THE BUSINESS TRUST
KEYNOTE
Trust is not a culture initiative. It is a high performance, business growth, and retention strategy. And there is no more credible proof of concept on any stage in the world than Matt Formston AM.
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Clients
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SEE MATT IN THE ROOM.
Matt's showreel is updated regularly. For a speaker-specific clip or a recording from a recent engagement, contact the team directly.
TRUST IS THE MOST VALUABLE ASSET IN YOUR MARKET. AND IT IS IN FREEFALL.
of people globally are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values or information sources.
Traditional anchors of shared reality — government, media, religion — are no longer holding. People are retreating into smaller circles of trust. They are bringing that retreat to work.
of consumers say they would trust an organisation less if it used generative AI.
AI is arriving faster than human trust can adapt. The organisations deploying it without a trust foundation are accelerating their own credibility problem.
faster revenue growth in high-trust organisations versus their competitors.
Business is the only institution globally still seen as both ethical and competent. The organisations that build trust intentionally right now will inherit the market that low-trust organisations are vacating.
TRUST IS NOT FELT INTO EXISTENCE. IT IS BUILT.
Sources: 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer · 2026 Thales Digital Trust Index · Deloitte TrustID 2025
From the moment Matt took the stage, our sales leaders from across APAC were completely immersed. Matt didn't just share his journey — the message was tailored in a way that deeply resonated with our people, weaving in themes of resilience, adaptability, and high performance that directly aligned with our business goals. Many described it as one of the most powerful and inspiring sessions they've ever attended.
2014. THREE WORLDS. ONE YEAR. BLIND.
In 2014 Matt set a World Record in track cycling and became a World Champion in Aguascalientes, Mexico. In the same year he exceeded his Optus enterprise sales target by 140%, managing complex, multi-million dollar strategic accounts, and won a national Pacesetter Award. That same year his first child was born. Not one then the other. All of it. Simultaneously. Blind.
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Nothing crashed. Nothing burned. Not the sport. Not the career. Not the marriage. Not the family. More than a decade later Matt has three children, a strong marriage, and is still competing at world championship level. This is not a story about sacrifice. It is a story about what becomes possible when trust runs through everything you do — trust in yourself, trust in your team, and trust in the standards you refuse to negotiate away. The framework Matt teaches is not borrowed from a textbook. It was built in the daily reality of running two elite careers and a family in parallel, blind, for 15 years.
MATT”S BUSINESS TRUST FORMULA
TRUST
=
STANDARDS
×
CONSISTENCY
×
TIME
The multiplication is deliberate. If any variable drops to zero, the result is zero. You cannot shortcut trust. You cannot announce your way to it. You cannot buy it with a discount or a culture day. You have to do the work — and this framework shows exactly what that work looks like.
MATT GETS EVERY ROOM ON ITS FEET.
Every engagement includes physical exercises designed to make the framework visceral rather than theoretical. Audiences experience the real difference between strong and broken teamwork, effective and ineffective communication, and genuine leadership versus management — not as concepts but as felt reality, in the room, in real time. These are the moments every audience member names when they're asked what they remember six months later.
Matt and his freediving coach Dan. Sixty feet underwater. Navigating through a World War II shipwreck on a single breath. The hull has a hole blown through it — jagged metal edges on every side. Matt is blind. He is holding one end of his white cane. Dan is holding the other end, ahead of him in the darkness, guiding him through. What keeps them alive is not courage. It is not adrenaline. It is standards — established on the surface, rehearsed before the dive, held without exception in the water. That is not a metaphor for trust. That is trust. And it is the last image every audience carries out of the room.
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The organisations that build trust the way Matt built it — deliberately, systematically, across every level of the business — earn the right to charge higher margins because their clients believe in them. They retain their best people longer because their teams believe in the standards being held around them. They close bigger deals because their sales organisations operate from a foundation of credibility that competitors can't replicate overnight. They take market share because when trust runs through everything — from the leadership team to the frontline to the customer relationship — performance compounds in ways that strategy alone never produces. That is what this keynote puts in the room. Not inspiration. A system.
FROM THE ROOM TO MONDAY MORNING.
- Leadership and sales capability
An understanding of why trust is the single most important capability a leader or sales professional can develop — and why it outperforms every other leadership initiative an organisation can invest in. - Practical framework
A practical framework for building trust deliberately — across teams, clients, and leadership — that is measurable, repeatable, and immediately applicable without consultants or off-sites. - Commercial differentiator
Clarity on why trust is the commercial differentiator that cuts through market noise, price competition, and change fatigue in ways that strategy and culture programmes rarely achieve alone. - The specific levers with data
The specific levers — standards, consistency, and time — that separate high-trust organisations growing revenue 2.5 times faster than their competitors from those that assume trust exists. - Shared language across the organisation
A shared language across every level of the organisation — from the boardroom to the sales floor, from product development to marketing to the frontline — that makes trust a system rather than a value on a wall.
ORGANISATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN IN THE ROOM.
Matt tailored his message in a way that deeply resonated with our people, weaving in resilience, adaptability and high performance that directly aligned with our business goals.
Getting large organisations to set aside their own agendas, hold themselves to a common standard and build genuine trust across competing interests takes a particular kind of leadership, and Matt has it in abundance.
Matt's lessons about leadership, perseverance and resilience, and the power of building strong teams, resonated with everyone.
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