Customer Experience & Marketing

Why organisations work with Timothy Armoo He has actually sold Gen Z attention to the buyers in the room. Fanbytes ran creator campaigns for Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo and the UK Government before exiting to Brainlabs. Two exits before 28 give him an operator’s view of scale-up commercial discipline that most Gen Z marketing voices cannot match. His Penguin book What’s Stopping You? gives commercial audiences a structured language for the founder mindset he is asked to transfer into corporate teams. He sits inside Brainlabs as VP Influencer Marketing, which keeps his read on creator platforms, CPMs and Gen Z behaviour current rather than retrospective. He brings a credible answer to the multigenerational question: not a generational stereotype deck, but a working view of how Gen Z employees and customers behave once incentives are on the table. Biography highlights Co-founder and former CEO of Fanbytes; sold to Brainlabs in 2022 in an eight-figure deal. Sold his first business, EntrepreneurXpress, to Horizon Media at 17. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021, Media & Marketing. Named in the Evening Standard Progress 1000 list of London’s most influential figures in advertising and media. Author of What’s Stopping You? 11 Cheatcodes to Unlock the Life You Want, published by Penguin. Currently Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Brainlabs, the global digital agency that acquired Fanbytes. Biography The hardest commercial question facing many consumer brands is no longer awareness. It is whether the under-30 customer takes them seriously at all. Influencer budgets are climbing, internal teams are stretched between TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, and most boards have no operator in the room who has actually run those campaigns at scale. Fanbytes was built to sit in that gap. Co-founded by Timothy Armoo in 2017 with Ambrose Cooke and Mitchell Fasanya, the agency ran creator campaigns for Apple, McDonald’s, Nike, Samsung, Deliveroo, Boohoo and the UK Government. In May 2022, Brainlabs acquired the business in an eight-figure deal. Armoo was 27. He stayed on as Vice President of Influencer Marketing at Brainlabs, which keeps his commercial view of Gen Z platforms current, not retrospective. The track record was not a single lucky exit. He sold his first company, EntrepreneurXpress, to Horizon Media at 17. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Europe list for Media and Marketing in 2021. The Evening Standard Progress 1000 listed him among London’s most influential figures in advertising and media. His Penguin book What’s Stopping You? extends the same operator’s logic into a wider audience of commercial leaders and early-career professionals. For senior buyers, the value is specific. He is the rare voice on Gen Z marketing who can speak to a CMO with the discipline of a founder who had to make a P&L work, sell to a procurement team, and exit to a global agency. That is a different conversation from a panel on creator culture. Key speaking topics Gen Z consumer behaviour and brand decisions Influencer and creator-led marketing strategy Entrepreneurship and scale-up commercial discipline Building, scaling and exiting a venture-backed business The multigenerational customer and workforce Social platforms and the modern media landscape Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and consumer marketing leadership rethinking creator and Gen Z strategy Founders, scale-up CEOs and growth leaders preparing for raise, scale or exit Boards and exec teams of consumer-facing businesses with under-30 customer exposure Talent, employer brand and graduate recruitment leads who need a sharper read on Gen Z employees Audience outcomes A clearer commercial map of how Gen Z actually decides on brand, employer and product Specific operator lessons from building, scaling and selling a creator-economy agency A framework for evaluating influencer and creator spend as a measurable channel, not a content experiment A more honest read on the gap between how senior teams talk about Gen Z and how Gen Z behave Conviction to back internal entrepreneurial bets that conventional governance tends to slow

Why organisations work with John Hall He has built two commercial businesses around the problem he speaks on: Influence & Co., which scaled content as a managed marketing function for senior executives, and Calendar, which monetises the attention his first company taught leaders to capture. Top of Mind (McGraw-Hill) gives sales and marketing teams a named operating model for staying memorable to specific decision-makers, not a generic content playbook. Weekly Forbes and Inc. columns, plus contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Fast Company, mean his frameworks are tested in public against a senior business readership every week. Influence & Co. was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America and won EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company, so the underlying methodology has commercial proof, not only platform reach. He translates content marketing out of the marketing department and into a CEO and revenue conversation, which is where buying decisions about brand authority actually sit. Biography highlights Co-founder of Calendar, a scheduling platform used by millions of professionals. Co-founder and former CEO of Influence & Co., the content marketing firm ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Author of Top of Mind, published by McGraw-Hill in 2017. Weekly columnist for Forbes and Inc. Contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable. EY Entrepreneur of the Year (Best Emerging Company) and Business Journals’ Top 100 Visionaries. Described by Inc. as “one of the most powerful people in media you’ve never met” and by Forbes as a “must-see keynote speaker”. Biography Most companies treat brand visibility as a marketing line item. Buyers