Employee Wellbeing speakers

Why organisations work with Madison Butler She works inside the people function as a practitioner, not as an outside commentator. Her perspective comes from running employee experience as Chief Experience Officer at GRAV and as a fractional people ops consultant. She has built a structural intervention into her own industry. The Black Speakers Collection was created to close the speaker pay gap for Black speakers, and is now a working directory used by meeting planners. Her book “Let Them See You” (Wiley, 2025) gives buyers a published thesis on authenticity at work that they can hand to a leadership team before the keynote. She speaks credibly on mental health, trauma and psychological safety in workplace settings without softening the operational implications for managers. Named a LinkedIn Top Black Voice and a DivInc Austin Rising Star, with sustained media presence in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and Rolling Stone. Biography highlights Author, “Let Them See You: Empowering Change Through Authenticity” (Wiley, 2025) Founder, Black Speakers Collection, a directory created to address pay equity for Black speakers Founder, Blue Haired Unicorn, an HR and DEI consultancy advising on psychological safety and culture design Chief Experience Officer at GRAV, based in Austin, Texas Named a LinkedIn Top Black Voice; named DivInc Austin Rising Star, 2021 Featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Yahoo and Rolling Stone Biography The employee experience is the part of the company most leaders do not own. HR runs onboarding, operations runs the systems, leadership sets the tone, and the actual lived experience falls between them. Butler works in that gap. As Chief Experience Officer at GRAV and through her consultancy Blue Haired Unicorn, she designs how a workforce actually moves through the organisation, from joining to leaving. Her published thesis sits in “Let Them See You: Empowering Change Through Authenticity”, released by Wiley in 2025. The argument is that performative culture work fails because it asks people to keep their full selves out of the building. Butler treats authenticity as an operating condition for trust, engagement and retention, not as a value statement. The Black Speakers Collection is her clearest demonstration of how she thinks. Faced with persistent pay inequity for Black speakers in the bureau industry, she built a directory rather than writing a position piece. It is now used by meeting planners as a working resource, profiled by PCMA and Prevue Meetings. Her media presence reflects the breadth of her audience. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Yahoo and Rolling Stone have carried her commentary on workplace culture, mental health and inclusion. LinkedIn named her a Top Black Voice; DivInc named her Austin Rising Star in 2021. Key speaking topics Psychological safety and workplace culture Authenticity and human-centred leadership Employee experience design Inclusion as operating practice Mental health and trauma at work Future of work and the people function Personal branding and self-presentation at work Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers designing employee experience end to end Heads of DEI and inclusion leads looking for operating substance over signalling Founders and CEOs of scaling companies under cultural strain Internal leadership programmes for managers responsible for psychological safety Audience outcomes A clearer view of where the employee experience is breaking inside their own organisation A sharper distinction between performative culture work and operating culture work Language for managers to discuss mental health, trauma and authenticity at work without flinching Practical reference points from a practitioner running these problems day to day A published thesis (“Let Them See You”) to extend the conversation after the room

Why organisations work with Maisie Summers-Newton A defended Paralympic title is a rare proof of consistency. She won double gold at Tokyo 2020, then did it again at Paris 2024 in the same two events, three years later. Her 200m individual medley SM6 world record, 2:56.68, was set under maximum pressure at her first Paralympic Games. That is the kind of result organisations want to understand when they talk about delivering at the moment that counts. She speaks credibly on disability and visible difference from a position of public authority, not advocacy alone. The MBE was awarded for services to swimming, and her platform on achondroplasia and language reaches audiences that DEI presentations rarely do. She runs a parallel career as a primary school teacher. That dual life gives her something most elite athletes do not have on a stage: a working perspective on time, attention, and what consistent performance looks like outside the pool. Biography highlights Paralympic gold medallist in