"Every athlete or high performer builds a playbook they don't know they're building. The question isn't whether you have it — you do. The question is whether you know how to open it.”
I work with high-performing business teams to open it — and use it — when the moments that matter most arrive.
Meet Phil McCarthy,
Founder of North Star Advisory
PERFORMANCE COACH
ENTREPRENEUR
ADJUNCT PROFESSOR
Phil McCarthy spent his life building a playbook on athletic fields — three national championships in lacrosse, team captain and all-time leading scorer in hockey — before discovering that playbook was good for far more than sport.
For 30 years he has brought the same mental and emotional framework to building businesses, coaching athletes, teaching university students, and advising high performers and leaders inside of businesses under real pressure. That framework is what North Star Advisory delivers.
A seasoned advisor, Phil founded North Star Advisory in 2018, where he empowers top performers and leadership teams to unlock sustainable growth and resilience.
Phil teams with a variety of businesses to improve performance and drive success:
His work with a private equity-sponsored environmental engineering firm led to record-setting EBITDA, free cash generation, and a pivotal refinancing.
As a law firm advisor and board member, he helped redesign the firm’s civil department and leadership matrix, proving his skill in driving strategic change within complex organizations.
He provides Leadership & Executive Coaching for a venture capital firm, helping to implement additional GTM strategies and working one-on-one with leadership to get there quickly. The firm’s 2024 aggregated investments are up over 80% YOY.
He develops and facilitates quarterly offsite meetings for a client’s Business Development & Proposals team, conducting engaging group discussions and insightful breakout sessions.
ABOUT PHIL
In 1992, four weeks before Phil was to graduate with his MBA, he had a brain aneurysm. He left his graduate school on a stretcher. There were no cell phones, no email — the university mailed his finals to the recovery hospital where he was learning to walk again. He finished them by hand, in a hospital bed. He returned to campus only for graduation, walking across the stage on crutches.
What carried him through wasn't willpower conjured from nowhere. It was a playbook built over years on lacrosse and hockey fields — the mental toughness, the resilience, the ability to process a setback and ask 'what's my next play?' — tools his coaches and teammates had helped him build without knowing he would one day need them this way. He didn't find something new in that hospital bed. He reached back into something he had already built.
He spent the next 30 years expanding on it and building that same playbook in other people. Building his business and coaching athletes across Colorado at every level. Teaching them not just how to compete, but how to carry what they built on the field into every arena that followed.
For the past eight years he has done the same work in the classroom at the University of Denver's Daniels School of Business, where he teaches entrepreneurship and received the 2026 Excellence in a Teaching Award — because he teaches like a coach, and knows it creates competitive advantage for his students.
Before coaching, Phil launched his career as an options and futures trader in New York and Singapore. He then built Breakaway Sports from a single store into a national retail and team sales operation across seven locations in four states — with an apparel company, a screen-printing and embroidery business, and a real estate company built around the stores' growth — generating over $100 million in revenue before successful exits across all businesses.
Phil lives in Denver with his wife Sarah and their three children, Amelia, Finn, and Rhys — bringing the same dedication to his family that he brings to every team he leads.
“There’s nothing more exciting than being on a great team and celebrating wins together.
Get the culture right and performance follows.”
— Phil McCarthy
Performance matters.
Phil's approach to coaching is built on one conviction: the mental and emotional architecture and processes that makes great athletes also makes great leaders, great teams, and great organizations. His work is grounded in what he has seen across 30 years of coaching and being an entrepreneur— that the will to recover, the discipline to adapt, and the commitment to the people around you are not soft skills. They are performance infrastructure. North Star Advisory builds that infrastructure inside your business.
As the founder of Northstar Advisory, Phil has condensed 30 years of expertise in coaching and leadership into a playbook of solutions to help you perform better when it matters most.
“His life is his message.”
“Phil McCarthy makes everyone around him better. Every teammate, every colleague, every team and anyone he engages will tell you that Phil is the best.