experience it as the shortlist they already had in their heads before procurement opened a process. Closing that gap, between how visibility is funded internally and how it is consumed externally, is the commercial problem John Hall has worked on for more than a decade. Top of Mind, his McGraw-Hill book, sets out the operating logic. Trust is built by useful content delivered consistently to the specific people whose decisions matter, and it compounds. The book is not a content marketing manual. It is a framework for executive and corporate visibility, built from running Influence & Co., the agency that productised the discipline for senior leaders and was ranked No. 72 on Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America. Hall scaled that thesis into a second business, Calendar, which sits on the other side of the equation. Once a leader has captured attention, time becomes the constraint. Together the two companies bracket the commercial problem his keynotes address: how to be the name buyers reach for, and how to manage the demand that creates. His weekly columns for Forbes and Inc., and contributions to Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur and Mashable, keep the argument public and tested. EY named him Entrepreneur of the Year for Best Emerging Company. The Business Journals listed him among its Top 100 Visionaries. Key speaking topics Building executive and corporate visibility Content as a trust-building system Sales influence and decision-maker engagement Top-of-mind brand strategy Time management and executive productivity Talent attraction through company culture and content Ideal for CMOs, CROs and heads of brand reassessing how content drives pipeline CEOs and founders building personal and corporate authority in a contested market Sales leadership teams measuring trust as a leading indicator of revenue Marketing and communications functions inside professional services, B2B technology and financial services Audience outcomes A working definition of top-of-mind status and the specific behaviours that produce it inside their organisation Named criteria for deciding which content earns attention from senior buyers and which dilutes it A clearer line between brand spend and revenue contribution, framed for finance and board conversations Tactics for converting executive expertise into published authority without consuming executive time

Why organisations work with Jacco van der Kooij He built the operating language that serious SaaS revenue teams already use. Bowtie, SPICED and Revenue Architecture are not proprietary curiosities; they are the common vocabulary at companies like DocuSign, Uber Eats, Adobe and MURAL. His work treats go-to-market as a designed system, not a set of sales tactics. Leadership teams leave with a structural view of acquisition, retention and expansion as one connected revenue engine. He has operating credibility from inside enterprise technology. Senior roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks, so the advice is grounded in execution, not theory. He is published where serious readers look. Harvard Business Review (with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School) and a shelf of best-selling books including Revenue Architecture and Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization. He advises the capital side, not just the operating side. Growth advisory to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures gives him a cross-portfolio view of what compounds and what breaks. Biography highlights Founder of Winning by Design, a go-to-market consulting and training firm working with hundreds of recurring-revenue companies worldwide. Creator of the Bowtie customer-journey model, the SPICED qualification framework and the Revenue Architecture operating model. Author of Revenue Architecture (2023) and co-author of Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization and The SaaS Sales Method series. Co-author with Frank V. Cespedes of the Harvard Business Review article “Hiring Star Salespeople Isn’t the Best Way to Grow” (February 2016). Clients and training partners include Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and OwnBackup. Growth advisor to Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures. Keynote speaker at Dreamforce, SaaStock Dublin, SaaS Growth London, MarketingProfs and RD Summit Brazil. Biography Recurring revenue rewrote the economics of B2B software, but most companies still run sales, customer success and marketing as separate departments with separate targets. Winning by Design, the firm Jacco van der Kooij founded in 2012, exists to correct that. The core of his work is a set of frameworks that have become standard vocabulary inside serious SaaS revenue teams. The Bowtie extends the funnel into onboarding, adoption and expansion, so leadership can see acquisition and retention as one connected system. SPICED gives every customer-facing function a shared qualification model. Revenue Architecture, the 2023 textbook of over 250 diagrams and blueprints, ties the two into an operating design for recurring-revenue growth. His authority is grounded in operating history before it is grounded in publishing. Senior sales and strategy roles at Kontiki, Qumu and Technicolor sit underneath the frameworks. Harvard Business Review published his co-authored work with Frank V. Cespedes of Harvard Business School on why hiring star salespeople is a weaker growth lever than organisational design, a piece that now reads as the seed of the larger thesis. Today his focus is how compounding growth systems behave under AI. He advises executive teams and venture capital firms, including Notion Capital, Reach Capital, Astella and Storm Ventures, on redesigning go-to-market operating models where probabilistic modelling and AI-enabled workflows replace linear funnel thinking. The training side of the business has equipped revenue teams at Uber Eats, DocuSign, Adobe, MURAL