the 200m individual medley SM6 and 100m breaststroke SB6 at Tokyo 2020, defended both at Paris 2024. World record holder in the SM6 200m individual medley (2:56.68, Tokyo 2020). MBE for services to swimming, 2022 New Year Honours. Gold medallist, Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022, 100m breaststroke SB6. Multiple World Para Swimming Championship golds across 2019, 2022 and 2023. Graduate of the University of Northampton; works as a primary school teacher alongside elite competition. Biography Defending a Paralympic title is harder than winning the first one. The race is the same length, but everything around it has changed: expectation, public attention, and the slow accumulation of three years of training against people who have studied your last performance. Maisie Summers-Newton did it twice at Paris 2024, retaining her 200m individual medley SM6 and 100m breaststroke SB6 titles from Tokyo 2020. The Tokyo wins were already remarkable. She set a world record of 2:56.68 in the 200m medley on her Paralympic debut, having broken her first world record at 15. The Paris defences happened with a different kind of pressure on her shoulders, the kind that asks whether the first set of results were a moment or a method. The answer turned out to be a method. Her platform is broader than the medal table. She was appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to swimming, and has used her public position to speak directly about achondroplasia, language and how visible difference is treated in everyday settings. She graduated from the University of Northampton and works as a primary school teacher, a working life that sits unusually close to the audiences she addresses. What organisations get from her is rarely framed as theory. It is a working account of what it takes to perform when the result is binary and public, and an honest perspective on inclusion from someone who lives it rather than presents on it. Key speaking topics Composure and performance under pressure Defending success and sustaining high performance Goal setting in long-cycle, high-stakes environments Resilience through setback and injury Disability inclusion and lived experience Language, visibility and difference at work Team dynamics in elite environments Ideal for Senior leadership and high-performance teams preparing for a defining year or event HR, DEI and ERG audiences focused on substantive disability inclusion rather than awareness alone Sales, commercial and delivery teams working to a binary, deadline-driven target Conferences and internal events seeking a credible voice on resilience supported by named results Audience outcomes A concrete picture of what consistency under pressure looks like over a multi-year cycle, not a single performance. A first-person account of disability inclusion that audiences can take back into team conversations. A clearer sense of how elite preparation translates into routine choices about time, attention and recovery. A more honest reading of what resilience requires when results are public and binary.

Why organisations work with Makala Green She holds the Chartered Financial Planner credential, the senior qualification of the UK financial advice industry, which gives employee audiences a regulated voice they can actually trust on money decisions. She is the first black woman in the UK to achieve that chartered status, which makes her a credible speaker on inclusion in financial services and on the confidence gap that disproportionately affects women and minority employees. Her book The Money Edit (Yellow Kite, Hachette UK) sets out a deliberately jargon-free framework, which lets her translate pensions, investing and budgeting into language a mixed-seniority audience can act on the same week. She has worked with Waitrose, John Lewis and Metro Bank on financial wellbeing programmes, so the content has been tested inside large UK employers rather than only on a public stage. Her ITV This Morning, BBC Radio and Financial Times appearances mean she can hold a room of non-finance professionals without losing the technical accuracy a regulated topic demands. Biography highlights UK’s first black female Chartered Financial Planner, the senior credential of the Chartered Insurance Institute’s financial advice qualification track. Founder of Green Wealth Planning and the consumer platform The Wealth Check. Author of The Money Edit: Your No Shame, No Blame Guide to Taking Control of Your Money, published by Yellow Kite (Hachette UK), 2022. Named Financial Adviser of the Year, South East England, Professional Adviser, 2021. Resident financial expert on ITV’s This Morning, with further appearances on BBC Radio and contributions to the Financial Times, Spear’s, FinTech Magazine, Glamour, Stylist and Women’s Health. Corporate financial wellbeing work with Waitrose, John Lewis and Metro Bank. Host of the Your Financial Journey