Plenty of leaders who are mid-career or looking for change know exactly what’s wrong. They’ve read the books, done the podcasts, picked up a useful line or two from a seminar.
What they haven’t done is turn any of it into a habit that survives a bad week. That gap, between knowing and doing, is where 2b Limitless has built its business.
“Your world needs you at your best” is the company’s global tagline, and the two men running its Australia and New Zealand arm believe it because generic self-improvement never quite worked for them either.
Awareness is the easy part
Tony Martin leads 2b Limitless across New Zealand and Australia alongside Neil Wagstaff, owner of Peak Fitness and Health in Hawke’s Bay.
“Some people get that awareness by reading a book or listening to a podcast,” Tony says. “But how do you bring that intentionality into how you actually operate? That’s what people find hard to do on their own.”
Neil sees it from a different angle: not too little information, far too much.
“We’re totally surrounded by information. We’re all exceptionally good at consuming it now,” he says. “But that volume is just creating more confusion. A big part of what we do is helping people work out what’s relevant to them.”
That’s the main takeaway for anyone on the fence: it’s not just another framework to read about, but a coach and a tight-knit peer group who make sure it sticks.
What you actually get
Clients move through four stages, awareness, intentionality, integration and mastery, using tools most people never encounter outside a corporate leadership programme.
CliftonStrengths maps what a person is naturally good at. PH360 looks at epigenetics, the lifestyle choices that switch genes on and off. Positive Intelligence trains mental fitness, spotting and quieting the internal saboteurs that talk people out of good decisions.
“You’ve got to be hyper personalised,” says Tony.
“Dale Carnegie does a public speaking course, but do it in San Francisco or Dubai, it’s the same course. We don’t want a thousand Tony Robbins out there. We want the best version of you as the leader.”
There are four ways to partner with 2b Limitless. Next Level Velocity is a 12-week discovery experience for ambitious owners and senior leaders wanting to understand themselves alongside a small, like-minded cohort. Next Level Mastery is the flagship 12-month journey, supporting lasting transformation through deeper learning, coaching and accountability. One-to-one executive coaching offers individualised support, and for organisations, they partner with leadership teams to build high-performing cultures and the capability needed to thrive in a changing world.
Some clients have stayed for more than 10 years, moving between formats as their needs change. The typical client is aged 40 to mid-50s, roughly 60/40 male to female in New Zealand, and usually someone who’s already had a successful first act.
“There’s a recognition that they’ve plateaued, or the skills they were using before aren’t relevant, or they’re not getting the results they were looking for,” Tony says.
A turning point
Tony points to one client as proof of what the work can do. A strengths profile showed clear entrepreneurial talent, but the man had spent his career working for other people and felt permanently boxed in.
“He never was really able to get out and spread his wings,” Tony says. Through the programme, Tony helped him find clarity on his next move, then the confidence to leave and build his own business.
“He could have got there on his own,” Tony says, “but I think we got him there a lot faster, with a set of tools that propelled him quickly into being successful.”
A more rounded person
Most self-improvement picks a lane, hard on training and diet while mindset slides, or vice versa. 2b Limitless treats that as a false choice; the gains show up in the combination.
Tony and Neil don’t split the two either, building something physical, something nutritional and something mental into every day.
“The epigenetics really looks at the environment we live, work and play in,” Neil says. “It’s about how we set that up to maximise our gene expression, including something as simple as timing. When someone exercises, does their deep work, or spends time with family all shapes how they show up as a leader.”
The other surprise for most clients is time itself. People arrive convinced they’re too busy for any of this.
“As you go down the path of personal development, you realise you’ve got more time than you think,” Neil says. Learning to turn the noise down opens windows in the day that were there all along.
Two men who live it
Tony and Neil both came out of corporate careers before stepping into coaching, and both still run other businesses.
Tony is chief executive of Prevar, an intellectual property company in the global horticulture industry, based in Havelock North.
“Prevar is what I do,” he says. “2b Limitless is much more about who I am.”
Neil bought Peak Fitness and Health in Havelock North 11 years ago after leaving a large corporate wellness business, and remembers the moment the support structure disappeared.
“I realised there wasn’t anyone there to phone any more,” he says. He found his own coach, still works with him today, and credits that relationship with the clarity he now brings to running his own business.
Tony’s own ritual is “five by eight”: five habits completed before eight each morning, including meditation, exercise and journaling. “If you can’t create 10 minutes to meditate every day, you probably need two hours,” he says.
He credits the discipline with three shifts in himself: clarity, calmness and confidence. “There’s a self-belief that comes from that, because you’ve done the work.”
Where 2b Limitless started
The story begins with Mick Todd, the Australian-born coach who founded 2b Limitless two decades ago, joined by business partner Peter Turner about 12 years later.
Tony met Mick in Dubai after a rough start in a bigger role, one of seven coaches he interviewed and the only one who stuck. “He transformed the way I think about my life,” Tony says. “I was inspired to think, if he could do that for me, I’d like to do that for other people.”
When Tony moved home to New Zealand at the end of 2020, Mick invited him to set up the Australia and New Zealand arm. Neil, whose 25 years in health and fitness coaching already overlapped heavily with the work, came on board soon after.
“There’s a lot of crossover between the health and wellbeing space and the leadership and executive space,” Neil says.
Scaling beyond the founders
The business is shifting from a model built largely on Mick’s reputation towards something more systemised, training new coaches rather than relying solely on founders.
There are three coaches in Australia plus Mick, and in New Zealand, Tony, Neil, Peter Ghanem (director of partner and client relationships), Hannah Poole (head of marketing and communications) and two new associates joining this year.
The plan is to place coaches in the main centres on both sides of the Tasman, backed by online delivery that makes location less of a constraint than it once was.
Larger businesses are putting team members through the programme, including New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, Tony’s former employer, alongside corporate clients in the Middle East and Asia.
“There’s so much talent in leadership that’s never really been given the opportunity to shine, or to lead in their own authentic way,” Tony says. “That’s the shift we want to see.”
Where to start
For anyone curious, 2b Limitless runs monthly 90-minute online workshops. The Unleash Your Strengths session gives a taste of the strengths-based approach, before people continue in one-on-one coaching, a group programme, or by bringing the tools into their own team.
For Neil, the reason for doing this work hasn’t changed since day one: watching someone stop performing a version of themselves and start leading as who they actually are.
“People don’t quite realise they’re not being themselves,” he says. “Giving themselves that permission is a big, big change.”
Their world, finally, getting them at their best.