and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the same operating language. Key speaking topics Revenue Architecture for recurring-revenue businesses The Bowtie customer-journey model SPICED qualification and customer conversations Go-to-market operating design for B2B SaaS AI-enabled go-to-market and probabilistic growth modelling Sales organisation design and scaling Executive growth governance Ideal for CROs, CCOs, VPs of Sales and VPs of Customer Success rebuilding the revenue engine around recurring revenue B2B SaaS founders and executive teams moving from founder-led selling into scaled, systematised go-to-market Venture capital firms and boards overseeing growth-stage portfolio companies Corporate transformation leaders inside enterprise technology businesses shifting to subscription or consumption models Audience outcomes A shared operating language across sales, marketing and customer success that replaces siloed vocabulary. A structural view of the full customer journey through the Bowtie, from acquisition into retention and expansion. A working grasp of SPICED as a qualification and conversation model any customer-facing team can deploy. A clearer read on where AI meaningfully changes go-to-market design and where it is overclaimed. Specific diagnostic questions leadership teams can use to locate the actual bottleneck in their growth system.

Why organisations work with Jeremy Schwartz He has sat in the chief executive seat at The Body Shop and as interim joint CEO at Pandora, so the advice on transformation comes from someone who has signed off the trade-offs, not described them. He led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit” at The Body Shop, a sustainability commitment with hard 2020 targets across ingredients, packaging, suppliers and stores, and oversaw the business through the 1bn euro sale to Natura. He proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero during his time as Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola Europe, giving him credibility on commercial brand creation as well as ethical repositioning. His current mandates as Practice Chairman at Kantar and advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice keep him close to live programmes inside large consumer and retail organisations. Few speakers can argue the commercial case for sustainability from inside the P&L of a global beauty business and the boardroom of a listed jewellery company. Biography highlights CEO of The Body Shop, 2013-2017; led the “Enrich Not Exploit” sustainability strategy and the 1bn euro divestment from L’Oreal to Natura. Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora A/S. Managing Director, L’Oreal UK; Marketing and Innovation Director, Coca-Cola Europe; Brand Director, Sainsbury’s; CMO, News International. Practice Chairman, Kantar Sustainable Transformation Practice; Senior Advisor, McKinsey Business Transformation Practice. Founder and host of the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast. Founding trustee, Against Malaria Foundation. Biography The hardest job in a consumer business right now is holding two clocks at once. The quarterly clock that the market reads, and the multi-year clock that sustainability commitments, digital re-platforming and supply chain redesign actually run on. Schwartz has run a business under both. As CEO of The Body Shop from 2013 to 2017, he led the launch of “Enrich Not Exploit”, a sustainability commitment with measurable 2020 targets on ingredients, packaging, fair trade sourcing and habitat protection. Over the same period he steered the business back to growth and through the 1bn euro sale from L’Oreal to Natura. Before that he was Managing Director of L’Oreal UK, Marketing and Innovation Director for Coca-Cola in Europe (where he proposed the consumer concept behind Coca-Cola Zero), Brand Director at Sainsbury’s, and CMO at News International. He later served as Chief Operating Officer and interim joint CEO of Pandora. His advisory work now sits inside the practices that buy-side leaders actually use. He is Practice Chairman of Kantar’s Sustainable Transformation Practice and Senior Advisor to McKinsey’s Business Transformation Practice. That keeps the speaking material close to live transformation programmes rather than retrospective case studies. He hosts the “Saving Tomorrow’s Planet” podcast, interviewing leaders who are reducing emissions inside operating businesses, and is a founding trustee of the Against Malaria Foundation. The through-line across all of this is the same argument he makes to boards: sustainability and commercial growth are not parallel agendas to be balanced, they are the same agenda once the operating model is set up to carry both. Key speaking topics Consumer brand transformation Sustainability and commercial growth Retail leadership CEO and executive team performance Marketing and innovation in consumer businesses Purpose and culture in transformation Digital transformation in retail Ideal for CEOs and executive committees in consumer, retail and FMCG businesses balancing growth targets with sustainability commitments. CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding propositions around purpose without losing commercial discipline. Boards and chairs evaluating ESG and transformation programmes with real P&L implications. Senior leadership teams inside transformation, sustainability or digital programmes that need an outside CEO voice. Audience outcomes A working argument for why sustainability and commercial growth belong in the same operating plan, drawn from a CEO who has run it. Specific examples from The Body Shop, Pandora, L’Oreal and Coca-Cola of how brand, marketing and sustainability decisions look from inside the P&L. A clearer view of where consumer transformations stall and what senior leaders can do about it before they reach the operating teams. Practical reference points for boards on how to set sustainability targets that survive contact with quarterly performance.