podcast. Biography Financial anxiety inside a workforce rarely shows up as a line item, but it shows up in absence, in retention, and in the quality of decisions people make under pressure. Most employers respond with a benefits brochure and an EAP phone number. Few have a voice that employees actually trust on money. Makala Green is that voice. She is a Chartered Financial Planner, the senior qualification of the UK financial advice industry, and the first black woman in the country to hold that status. She built Green Wealth Planning as a regulated advisory practice, then founded The Wealth Check as the consumer-facing platform that translates the same discipline into language employees and entrepreneurs can act on. Her book The Money Edit, published by Yellow Kite at Hachette UK, sets out the framework she uses on stage and inside corporate programmes. Waitrose, John Lewis and Metro Bank have run her into their workforces. ITV’s This Morning, BBC Radio, the Financial Times and Spear’s have used her as a financial expert on air and in print. Professional Adviser named her Financial Adviser of the Year for the South East of England in 2021. What she gives a corporate audience is the rare combination of regulatory standing and plain English. She can talk about pensions, investing and household resilience without either patronising the room or hiding behind jargon, and she can do it from a position that audiences hearing from a woman of colour in senior financial expertise still find unusual. That is the substance behind the inclusion claim, and it is also why her financial wellbeing work travels into mixed-seniority rooms that more conventional adviser-speakers struggle to hold. Key speaking topics Employee financial wellbeing Financial confidence and the gender and ethnicity wealth gap Cost-of-living resilience for workforces Inclusion in financial services Investing, pensions and long-term wealth planning Entrepreneurship and personal finance for founders Money mindset and behavioural finance Ideal for HR, reward and benefits leaders designing financial wellbeing programmes DEI leads and employee resource groups focused on women, Black and minority employees Retail, consumer and financial services employers with large mixed-seniority workforces Founder and scale-up communities where personal finance and business finance overlap Audience outcomes A clearer picture of how financial anxiety is currently affecting their workforce and where regulated input would change behaviour. A jargon-free vocabulary for talking about pensions, investing and debt that employees of any seniority can use. Specific moves employees can make in the weeks after the session on savings, pensions and household budgeting. A more honest conversation about the gender and ethnicity dimensions of financial confidence inside the organisation.

Why organisations work with Marc Convey A first-hand account of post-traumatic growth that gives audiences permission to discuss adversity, fear, and visible difference without sliding into clinical or HR-policy register. Years as a campaigner for Changing Faces, the UK charity for people with visible difference, which informs how he handles inclusion and self-image conversations inside organisations. A working life that crossed live poker broadcasting, video production, and non-profit leadership, which gives him commercial fluency when speaking to corporate audiences. A track record on charged platforms, including a suicide prevention evening at Brighton Dome for Baton of Hope, where he has delivered a keynote that holds an audience through difficult material. Biography highlights Two-year voluntary campaigner with Changing Faces, the UK charity for people with visible difference. Keynote speaker at the Baton of Hope suicide prevention event at Brighton Dome. Client testimonial from Cristina Proietti, Head of Commercial Operations at WHSmith Travel. Former globally-travelled poker commentator across the live tournament circuit. Founder of his own video production business and operator of a non-profit focused on “working with purpose.” Writes the Substack “Making a Marc” and appears regularly on podcasts including “Man Up / Man Down.” Biography A fire at 14 left Marc Convey with burns that he carries today. The decision that followed shaped the rest of his life: refuse to be defined by the injury, and build the inner resources to face what came next. That choice now sits at the centre of his speaking work. Before turning to the stage, he spent years commentating on live poker tournaments around the world. He then ran a video production company and built a non-profit focused on what he calls “working with purpose.” Each of those careers fed the next, and gave him the commercial language to address corporate audiences without losing the personal core. His signature keynote, The Gift of Adversity, draws on that long road back. Audiences hear a specific