By invitation · Salt Lake City
Your next market will test your organisation before it tests your product.
The Utah Catalyst Group brings together leaders from scaling Utah companies to work on one shared challenge: what it takes to grow beyond the state, whether that means the next state, the next country or the next continent.
3.6m
People in Utah, about one percent of the US market. Serious scale means crossing a border.
$22.4bn
Utah goods exported to 198 countries in 2025, supporting more than 73,000 jobs.
1.4%
Utah job growth in the year to July 2026, below the state's 2 to 3 percent norm.
Sources: Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, Utah International Trade 2025 and long-term projections; Utah Chamber and Gardner Institute economic update, September 2026.
Why now
Utah is very good at building companies. Growing them beyond Utah is a different craft.
The first market beyond the border usually gets treated as a commercial project: pricing, a channel, a good hire, maybe a distributor. Two years later the numbers disappoint, and the market takes the blame.
The cause is usually closer to home. Decisions sit too far from the customer. The culture that built the company arrives as instruction rather than invitation. Insight from the new market takes months to change anything. The organisation, and not the market, becomes the limit.
Leaders rarely get to compare notes on this with people facing the same thing at the same time. That is what this group is for.
The Catalyst Group
A small group of Utah leaders, working on the same question at the same time.
Facilitated by Xenergie, hosted in Salt Lake City, and built on the simple idea that leaders learn fastest from peers who are one step ahead or one step behind them on the same road.
By invitation
Eight to twelve senior leaders from different, non-competing Utah companies. Each place is offered, not sold.
Facilitated, not networked
Xenergie brings a systemic method and thirty years of work inside scaling and multinational organisations.
Confidential
A clear agreement on confidentiality and no selling between members. Candour is the point.
Short and practical
A first session in Salt Lake City, then a rhythm the group sets. Each leader leaves with something to act on.
What the group explores
The questions that decide whether growth beyond Utah holds together.
Decision rights across distance
Which decisions move to the new market and which stay at home, and what happens to speed when a regional leader has to wait for headquarters.
A culture worth carrying
Utah companies are proud of how they work. Which parts of that must travel unchanged, which should adapt, and which were always local.
The second founding
New owners, new capital, succession and acquisitions all reopen the questions the company answered implicitly at the start.
Trust in an unfamiliar market
Customers and partners judge a company by how it behaves when costs, prices or supply change. That behaviour can be designed.
Capacity at home
Hiring a fresh layer of executives into Utah gets harder each year. Growth has to come from the leaders already in the business.
Absorbing growth
How to tell good growth from the kind that runs ahead of the operating model, before the numbers make it obvious.
Where it leads
A place in the Systemic Growth Studio, 2027.
Catalyst members get first access to the Utah Systemic Growth Studio: a peer cohort taking their growth questions through a structured six-month journey, face to face and online.
- A shared journey through each member's own growth issues, session by session.
- Xenergie's systemic method applied to the group's named constraints.
- Connection to an international ecosystem of multinational companies, industry experts and trade bodies.
- Progress tracked against the constraints the group names, rather than left to memory.
Joining the Catalyst Group carries no obligation to continue. It is the place to find out whether the Studio is worth your year.
Who it is for
Leaders of Utah-headquartered companies
- CEOs, COOs, chief people officers and senior leaders accountable for growth.
- Companies of roughly one hundred to two thousand people, with a proven model.
- Expansion under way or under serious consideration, in any sector.
- A willingness to speak candidly and to act on what the group surfaces.
Request an invitation
Tell us where your next market sits.
T.H. Ong, who leads Xenergie's work in Utah, reviews every request personally and will come back to you within a few days. Places are limited so that the group stays small enough for real conversation.
The first Catalyst session runs in Salt Lake City in November 2026, before 2027 plans and budgets are set.