Why organisations work with Bill Tolany He has run brand and marketing inside a category-defining grocer and operations inside Amazon’s ultra-fast delivery business, so he can talk about customer experience as both a marketing problem and a logistics problem. As Senior Director of Marketing at Whole Foods Market, he launched the integrated marketing team and grew alternative commerce sales by hundreds of millions of dollars; a specific commercial result, not a theme. His Amazon Prime Now experience as Regional General Manager gives him direct exposure to the operating model that consumer brands are now being benchmarked against. As Turnaround CEO of Greenling, he has carried the cost discipline and unit economics of a venture-stage e-commerce business, not just commentary on it. He moves easily between corporate transformation conversations and start-up advisory work, useful for buyers whose internal teams need to understand both worlds. Biography highlights Senior Director of Marketing, Whole Foods Market; founding leader of its integrated media team. Regional General Manager, Amazon Prime Now, during its launch and expansion phase. Turnaround CEO, Greenling, Inc., a mission-driven local food e-commerce business. Board Director, The Very Good Food Company Inc. and Caboo Paper Products. Advisor to multiple consumer and technology start-ups. US patent holder. Biography Whole Foods Market and Amazon were two of the most studied consumer businesses of the last decade. Bill Tolany held senior roles at both before they merged, which is unusual for any operator working in modern retail. At Whole Foods Market he served as Senior Director of Marketing and founding leader of the integrated media team. The brief covered brand, social and mobile; the result, according to the company’s own later disclosures, was the launch of an integrated marketing function and growth of alternative commerce sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. His public commentary on Whole Foods’ social strategy, where roughly 85% of corporate tweets were customer responses, became a reference point for retailers thinking about brand as service. He later ran Greenling, Inc. as Turnaround CEO, taking on the unit economics of a mission-driven local food platform. Amazon then recruited him as Regional General Manager for Prime Now, the ultra-fast local delivery business that pushed Amazon into the consumer experience grocers had previously owned. That role gave him direct exposure to how marketing, logistics and store operations have to be re-wired when a customer expects a one-hour window. He sits on the board of Caboo Paper Products, a sustainable bamboo paper products brand, and previously served on the board of The Very Good Food Company Inc., a plant-based food business. He also advises growth-stage companies in media, technology, and e-commerce. The throughline is practical: how a consumer brand sustains a relationship with its customer when the delivery model, the marketing channel and the competitor set all change at once. Key speaking topics Customer experience in modern retail Marketing and commerce integration Digital transformation in grocery and food E-commerce operating models Brand building through service and social Start-up and corporate innovation Plant-based and mission-driven consumer businesses Ideal for CMOs and customer experience leaders in retail, grocery and consumer brands Heads of digital, e-commerce and omnichannel inside consumer businesses Leadership teams at food, beverage and mission-driven consumer companies Corporate innovation and venture teams working with consumer start-ups Audience outcomes A clearer view of how marketing, operations and logistics combine to produce customer experience in modern retail. Specific reference points from Whole Foods Market and Amazon Prime Now on how brand and commerce can be run as one system. Sharper questions to ask about the unit economics of e-commerce and ultra-fast delivery models. Perspective on how legacy consumer brands can work with and learn from start-up operators.