story, not a generic message, and leave with a more grounded vocabulary for fear, recovery, and the meaning of difference. The work has reached charged platforms, including a Baton of Hope suicide prevention evening at Brighton Dome, and corporate floors at WHSmith Travel. Beyond the stage he writes the “Making a Marc” Substack and serves a two-year campaigner role with Changing Faces, the UK charity for people living with visible difference. That campaigning work is what separates his content from the wider motivational category: he is in active service to a population whose lived experience he shares. Key speaking topics Resilience and post-traumatic growth Adversity and recovery from setback Mental health and wellbeing at work Visible difference and self-image Fear, change, and personal transformation Authentic leadership and inner resources Team culture grounded in values Ideal for CHROs and HR leaders programming mental health, wellbeing, or culture events Internal communications and culture leads commissioning all-hands or away-day keynotes Charities, healthcare bodies, and public service audiences working on suicide prevention or visible difference Audience outcomes A direct first-hand account of trauma and recovery that gives audiences permission to talk honestly about adversity at work A more concrete vocabulary for fear, setback, and visible difference than wellbeing programmes typically offer Language and reference points that internal communicators can carry into culture and engagement conversations after the talk A confident sense that post-traumatic growth is achievable, anchored in a specific lived example rather than abstract claim

Why organisations work with Marissa Afton She brings a published, board-ready framework for compassion paired with difficult action, set out in Compassionate Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), not a generic wellbeing message. She works at the inside edge of what leaders actually face right now: how to communicate restructure, layoff and AI-driven role change in a way that retains the people who stay. Her client base spans Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Google, Eli Lilly and Amgen, so her examples are drawn from leadership teams operating at the same scale and pressure as the buyer’s. More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) gives her a second published framework, this time for the AI transition. It names awareness, wisdom, and compassion as the qualities leaders build as machines take on more of the analytical work. In Harvard Business Review she set out the operational version at IBM, whose HR unit reinvested the hours AI saved into developing its managers, and put AI to work as a leadership coach. Biography highlights Partner and Head of Global Accounts, Potential Project. Co-author, More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead (2025) and Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way (2022), both Harvard Business Review Press. Contributing author, The Mind of the Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Recurring contributor to Harvard Business Review, including “How Gen AI Can Create More Time for Leadership”, “Using AI to Make You a More Compassionate Leader”, “To Succeed with AI, Adopt a Beginner’s Mindset”, and “Connect with Empathy, But Lead with Compassion”. Client engagements at Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Eli Lilly, Google and Amgen. More than 25 years of formal mindfulness practice, applied to executive development at scale. Biography Hard decisions are arriving faster, and the audience for them has changed. Boards are being asked to restructure, redeploy and let people go in the same year they ask for innovation, retention and engagement. The leaders inside that contradiction need a way to act decisively without becoming the problem they were hired to solve. That is the territory Marissa Afton works in. As Partner and Head of Global Accounts at Potential Project, she runs leadership engagements with companies including Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Google, Eli Lilly and Amgen, and the brief is consistently the same: how do senior people deliver difficult news, drive hard change and still hold the room. Her co-authored book Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) is the published frame for that work. The argument, developed with Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter in HBR, is that empathy on its own makes leaders worse at hard decisions. What organisations need instead is wise compassion, the willingness to act on hard truth while keeping the human in view. She has practised formal mindfulness for more than 25 years. More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) carries the argument into the AI transition. It names awareness, wisdom, and compassion as the qualities leaders build as machines take on more of the