Olivier Gil
Senior executive. Mountaineer and alpinist. Altitude coach.
Two demanding worlds — one discipline.
The same discipline — in the boardroom and on the mountain.
For over fifteen years, I have operated at the intersection of two demanding worlds. Professionally, I have spent my career building businesses, leading international teams, and creating new sources of growth — across industries, in complex environments, often at significant scale.
In parallel, the mountains have never stopped. From the first technical ascents to solo efforts and high-altitude expeditions, the same questions keep coming up on both sides: how do you prepare when the stakes are real? How do you perform when conditions change? How do you make the hard call, and live with it?
Higher Ground is where those two things converge — not as a metaphor, but as a genuinely shared discipline. The same rigour that structures a business transformation structures a high-altitude preparation. The same honesty that makes a team decide to turn around makes a leadership team trust each other under pressure.
Building at scale.
My professional career has been built around one consistent thread: finding an opportunity, working out the business model behind it, bringing together the right people and capabilities, and making it work at scale.
I have led sales and commercial businesses, built new revenue models from scratch, managed large-scale transformations, and worked across M&A and post-merger integration — mostly in private equity-backed environments, across multiple industries and international markets.
What I enjoy most is building: the early ambiguity, the architecture of a model, the execution that turns an idea into something real. A mindset that translates directly to the mountains.
Full professional background on LinkedIn →From the Pyrenees to the Himalaya.
The mountains started as a passion and progressively became something more serious — a domain where preparation, judgment and commitment matter as much as they do in any high-stakes professional environment.
The Pyrenees
The beginning — technical terrain, long days, learning to read conditions and manage effort over distance.
The Alps — 4,000m objectives
Moving into technical alpine terrain — mixed routes, glaciated ridges, increasingly committed objectives.
Mont Blanc — solo, one push · 2024
From the valley to the summit and back, alone, in a single effort. A test of preparation as much as fitness.
Karakoram expedition · 2025
A first high-altitude expedition — acclimatisation, logistics, sustained effort at altitude, team dynamics over weeks.
Creation of Higher Ground · 2026
Turning fifteen years of mountains and preparation into a coaching practice, built around the Altitude Readiness System.
Design of The Ridgeline Keynote · 2026
Distilling the leadership lessons from real decisions above 6,000 metres into a keynote for companies and leadership teams.
Ama Dablam · Nepal · 2027
The next objective. 6,812m, Himalaya — a serious technical mountain, and the current live project of Higher Ground.
Follow the preparation →Over the years, the preparation has become almost as interesting as the ascent itself. Training, physiology, nutrition, altitude and mental readiness — these became a genuine area of practice, not just personal habit. That is what Higher Ground is built from.
The coaching practice.
Higher Ground was built to help mountain athletes — and the teams and leaders who share the same mindset — prepare with more clarity, structure and purpose.
I am a UESCA-certified coach, and the Higher Ground methodology is grounded in the reference literature of alpinism — Training for the New Alpinism and Training for the Uphill Athlete by Steve House and Scott Johnston — with pre-acclimatisation protocols developed in partnership with The Altitude Center in London.
The method is currently proven live with Simon Niklaus's no-oxygen ascent of Manaslu (8,163m) — the first step of a 14×8,000m no-oxygen project.
The Higher Ground Method →UESCA-certified
Ultrarunning coaching curriculum — applied to altitude and mountain objectives.
Reference literature
House & Johnston's two foundational works on mountain athlete preparation.
The Altitude Center
Pre-acclimatisation protocols developed in partnership with London's leading altitude specialists.
Barcelona · international
Working with athletes and organisations in English, French and Spanish.
Two ways to work together.
For athletes preparing a serious mountain or altitude objective — from a first 6,000m peak to an 8,000er without supplemental oxygen.
Let's talkThe Ridgeline is a 45-minute keynote for leadership teams, drawn from real decisions above 6,000 metres — and what they teach about performing under pressure.
Enquire about The Ridgeline