Why organisations work with Sarah Willingham She has run the full arc of a hospitality business: founding The London Cocktail Club, taking Nightcap to AIM as its founder-CEO, acquiring four bar groups under it, and steering the group back into private ownership. That gives audiences a working perspective on growth, M&A and capital markets in one voice. Her acquisition record is concrete: London Cocktail Club, Adventure Bar Group, Barrio Familia and The Piano Works rolled into Nightcap inside two years. Buyers booking on M&A integration get a CEO who has done it on a public balance sheet. She brings an operator’s view of consumer demand, not a consultant’s. Bombay Bicycle Club went from six sites to seventeen under her, Cocktail Club from one site to ten, before either was sold or absorbed. She speaks with credibility on building through downturns. Nightcap was floated and grown through pandemic trading and the cost-of-living squeeze, then taken private when the public-market route stopped working. Few founder speakers have lived that decision in real time. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Nightcap PLC, the bar group behind The Cocktail Club, Adventure Bar Group, Barrio Familia and The Piano Works. Co-founder of The London Cocktail Club (2010), grown to ten sites before acquisition by Nightcap in January 2021. Acquired The Bombay Bicycle Club through The Clapham House Group in 2004, expanded it to seventeen sites, exited in 2007. Investor on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den, Series 13 and 14, from 2015. Previously a judge on Raymond Blanc’s BBC Two series The Restaurant. MBA, Cranfield School of Management. Honorary doctorates from Staffordshire University, Cranfield University and Oxford Brookes University. Business Leader of the Year, Publican Awards 2023. Biography The London Cocktail Club opened a single site on Goodge Street in 2011. A decade later it sat at the centre of a listed bar group that had also bought Adventure Bar Group, Barrio Familia and The Piano Works. Sarah Willingham co-founded the original chain and, with her husband Michael, founded Nightcap PLC to roll it up. That arc is unusual. Most founders in hospitality build one concept and stop. Willingham has built, sold, listed and acquired across consumer brands for two decades, starting with the purchase of Bombay Bicycle Club through The Clapham House Group in 2004 and a profitable exit three years later. The Cranfield MBA and the honorary doctorates from Staffordshire, Cranfield and Oxford Brookes followed the operating record, not the other way round. Her public profile is anchored in BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den, where she invested through Series 13 and 14, and earlier in The Restaurant alongside Raymond Blanc. Inside the industry the credibility comes from running Nightcap as a listed CEO through pandemic trading, a cost-of-living squeeze, and the eventual decision to take the group private when the AIM listing stopped paying for itself. For audiences in growth, scale-up and consumer strategy, that record translates into specifics: how to evaluate an acquisition target, when to integrate and when to leave a brand alone, what listed life actually demands of a founder, and when to walk a company out of the public market. The 2023 Publican Awards Business Leader of the Year reflects the industry view of how she has handled it. Key speaking topics Founder-led scale-up Mergers, acquisitions and brand integration Hospitality and consumer growth strategy Listing, operating and delisting on AIM Investor decision-making and dealflow Building consumer brands through downturns Female founder leadership in consumer markets Ideal for Founder and CEO audiences in consumer, hospitality, retail and lifestyle Corporate M&A, integration and post-acquisition leadership teams Investor and private-equity events, family-office gatherings, scale-up programmes Women-in-business and female-founder networks at senior level Audience outcomes A working view of how a consumer business moves from one site, to a chain, to a listed group. Specific lessons from four hospitality acquisitions executed inside two years on a public balance sheet. A grounded perspective on what listing changes for a founder, and when to undo it. A direct read on investor decision-making, drawn from years on Dragons’ Den and on her own deals.