analytical work. In Harvard Business Review she showed the operational version: IBM’s HR unit reinvested the hours AI saved into developing its managers, and used AI itself as a leadership coach. Key speaking topics Compassionate leadership and hard decisions Leading through restructure, layoffs and change The mind of the leader and mental agility Mindful leadership and self-leadership at senior levels Resilience and burnout prevention for executives Women in senior leadership Leading in the age of AI Building human connection in hybrid work Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and senior HR leaders running restructure, redeployment or layoff programmes Executive leadership teams working on culture and trust through periods of significant change Boards and ELT offsites where the brief is to combine commercial honesty with humane delivery Women’s leadership programmes and senior leadership development cohorts Audience outcomes A working language for combining hard decisions with humane delivery, drawn from a published HBR Press framework A clearer view of where empathy helps leaders and where it begins to undermine them Specific practices for self-leadership under pressure, grounded in mental training rather than motivation A perspective on AI-era leadership that treats human attention as a scarce, trainable resource

Why organisations work with Mark Wilkinson Pairs an operational safety credential, Chartered Member of the Institute of Safety and Health, with personality diversity practice through Equilibria’s E-Colours framework. That combination is unusual on the speaker circuit, where wellbeing voices rarely carry frontline safety standing. Translates personality difference into safety behaviour. The argument that an extroverted risk-taker and a cautious analyst will hear the same toolbox talk in opposite ways gives leaders a concrete way to redesign briefings, supervision and incident review. Lived recovery from collapse, addiction, bankruptcy and depression gives the resilience material first-hand authority. The story is supported by a published book, Life Remixed, endorsed by Bob Proctor and Marci Shimoff. Works comfortably across heavy industry, energy and corporate audiences, including engagements such as Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival, and adapts the same material for a leadership offsite or a frontline safety stand-down. Brings the production craft of a former Ministry of Sound resident DJ into the room. Music, video and live elements are part of the delivery, which lands with audiences who switch off during conventional keynotes. Biography highlights Chartered Member of the Institute of Safety and Health (CMIOSH) and Fellow of the Institute of Leadership (FIoL). Certified E-Colours personality diversity practitioner through Equilibria, working with leadership teams across energy, sport and corporate sectors. Author of Life Remixed: Looking Beyond The Dance To Face The Music, published 2021, with foreword endorsements from Bob Proctor and Marci Shimoff. Host of the Life Remixed podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Former international house music DJ with a Ministry of Sound residency, performances in 65 countries and a UK Top 10 chart entry as part of Dab Hands with the remix of Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love”. Speaker at Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival and across health, safety and leadership programmes for industrial and corporate clients. Biography Behavioural safety has a translation problem. Two people on the same site, given the same briefing, will walk away with different versions of what was said and different views of the risk in front of them. Wilkinson’s working argument is that personality difference is a structural variable in safety and engagement, not a soft factor to be managed around. He works that argument through Equilibria’s E-Colours framework, where he is a certified practitioner, and through his Chartered standing with the Institute of Safety and Health. The combination matters: the diagnostic of human difference is paired with operational health and safety credibility, which is what gives the work purchase in heavy industry and energy clients rather than only in leadership development settings. The personal story sits behind the professional one. A former Ministry of Sound resident DJ with a UK Top 10 chart credit, Wilkinson collapsed at 33 and lost income, home and relationship across an 18-month recovery. He rebuilt through health and safety work and personal development study, and wrote Life Remixed, endorsed by Bob Proctor and Marci Shimoff, as the account of that rebuild. For organisations, that biography is useful because it lets him hold a room of frontline operators and a room of senior leaders with the same material. The safety and personality work gives the talk its operational edge. The recovery