He inspires as he challenges, somehow making everyone want to run through a wall for him. Especially me. He embodies the athlete’s mindset and his life is his message. He makes us better.”
— Todd Burnham | Founder, Burnham Law
Speaking: Bring the playbook to your team.
Phil speaks to law firms, leadership teams, business schools, and athletic teams & alumni networks on the transferable power of athletic experience. His talk — “You Can Look Back. Just Don't Get Caught Staring”. — gives high performers a new relationship with what they've already built, and a practical framework for using it every day. Available as a keynote (30–45 minutes) or interactive workshop (60–90 minutes), customized for your audience. As a college adjunct professor, I design and deliver curriculum and workshop on a weekly basis.
The Performance Playbook
Every high-performing organization has people who built a playbook — in sport, in early-career pressure, in the moments that tested them most. North Star works with those people to open it, apply it, and build the culture that makes everyone around them better. From one-on-one executive coaching to full team alignment, the work is always the same: close the gap between what your best people are capable of and what they're actually delivering.
Leadership Development
Executive Coaching
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We work with your key people to deliver the priorities of their role, help them stay aligned, and grow their influence.
We help leaders become more effective and clear in setting direction.
We help leaders align better with their key people.
We discuss leadership challenges, difficult situations, and business dynamics where an unbiased opinion and strategic insights help.
The typical engagement in this area is a commitment of 6 months, the minimum amount of time to create change.
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We coach executives one-on-one. This is the fastest way to create change.
We soundboard ideas to help leaders make better decisions and motivate key personnel.
We help leaders drive initiatives by coaching their executive leadership teams.
We discuss leadership challenges, difficult situations, and business dynamics where an unbiased opinion and strategic insights help.
The typical engagement in this area is a commitment of 6 months, the minimum amount of time to create change. Every situation is different so we design our time to meet your needs.
Team Performance & Alignment
Business Assessment & Diagnostics
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We help people perform better quicly.
We help teams through difficult or complicated situations.
We bring people together to improve performance.
We help make business units more profitable.
This is a situation based engagement. You communicate the situation, a winning outcome, the people involved and we work with the team to achieve the desired outcome. We will agree on the plan, the timeframe of the solve and the meeting rhythms to fit the situation.
We have been contracted for these services after an acquisition, when leadership changes, or after a key hire.
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We assess the health of the business to co-create the go-forward plan.
If the business needs immediate attention in any particular area we move quickly with a strategy.
We diagnose individual business units to create more profit and efficiency.
We administer assessments on key people and report key themes and recommendations.
The typical engagement in this area is a commitment of 6 months, the minimum amount of time to create change. Every situation is different so we work work with you to design a program to suit your needs.
Meeting Facilitation & Workshops
Coaching & Mentoring
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We work hands-on in person and remotely with your teams.
We facilitate training sessions.
We facilitate department meetings to drive priorities and align teams.
We work with you to develop the presentation topics to meet your specific team needs.
We facilitate half or full day engagements.
We design and deliver talks at monthly or quarterly business reviews to support alignment.
We design and deliver ongoing leadership training sessions for high potential employees and/or new hires and young professionals.
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For College Student-Athletes, Early Career Professionals, Mid-Career Development, Career Change Coaching
We explore where you are at, what got you here and where you want to go.
We will work through specific situations, challenges or upcoming opportunities.
You will walk away motivated with new perspectives and an actionable plan.
The typical engagement here is 3-6 one hour sessions. Sessions are $200 each. The initial 15 minute assessment session is free.
“Phil McCarthy is an outstanding executive coach and tremendous sounding board that the executive team (myself included) uses on a frequent basis (often weekly).
We openly discuss leadership challenges, difficult situations, and company dynamics where his unbiased opinion and strategic insight is extremely helpful.”
— Bill Deane, Senior Vice President, APTIM | Resilient Solutions
Ready to open the playbook?
Whether you're looking for executive coaching, team performance work, or a speaker who will change how your people think about what they're already carrying — let's talk.