Why organisations work with Sally Hogshead She brings a diagnosis, not a theory. The Fascination Advantage assessment gives leadership teams a shared vocabulary for what each person and each brand actually does best, drawn from data on more than a million respondents. Her commercial credibility is built on practice, not commentary. She wrote campaigns at Crispin Porter and Bogusky and her own agencies for MINI Cooper, Nike, Godiva and Harley-Davidson before turning that craft into a research-based system. Two New York Times bestsellers, Fascinate and How the World Sees You, give her arguments a published spine that internal teams can return to after the keynote. She translates the science of attention into work an executive can act on: how a sales team positions itself in nine seconds, how a leader is perceived in the first meeting, how a brand earns memory in a crowded category. Hall of Fame induction by the National Speakers Association places her in the top tier of professional speakers, measured by sustained client demand, not single-event reception. Biography highlights New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of How the World Sees You and Fascinate, the latter translated into more than twelve languages. Creator of the Fascination Advantage assessment, used by over a million professionals to identify communication and brand differentiation traits. Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association. Former managing and creative director who opened the Crispin Porter and Bogusky Venice office in 2001 and previously co-founded Robaire and Hogshead. Built campaigns for MINI Cooper, Nike, Godiva, Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson; advertising work held in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Frequently featured by Fortune 500 teams and C-suite leadership groups to apply Fascinate research directly to brand and team positioning. Biography Most markets are not short of communication. They are short of memorable communication. The discipline of identifying what makes one brand, one team, or one senior leader stand out in a category where everyone sounds competent is where Sally Hogshead has spent twenty years of practice and research. Hogshead came up through the advertising industry as a copywriter at Fallon, Wieden and Kennedy, and The Martin Agency, then co-founded Robaire and Hogshead in 1998 before opening the Venice, California office of Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2001 as managing and creative director. The campaigns she wrote for MINI Cooper, Nike, Godiva, Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson hang in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. By the end of that decade, she had won close to every major international advertising award on record. The work since then has been about turning that craft into a system. Her two New York Times bestsellers, Fascinate and How the World Sees You, set out the research behind the Fascination Advantage assessment, a tool used by more than a million professionals and Fortune 500 teams to map how they are actually perceived rather than how they intend to be perceived. The distinction matters in commercial settings, where positioning is decided by the audience, not the speaker. Her induction into the National Speakers Association CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame placed her among fewer than 200 inductees since 1977. Senior teams hire her when they need to move from generic differentiation language to a specific account of why their organisation, product, or leadership team is the one a customer chooses to remember. Key speaking topics Brand differentiation and positioning Persuasion and attention in saturated markets Personal brand and executive presence Customer experience and marketing Sales communication and pitch effectiveness Team communication and perception Storytelling and business communication Ideal for CMOs, brand directors and marketing leadership teams Sales leaders and customer-facing organisations are rebuilding pitch and positioning CHROs and executive development leads are working on senior leader presence Founders and partners in professional services firms competing on differentiation Audience outcomes A specific, named view of where their brand or leadership team is currently differentiated, and where it is interchangeable A working vocabulary from the Fascination Advantage framework that teams can apply to pitches, profiles and internal communication Concrete examples drawn from MINI Cooper, Nike and other brands of how differentiation is constructed, not asserted A sharper assessment of what their customers and colleagues actually find memorable about them Editorial discipline on cutting filler messaging that is competent but forgettable

Why organisations work with Sallie Krawcheck She has run wealth management at the largest scale in the industry, leading Smith Barney, Citi Private Bank, US Trust and Merrill Lynch, then built a venture-backed fintech from scratch around a gap she watched the incumbents miss. Her thesis on the gender wealth gap is quantified, not rhetorical. Ellevest’s portfolio construction takes gender-specific salary curves, career breaks and longevity into account, which gives her a concrete answer to the “what would you actually change” question that most diversity speakers cannot give. Fortune called her “The Last Honest Analyst” for refusing to soften research calls and for reimbursing retail clients during a downturn. That reputation is what makes her credible to senior boards on questions of conflict of interest and product integrity. Her book “Own It: The Power of Women at Work” (Crown Currency, 2017) is a Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, and her LinkedIn writing has built one of the largest executive followings on the platform. She arrives with a real audience and a real argument, not a stock keynote. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women. Former president of Global Wealth and Investment Management, Bank of America, overseeing Merrill Lynch and US Trust. Former CEO of Citi Global Wealth Management and former chairman and CEO of Sanford C. Bernstein and Co. Author of “Own It: The Power of Women at Work” (Crown Currency, 2017), Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller. Called “The Last Honest Analyst” by Fortune; multiple appearances on the Forbes “100 Most Powerful Women” list; named to Time “Global Influentials”. BA summa cum laude, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; MBA with honors, Columbia Business School. Biography The gender wealth gap is wider than the gender pay gap, and for many cohorts, it is still moving in the wrong direction. Closing it is not a marketing problem for financial services. It is a product, advice and capital allocation problem, and the people best placed to solve it are the people who have run the businesses on the other side of the gap. Krawcheck spent two decades doing exactly that. She rose from equity analyst to chairman and CEO of Sanford C. Bernstein and Co, then ran Smith Barney and Citi Global Wealth Management, then led Bank of America’s combined Merrill Lynch and US Trust wealth business. Fortune called her “The Last Honest Analyst” for protecting research independence and reimbursing retail clients during a downturn, which remains the cleanest single line on her professional integrity. In 2016 she co-founded Ellevest, a digital investment platform built around the financial reality of women’s careers and lifespans. The investing algorithm factors in salary curves that peak earlier, more frequent career breaks and longer retirement horizons. Ellevest is the only modern fintech that uses gender as an input to portfolio construction rather than a marketing layer on top of a generic product. Her book “Own It: The Power of Women at Work” (Crown Currency, 2017) became a Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller. Her LinkedIn following puts her among the most-read business writers on the platform, and Inc. has named her a Top Female Founder. She speaks to financial services boards, leadership teams and consumer brands on what it actually takes to design products and careers around a customer base the industry has historically underserved. Key speaking topics Closing the gender wealth gap Designing financial products for underserved customer segments Women, leadership and career capital Building a fintech inside a regulated industry Trust, conflict of interest and integrity in financial advice Entrepreneurship after a corporate career Capital, investing behaviour and the future of advice Ideal for Financial services CEOs, CMOs and heads of wealth and private banking are rethinking their women-client strategy. Boards and ExCos of consumer-facing businesses where female customer segments are under-monetised. Founders, investors and leadership teams in fintech and consumer finance. Senior women’s leadership programmes, CHRO sponsors and ERG executive sponsors at large enterprises. Audience outcomes A specific read on where the gender wealth gap actually sits in product design, pricing and advice, not in HR policy. A Wall Street insider’s honest account of how integrity, advice quality and conflicts of interest play out at the top of the industry. A practical view of what it takes to build a regulated fintech around an underserved segment, told by an operator who has done it. A direct, unhedged set of arguments on women, money and career capital that senior audiences can act on.

Why organisations work with Sahar Hashemi She has built three commercial ventures from a standing start. Coffee Republic (110 stores, £50 million market cap), Skinny Candy (acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built (2,000+ businesses, £2.5 billion combined turnover) give her a working library of how entrepreneurial behaviour actually feels day to day. Her Start Up Forever framework breaks the entrepreneurial mindset down into a small set of repeatable daily behaviours, which is what lets it survive contact with corporate hierarchy. The book was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month. She translates between two worlds that rarely speak the same language: founders running on instinct and customer obsession, and senior executives running on process and structure. Most speakers can describe one of those worlds; she has lived both. Her credibility on women-led growth is operating credibility, not advocacy. Buy Women Built is a commercial channel built with major retailers, and she co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce on growing SMEs. Biography highlights Co-founder, Coffee Republic; scaled to 110 stores and a £50 million market capitalisation Founder, Skinny Candy (50% acquired by Glisten Plc) and Buy Women Built Author, Anyone Can Do It (Wiley, 2003) and Start Up Forever (Troubador, 2019, Financial Times Business Book of the Month) OBE for services to the UK economy and to charity, 2012 Birthday Honours Co-chair, UK government Scale Up Taskforce; board member, Scale Up Institute Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum Biography Coffee Republic opened on South Molton Street in 1995, the first US-style coffee bar chain in the UK. Within five years it ran 110 stores at a £50 million market capitalisation. Sahar Hashemi co-founded the business with her brother Bobby after leaving a career in law, and the speed of the build became the basis of everything she has worked on since. The question that has occupied her for two decades is why large companies struggle to act on what they already know. Most have the people, the capital and the data to behave entrepreneurially. They rarely behave that way in practice. Her book Start Up Forever, named a Financial Times Business Book of the Month, breaks that gap into a set of daily habits that survive inside corporate structure rather than dying in workshop rooms. The work has weight because it is grounded in three operating businesses she actually built, not consulting case studies. Skinny Candy, the sugar-free confectionery brand, was acquired by Glisten Plc. Buy Women Built, launched in 2020, now represents more than 2,000 women-built businesses with combined turnover above £2.5 billion and has become a working channel inside major UK retailers. She co-chaired the UK government’s Scale Up Taskforce and sits on the board of the Scale Up Institute. Senior teams at Microsoft, L’Oreal, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble and Sky have brought her in for the same