narrative gives it the emotional weight that makes the safety message actually stick. Key speaking topics Behavioural safety and human factors Personality diversity in the workplace Resilience and personal recovery Mental wellbeing and mindset Leadership communication across personality types Engagement in high-risk operational environments Ideal for Heads of HSE, safety leadership teams and operational directors in energy, construction, aviation and manufacturing HR and culture leads designing engagement, wellbeing or behavioural change programmes Leadership and learning teams running offsites that need a credible voice on personal resilience Frontline conferences and toolbox events where a conventional academic keynote will lose the room Audience outcomes A working model for why the same safety message lands differently across a workforce and what to change about briefings as a result A vocabulary for personality difference that supervisors and team leads can use without specialist training A first-hand account of recovery from collapse and addiction that opens room for honest conversation about wellbeing A reframe of behavioural safety as a leadership and communication problem, not only a compliance one

Why organisations work with Marlo Clarke He gives employees a working language for purpose and fulfilment that is concrete enough to use on a Monday morning, built around named frameworks like the Cycle of Success through Intentional Action and the Spectrum of Joy. He treats setbacks as feedback to be evaluated, not motivation to be hyped past, which makes his content usable for teams under real pressure rather than after-dinner inspiration. His range is unusually wide for the format: the same content has landed with corporate audiences in the United States and United Kingdom and with rural community programmes in South Africa, which forces the ideas to be portable rather than context-dependent. Two TEDx talks at the University of Chester and the University of York give a public, watchable proof of how his material plays to a serious audience. Biography highlights Two-time TEDx speaker: TEDxUniversityofChester and TEDxUniversityofYork Former international rugby player for Barbados Has worked as a strategic and programme director across the United States, United Kingdom and South Africa Led U.S. federally funded youth and community development programmes in the American Midwest Conducted a year-long research project across 13 European countries on fulfilment and career meaning Currently runs volunteer development programmes in rural South Africa Biography Most workplace conversations about purpose end up too abstract to act on. Clarke’s work starts in the opposite place. He teaches people to answer one specific question at the end of a working day, then builds outward from that into how individuals define success, evaluate feedback, and decide what to do next. The material is shaped by an unusual working life. Born in Barbados, Clarke played international rugby for the country, then spent years running development programmes in the American Midwest funded by U.S. federal grants, working as a strategic director in the United States and United Kingdom, and leading volunteer programmes in rural South Africa. A year-long research project took him through 13 European countries interviewing people about what made their lives and careers feel worthwhile. Out of that came a small set of named frameworks: Define, Strive, Achieve, Share as the broad arc; the Cycle of Success through Intentional Action for the day-to-day; the Spectrum of Joy for what to do with achievement once it arrives. The frameworks are the spine of two TEDx talks, “What Now? What Next?” at the University of Chester and “How was your day today?” at the University of York. For an organisation, the value is practical. Clarke gives employees and leaders a way to talk about intention, setbacks and fulfilment that sits inside the working day rather than alongside it, and a vocabulary that holds up whether the audience is a corporate summit in the United States or a rural classroom in South Africa. Key speaking topics Self-defined success Intentional action Navigating uncertainty Feedback evaluation Personal fulfilment at work Cultural competency and cross-context storytelling Purpose and engagement Ideal for HR, learning and development leaders designing engagement and purpose programmes Internal conferences and leadership offsites focused on resilience and renewal Early- and mid-career talent populations being invested in by their employer Mission-driven organisations and NGOs working across cultural contexts Audience outcomes A short, repeatable daily checklist for evaluating progress against self-defined goals A working method for treating setbacks as feedback rather than failure Language for distinguishing between bliss, happiness and contentment, and why that matters at work A framework, Define / Strive / Achieve / Share, that maps onto how employees actually move through goals Renewed intent to act, grounded in two equations Clarke teaches: Passion plus Intention equals Purpose; Time plus Energy plus Money equals Purpose

