People who have done the work inside firms.

Craig Budner

Craig has practiced law for nearly four decades and built and led the global growth platform at K&L Gates, one of the world's largest law firms. As Global Strategic Growth Partner for a decade, he brought recruiting, lateral integration, business development, marketing and media relations into a single system. That system now powers Budner Performance Group.

He served on the Management Committee at K&L Gates and its predecessor firm, Hughes & Luce, for more than twenty-five years, while maintaining a national commercial litigation and arbitration practice for major creditors, financial institutions and technology companies. He was named Lawyer of the Year for Litigation in Banking and Finance and selected for D Magazine's inaugural Best Lawyer Hall of Fame.

Craig has moderated more than one hundred panels with general counsel and senior executives across more than a dozen countries, and hosts The Playbook, a podcast on how leaders across law, business, sport and the arts make decisions under pressure. He holds a J.D. from The University of Texas School of Law, where he was Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.

Will Budner

Will works at the intersection of performance psychology and revenue growth. He earned his MSc in Performance Psychology from the University of Edinburgh, where he studied how elite performers build durable habits, regulate under pressure, and sustain output over long horizons. He has spent the four years since translating that research into the operating reality of high-stakes organizations. The premise of his work, and of Budner Performance Group, is that what separates firms that grow from firms that stall is not strategy or talent, but whether the daily behaviors of senior professionals are built to last.

Will builds the performance infrastructure underneath growth. He has designed and delivered client strategy and development programs for AmLaw 100 firms and other professional services organizations, including multi-year client team initiatives for institutional accounts, development curricula for senior professionals and strategic assessments that align leadership priorities with frontline execution. He works in the unglamorous half of growth: client targeting, account planning, outreach cadences, peer accountability and leadership reinforcement that turn intent into output, all built to be run by the partners themselves.

His work draws on behavioral science, collaboration research and client-feedback data, applied to the specific economics of a law firm rather than to training in the abstract. In addition to his MSc in Performance Psychology from the University of Edinburgh, Will also holds a coaching certificate from the ICF, and is based in Austin, Texas.

Anna Tichborne

Anna has spent more than twenty years building and operating businesses across the United States, Australia and New Zealand, most often as the executive who turns growth strategy into operating reality. She was most recently Chief Operating Officer of PacketFabric, a Network-as-a-Service infrastructure provider, where she led global operations through a period of fast commercial expansion. Before that, as General Counsel at Megaport, a publicly listed connectivity business, she launched commercial operations into twenty-five countries and advised on employment issues across thirteen jurisdictions.

Scaling a business across twenty-five countries is the same work BPG asks of itself when a firm runs a program across offices, practices and partner cohorts. Anna founded AMT Advisors, advising scale-up companies on global operations, governance and cross-border M&A. She is admitted as a lawyer to the Supreme Court of Queensland, the High Court of Australia, and the High Court of New Zealand, and is based in Las Vegas.