reason: she gives a leadership group a usable answer to the question of what entrepreneurial behaviour looks like on a Tuesday afternoon at a 50,000-person company. She was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to the UK economy and to charity, and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurial mindset inside large organisations Innovation and creativity as everyday discipline Building start-up culture in established businesses Intrapreneurship and behaviour change at scale Women-led entrepreneurship and scale-up growth Customer obsession as a leadership behaviour Courage, action and the founder’s bias to start Ideal for Executive teams running innovation, transformation or culture-change programmes CHROs and learning leaders who want behaviour change, not awareness Strategy and growth leaders trying to build new businesses inside an existing one Sales, marketing and customer teams rebuilding around customer obsession Audience outcomes A practical model of entrepreneurial behaviour that translates into Monday-morning habits Specific examples of how founder instincts (customer obsession, bias to act, comfort with ambiguity) operate inside corporate structure A clearer view of why innovation programmes stall, and what to remove rather than add Renewed confidence in personal agency: what an individual contributor or senior leader can change without permission Frameworks from Start Up Forever that teams can apply to their own products, customers and decisions

Why organisations work with Rita Clifton A board-level voice on brand, not an agency one. As Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership and former NED at Nationwide, ASOS, Bupa, and Dixons, she speaks about brand from inside the governance conversation, not across the table from it. Two decades shaping the modern discipline of brand valuation as London CEO then Chairman of Interbrand, the firm that established the methodology most large companies still use to put a number on brand equity. Author of the standard reference text Brands and Branding for The Economist, used as a teaching text on MBA programmes, alongside The Future of Brands and Love Your Imposter. Credible on sustainability and brand purpose as Chair of Forum for the Future, which separates her from brand voices who treat purpose as messaging rather than as a commercial commitment to test. Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Said Business School on corporate reputation, with media reach across BBC, Sky, and the FT that signals authority to an external audience as well as an internal one. Biography highlights Deputy Chairman, John Lewis Partnership (from February 2021); Chair of the Nominations Committee. Chair, Forum for the Future, the international sustainability non-profit founded by Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin. Former London CEO and Chairman of Interbrand (1997 to 2012); previously Vice Chairman and Strategy Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. Visiting Fellow, Said Business School, University of Oxford, specialising in corporate reputation. Author of Brands and Branding (The Economist), The Future of Brands, and Love Your Imposter (Kogan Page, 2020), shortlisted at the Business Book Awards. CBE, 2014 New Year Honours, for services to the creative industries. Biography Brand is still treated, in most boardrooms, as something the marketing function owns. It sits beneath strategy in the agenda, gets the smallest share of capital, and is measured by activity rather than by enterprise value. Rita Clifton’s argument, built across thirty years at Saatchi & Saatchi, Interbrand, and BrandCap, is that this is the wrong organisational logic. Brand is what holds a company’s pricing power, customer trust, and talent magnetism in place, and in most large businesses it is the largest intangible asset on the balance sheet. She has tested the argument from both sides. As London CEO and then Chairman of Interbrand from 1997 to 2012, she helped shape the brand valuation methodology that boards now use to compare brand equity to other forms of intangible capital. As Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, alongside earlier non-executive roles at Nationwide Building Society, ASOS, Bupa, Dixons, and Ascential, she has been the person on the other side of the table, asking executive teams what their brand investment is actually buying. Her writing makes the argument durable. Brands and Branding, published by The Economist, is a standard MBA reference. Love Your Imposter, published by Kogan Page in 2020, was shortlisted at the Business Book Awards and reframes the inner experience of senior leadership through the same lens of identity and authenticity she applies to brands. The sustainability work runs in parallel and reinforces the commercial case. As Chair of Forum for the Future and a Trustee at Green Alliance, she sits inside the policy conversation on net zero and corporate purpose. That gives her something most brand voices lack: a defensible position on whether a company’s stated purpose is actually being capitalised, or is just rhetoric on a website. Key speaking topics Brand as enterprise value and board agenda item Corporate reputation under digital and AI disruption Brand purpose, sustainability, and credibility Non-executive leadership and governance Personal brand and authenticity for senior leaders Marketing and brand strategy in consumer-facing businesses Diversity in the boardroom Ideal for Boards, chairs, and NEDs reviewing brand as a strategic asset rather than a marketing budget line CMOs, CCOs, and CSOs aligning brand, sustainability, and corporate reputation CEO and ExCo offsites in consumer, retail, financial services, and partnership-model businesses Senior leadership programmes addressing personal brand, identity, and presence at the top Audience outcomes A sharper definition of what brand is doing inside their own organisation’s P&L and balance sheet A board-level vocabulary for brand investment that connects to capital allocation, not campaign spend A more honest read on whether stated purpose is commercially credible to customers, employees, and investors A practical view of personal authority for senior leaders facing scrutiny they did not have earlier in their careers