Why organisations work with Martine Wright A first-hand account of recovery from catastrophic injury that gives leaders concrete language for talking about adversity, mental health, and return to work without slipping into platitudes. Paralympic-level perspective on marginal gains, team performance, and selection, drawn from competing for Great Britain in sitting volleyball at London 2012 rather than from a textbook. Credibility on inclusion and belonging that comes from being inside the disability sport system, not commenting on it. Useful for ERG launches, accessibility programmes, and culture work where lived authority matters. An MBE, the BBC Helen Rollason Award, and a Sports Book Award-winning memoir give buyers external validation that holds up in front of senior audiences. Consistent broadcast presence with the BBC and Channel 4, including Rio 2016 and Invictus Games, which translates into stage presence and timing that work in front of 10,000-seat audiences and intimate leadership rooms alike. Biography highlights Survivor of the 7 July 2005 London bombings; was the last person extracted alive from the Aldgate carriage and lost both legs above the knee. Member of Great Britain’s women’s sitting volleyball team at the London 2012 Paralympic Games and later team captain. Appointed MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to sport. Recipient of the BBC Helen Rollason Award at the 2012 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Author of Unbroken: My Story of Survival from 7/7 Bombings to Paralympic Success (Simon and Schuster, 2017), winner of Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards. Broadcaster for the BBC and Channel 4, including roving reporter at the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games coverage. Biography The Aldgate bomb on 7 July 2005 killed seven people in a single Circle Line carriage. Martine Wright was the last person brought out alive. She lost roughly eighty percent of her blood, spent a week in a coma, and underwent ten months of surgery and double above-knee amputation. The detail that matters for a corporate audience is what came after: a deliberate decision, sustained over years, to treat recovery as work rather than a wait. That work led to elite sport. Wright took up sitting volleyball during rehabilitation, made the British squad, and was selected for the home Paralympic Games at London 2012, where Team GB fielded a women’s sitting volleyball side for the first time. She later captained the team and earned forty international caps. The 2012 BBC Helen Rollason Award and a 2016 MBE for services to sport followed. Her memoir Unbroken (Simon and Schuster, 2017) won Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards and remains the primary text behind her speaking. Alongside the book, she has built a steady broadcast career with the BBC and Channel 4, covering the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games, which gives her a level of stage craft most lived-experience speakers do not have. What organisations actually book her for is the translation. Wright takes the language of marginal gains, team selection, mental health, and belonging out of the abstract and grounds it in specific decisions she made and watched others make. NatWest, the NHS, John Lewis, Deloitte, Salesforce, Pfizer, and Aon are among the named clients on her own record. The room leaves with usable vocabulary for the conversations leadership teams already know they need to have. Key speaking topics Resilience and recovery from adversity Mental health and return to work Inclusion, disability, and belonging in the workplace Marginal gains and high-performance teams Change and uncertainty Paralympic sport and elite competition Leadership through crisis Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rolling out wellbeing, mental health, or return-to-work programmes DEI leads and ERG sponsors building disability inclusion and belonging work Leadership teams briefing staff through restructures, crises, or major change programmes All-staff conferences and town halls where the brief calls for an authentic, high-impact keynote rather than a research talk Audience outcomes A vocabulary for talking about adversity, mental health, and recovery that does not feel scripted. Specific examples of how marginal gains and team selection work inside an elite sport environment, drawn from London 2012. A sharper sense of what disability inclusion looks like from inside the experience, useful for shaping ERG and accessibility work. A reset on what is actually possible after a catastrophic setback, anchored in a verifiable personal story rather than abstract motivation.

