energy management tool. It returns a leader to their own mind.
Neither of them holds only one of those. Lee knows how to be still. Marsha knows how to bring the strength. The partnership works because both of them move between the two registers, and because both of them recognize that strength without stillness hardens and stillness without strength softens. What Root Astro offers, in every experience, is both.
For the guests who come, this means something specific. They are held by two people who actually practice what they are asking for. They are led into challenge and into quiet, and neither one is offered as a substitute for the other. The fire they sit around is real. The work they do with their hands is real. The rest they take is real. So is the return.
For Root Astro as a company, the partnership is the operating system. Both founders are coachable. Both communicate. Both tend the relationship that holds the business. Both ebb and flow with each other as the work demands, a practice that is rarer than it should be and that keeps the company honest. Neither of them built this alone. Neither would have built it the same way without the other.
The instrument must be true. So must the people holding it.
MEET THE FOUNDERS
STILLNESS
I've spent years in the room with executives and founders, working on their inner world of leadership. Root Astro is where that work gets to breathe outside. I co-founded it with Lee because the leaders I love most are running on empty, and I have something I want to give them.
Co-founder · Executive Coach (ICF PCC)
My other home is Adept Flow, the executive coaching and leadership development practice I founded. My work there is with founders scaling faster than they can integrate, executives inheriting cultures they didn't build, and leaders who sense in their bodies that something needs to shift long before they can name it. The short version: I've spent years in the room with executives and founders, working on their inner world of leadership.
Root Astro is where that work gets to breathe outside.
I co-founded Root Astro with Lee Arthur because the leaders I love most are running on empty, and I have something I want to give them. A place to sit around a fire that has no predetermined end. Meaningful conversations that encourage deep thought. The awe of nature, settling in. A few days when nothing buzzes in their pocket, and the body finally catches up to the mind.
Between us, Lee and I hold stillness and strength. The inward listening and the outward challenge. The reverence and the rigor. Neither of us carries only one.
A few things worth knowing.
I walk, most days. Through the woods when I can, around the city when I can't. It's where I let my mind drift into awe and full thoughts. It's where I do some of my best being.
Alongside building Root Astro, I am writing a novel. Like the leaders I work with, I am motivated and ambitious and in the ongoing practice of reaching without losing myself in the reach. Root Astro is, among other things, the infrastructure for that.
I climbed Kilimanjaro years ago and I have not forgotten what summits feel like. I've already asked Lee to join me on the next one. He finished the Moab 240 last October, a 240-mile run through the desert, and he still said yes. That tells you something about both of us.
And I am ridiculous. Mischievous, in the best possible way. If you sit around a fire with me long enough, you'll see it.
If titles help ground the work: I hold the PCC credential from ICF. I am also a Certified Mentor Coach and a Certified Trauma-Informed Leader. I serve as lead facilitator for Rutgers University's OneRED High-Impact Leadership Program, as an instructor for Group Coaching HQ, and as a leadership educator for Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses. These roles let me contribute to leadership at scale, which is part of what I love about building Root Astro too.
I carry my first family with me everywhere I go, especially the elders who have passed on: my great grandmother, my grandmothers, my dad. Everything I build is a continuation of what they already paid forward for me. Root Astro is no exception.
STRENGTH
My other home is Blenheim Chalcot, where I help leadership teams take on hard challenges and win. Root Astro is where that work gets to go quiet. I co-founded it with Marsha because the operators I respect most are running on a kind of depletion they've stopped noticing, and the standard remedies don't touch it.
Co-founder · Four-time CEO · Author, Hard
My other home is Blenheim Chalcot, where I help leadership teams take on hard difficult challenges and win. The work there is building and scaling ventures — supporting our CEOs and operators trying to move faster than the market will let them.
Root Astro is where that work gets to go quiet.
I co-founded Root Astro with Marsha Prospere because the operators and executives I respect most are running on a kind of depletion they've stopped noticing, and the standard remedies — a long weekend, a meditation app, a vacation where the laptop still opens — don't touch it. What touches it is a grounding, a fire with no predetermined end. A few days when the phone stops being the center of gravity. Conversations that don't turn into action items. The forest, doing what forests do.
Between us, Marsha and I hold stillness and strength. The inward listening and the outward challenge. The reverence and the rigor. Neither of us carries only one.
A few things worth knowing.
I write, most mornings. It's where I think things through before the day starts making claims on me. My book, Hard: Building Your Inner Citadel, was written in those early hours. It's about structured hardship as a recalibration tool — what gets rebuilt in a person when the easy paths are removed. Root Astro is, in part, the physical expression of that thesis.
Alongside Root Astro and the book, I write a Substack called The Ten Year Startup Journey, and I support start-ups and scale-ups and charities on various boards. I developed the RARA Framework (Relationship × Relevance Alignment) as my own operating model for how go-to-market actually works when you stop pretending it's a funnel.
In October 2025, I finished the Moab 240 Ultra. 240 miles footrace through the Utah desert, roughly four days of continuous running and a lot of night. I have not forgotten what that kind of distance does to a person. Marsha has already told me we're climbing mountains next.
I should also say: building Root Astro has been the most fun I've had being spectacularly out of my depth. Most of my career has been spent in rooms where I knew roughly what I was doing. On 7.1 acres of upstate woodland, I am Mr. Bean in the wild. I have learned, often the hard way, about septic setbacks, planning boards, yurt platforms, and the specific way a sharp knife reminds you of your mortality. The competence gap is part of the gift. It's been a long time since I was this much of a beginner, and I'd forgotten how good it is for a person.
If titles help ground the work: I am a four-time CEO, GM of Blenheim Chalcot North America, and author. I serve on multiple boards in education, media, and charitable organisations. Those roles let me contribute to how companies get built and how leaders get developed at scale, which is part of what I love about Root Astro too — it is the same work, just with the walls taken down.
I carry the lessons from my mother, many books mined for their golden insights, and dear friends and colleagues. Everything I build is a continuation of what they already paid forward. Root Astro is no exception.
THE LAND
Root Astro sits on seven acres bordering the Neversink Preserve in the Hudson Valley. The property was chosen for a specific reason: it is close enough to New York City that busy leaders can arrive without losing a full day to travel, yet remote enough that the noise of their default life falls away within minutes of arrival.
41.4739° N 74.5401° W
ELV 840 FT POLARIS ALT 41°
41.4739° N 74.5401° W ELV 840 FT POLARIS ALT 41°
THE ROOT ASTROLABE METHOD
The astrolabe was humanity's first precision instrument for finding position by the stars, used by navigators for centuries.
Sailors did not get a position by feeling. They read instruments against the sky. Leaders are no different. The Root Astrolabe Method is what sailors had, turned inward: a precision tool for reading where a leader actually is. It works against six fixed dimensions, and it does not flatter.
Every retreat, every exercise, every conversation at Root Astro is structured around the Root Astrolabe Method: the six dimensions of human transformation.
PHILOSOPHY
We believe that human beings are not optimized machines. They are complex, meaning-seeking organisms that require nature, silence, physical challenge, and genuine connection to function at their highest capacity. Every Root Astro experience is built on this conviction.
Begin with a conversation. No pitch, no pressure. Just an honest exploration of whether Root Astro is right for where you are.
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