How Will Travis And Elevation Barn Are Helping Leaders Find Clarity Of Purpose
There's a particular kind of loneliness that visits high achievers after they've reached every milestone they set for themselves. Will Travis knows it intimately. For years he chased it down by other means — running some of the most storied creative agencies on the planet, like ATTIK, Dentsu and SidLee, where he crafted creative teams for Apple, Nike, Toyota, Facebook, Coca-Cola, Netflix, Absolut, NorthFace, and many more. When that wasn't enough, he chased it physically: the seven summits, Antarctica, the Dakar Rally, one extreme experience after another in search of a feeling that never quite landed.
"I was going to TED, to Davos," he recalls. "Every single time, I would leave going, how awesome are all those people and all those accomplishments. But what about me? And where am I going?" That question — quiet, persistent, unanswerable by another summit or another stage — became the seed of Elevation Barn: a global network of accomplished leaders across every field, committed to living, leading, and contributing with greater clarity, purpose, and wellbeing.
Founded in 2018 by Travis, a former global CEO and brand strategist, Elevation Barn was built to solve one of modern leadership's greatest challenges: creating the space to think clearly and propel solutions with peers before making life's most important decisions. Eight years ago, Travis confronted the question every founder eventually has to ask: should he do it or not? He did. The result is a platform that has quietly become one of the most trusted spaces in the world for leaders, couples, family offices, and executive teams to find what Travis calls "clarity of purpose."
The Barn Raiser
Travis (married to wife Zhanna and father to four children) is careful never to be called a guru. He's something closer to a master barn-raiser: someone who learned, through early loss and a career built on winning love through creative excellence, that the things that actually take leaders out aren't the things they're focused on. "The bit that usually takes you out as a leader is the bit that you're not thinking about," he says — the marriage, the health, the home, the sense of belonging, quietly fraying while the business slide deck gets all the attention.
That insight traces back to a conversation with a healer in Bali, who told him there are eight reasons people come seeking guidance: mental, spiritual, physical, relationship, career, finance, home, and purpose. Travis built an entire philosophy of leadership around those eight dimensions, and built Elevation Barn as the infrastructure to address all of them at once, rather than the single dimension a person assumes needs fixing. The company has scaled over time, with Travis bringing in partners Emma Ross and Sian Jones to expand the company, now led out of NY, UK and Singapore.
The Eight, In Extraordinary Places
Membership begins deliberately small: an intimate four-day residential experience where just eight carefully selected leaders gather to step away from the noise, redefine what matters, and design their next chapter. Individuals, friend groups, family offices, or leadership teams choose from a roster of locations — Millbrook, New York; Ojai, California; Yorkshire, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Sydney, Australia; or Bali, Indonesia — each a luxurious, deep-nature environment where perspective expands and the conversations that actually matter have room to surface.
Three Pillars, One Quest
Every Elevation Barn experience — whether the initial four-day residency or a shorter "journey" further afield — rests on three pillars: a process rooted in the ancient power of story and self-ownership, a location chosen because the environment itself does some of the teaching, and a guide who has nothing to prove. "I wanted to ensure it was truly heartfelt, battle-tested and truly authentic," Travis says of the model. His guides aren't gurus performing wisdom; he calls them "modern elders" — people who've already climbed the mountain and now want to help others find their own route up it.
The ritual is simple and disarming: leave your title at the door, the way you'd leave your shoes. CEO, astronaut, physicist — it doesn't matter. "I'm here to help the person be holistic," Travis says. Within an hour, he's watched the egos drop and the shoulders drop with them.
What stands out most is Travis's rejection of the solitary hero's journey that so much of leadership culture still worships. "Life has to be about this kindred quest," he says. "How can we all feel that we're part of it, because we all have different superpowers." It's a subtle but important reframe — purpose isn't a summit reached alone, it's a story built with the people who pass the baton alongside you.
That philosophy doesn’t end after four days. Members join a trusted international community that reconnects throughout the year — online, and in person through 'Journeys of Exploration', retreats, and private gatherings in destinations as far-flung as Bhutan, Botswana, Mongolia, Scotland, Montana, and Bali. They explore some of the world's most remarkable places while working through the personal, professional, and philanthropic challenges that define modern leadership.
From Personal Clarity To Organizational Strategy
For organizations facing complex strategic challenges, members and external clients can also collaborate through STABLE, Elevation Barn's global consultancy. Drawing on an exceptional cross-disciplinary network, STABLE has supported organizations including BlackRock, FIFA, GoJek, Hughes, and Mission Blue, assembling experienced operators who deliver swift, wise, and globally informed solutions. It's the same filtration system Travis built for individuals, applied at the scale of an institution: strip away the noise, gather the right minds, and move from clarity to action quickly.
What Transformation Actually Looks Like
Two stories illustrate the model best. The first involves an exhausted executive, twenty pounds overweight, commuting hours each way, drifting from his wife and team. Through the Elevation Barn process, he made one decision — stop commuting two days a week — and watched it cascade: more time with his kids, weight loss that came from presence rather than discipline, a repaired marriage, a cross-country move to Los Angeles that let his wife finally build the business she'd been quietly capable of all along. One decision, made from clarity rather than panic, rippled into an entirely different life.
The second involves a woman who had inherited her father's company and was running it competently, dutifully — and miserably. At the Barn, she realized "that's his story, not mine." She told her father she was retiring to start something of her own. He took a day, then agreed to sell. With the proceeds, she built an investment fund for young entrepreneurs, became a judge on Dragon's Den, and started a young women's football team in her home country. Neither transformation began with a five-year plan. Both began with a single honest sentence, spoken out loud in a room where it was safe to say it.
The Ecosystem, Today
Here is Travis's central insight: most leaders are optimizing the one dimension everyone can see, while the dimension that will actually break them goes unattended in the dark. Clarity, in his model, isn't a luxury retreat amenity — it's risk management for a life.
Elevation Barn now approaches 1,000 alumni across 48 countries — entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, creatives, scientists, athletes, conservationists, and family business leaders, united by a belief that success is most meaningful when it’s in service of something greater. Travis has turned down investors eager to scale it into a Tony Robbins-style spectacle, insisting instead that "every single heart and person that we touch is a delicate jewel." Now he’s building a hospitality product — a permanent home for the philosophy — because, as he puts it, the goal was never about him. "How do we create a platform that, like Carnegie Hall, makes everybody who performs there feel awesome and inspired, no matter who they are?" . Elevation Barn are also moving to a new chapter with permanent homes called ‘Barns’ with two properties already and welcoming investing partners to expand further afield.
More than a network, Elevation Barn has become an ecosystem of trusted relationships, where diversity of thought sharpens perspective, extraordinary experiences deepen connection, and clarity of purpose becomes lasting action. Eight years after asking himself whether to do it, Travis has his answer. The harder question — the one his work keeps putting back on the table — is how many leaders are still waiting for permission to ask it of themselves.
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