Why organisations work with Marverine Cole She has anchored live news under pressure for Sky News, 5 News, ITV and the BBC, and brings that discipline to stage hosting where the running order changes in the moment. Her Mind Media Award for Journalist of the Year, won for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry, gives her standing to chair sessions on mental health, race and representation without sounding rehearsed. An honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University and a four-year stint running its undergraduate journalism courses mean she can interview senior leaders and academics on equal footing. As Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier and BBC Good Food columnist, she opens unusual commercial routes for brand and consumer events where culture, lifestyle and gender intersect. Biography highlights Newsreader on ITV1’s Good Morning Britain; previous news anchor roles at Sky News (World News and Business Report), 5 News, BBC Midlands Today and ITV Central News Journalist of the Year, Mind Media Awards 2019, for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry Honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University; former Director of Undergraduate Journalism courses, Birmingham School of Media (2018 to 2022) Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier; resident beer columnist for BBC Good Food magazine Co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live; presenter on Classic FM; contributor to BBC Radio 1Xtra and BBC 5 Live Contributing essayist to Sir Lenny Henry’s 2021 book Black British Lives Matter; board member of Birmingham Royal Ballet and The Student View Biography Live broadcast craft is a narrow skill, and it sits at the centre of what flagship corporate events still need. Cole has spent more than two decades inside that craft, presenting news for Sky News, 5 News, ITV Central, BBC Midlands Today and now ITV1’s Good Morning Britain. Sky News audiences watched her front a five-hour overnight World News and Business Report bulletin, including coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The journalism is not a sideline. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry, on the disproportionate mental health pressures facing Black women, won Journalist of the Year at the Mind Media Awards in 2019. She has produced and presented further work for BBC Radio 4 and BBC 1Xtra on female gambling addiction and on women in UK rap, and contributed an essay to Sir Lenny Henry’s Black British Lives Matter in 2021. Birmingham City University, where she trained as a broadcast journalist, brought her back as Director of Undergraduate Journalism courses from 2018 to 2022 and later awarded her an honorary doctorate. That academic spell shows in her interviewing: she frames questions for senior leaders without losing the audience in the room. The off-news work fills out the brief. She is Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier and BBC Good Food magazine’s resident beer columnist, presents on Classic FM, and co-presents Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4 with Reverend Richard Coles. For event organisers, that range translates into a host who can move from a board panel on workplace mental health to a brand showcase to a closing-night cultural conversation without changing register. Key speaking topics Event hosting, moderation and on-stage interviewing Awards ceremony presentation Mental health and Black women’s experience Race, representation and inclusion in media Women in broadcast journalism Consumer culture, lifestyle and the beer industry Birmingham, the Midlands and regional creative industries Ideal for Conference organisers commissioning a senior host for live, multi-track main-stage programmes DEI, wellbeing and ERG leaders running flagship internal events on race, mental health or women in the workplace Brand and consumer marketing teams hosting product launches, awards or media events Cultural and arts organisations seeking a credible chair for public conversations and panels Audience outcomes A live programme that holds energy through agenda changes, technical hitches and difficult guests Sharper, more candid contributions from senior panellists prompted by a journalistically trained interviewer A session on mental health or representation that lands with substance, drawn from her own reported work rather than secondhand framing A consistent on-brand voice across a multi-day event run by a single experienced anchor

Why organisations work with Matt Haig A first-person account of severe depression and suicidal crisis that has shaped public mental health conversation in the UK, told by someone whose books on the subject have topped national bestseller charts. A literary platform of unusual scale: The Midnight Library alone has sold over ten million copies and won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, which means his name lands with employees and leaders before he opens his mouth. Notes on a Nervous Planet gives him a developed argument about anxiety and the digital environment that maps directly onto how work now feels for most knowledge workers. He sits outside the clinical and HR registers that dominate workplace wellbeing content. The voice is a working writer’s, which is why audiences listen rather than tolerate. Biography highlights Author of Reasons to Stay Alive, a number one Sunday Times bestseller that spent 46 weeks in the UK top 10 and won the 2016 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award for Non-Fiction. Author of The Midnight Library, winner of the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and a New York Times bestseller with more than ten million copies sold worldwide. Author of the Sunday Times number one bestseller Notes on a Nervous Planet, on anxiety, social media, and modern life. Novelist whose adult fiction includes The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, The Comfort Book, and The Life Impossible. Children’s author whose Shadow Forest won the Nestle Smarties Book Prize Gold Award and whose A Boy Called Christmas was adapted into a feature film with Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, and Kristen Wiig. Translated into more than fifty languages, with a public platform on mental health that reaches well beyond the literary audience. Biography The honest conversation about anxiety and depression inside organisations is harder than the policy version. Most employees have read the wellbeing email. Far fewer have heard a senior voice describe what panic actually feels like at three in the morning, or why the always-on environment makes recovery slower than it should be. That is the gap Matt Haig’s writing has been filling for a decade. Reasons to Stay Alive, his memoir of a near-fatal breakdown at twenty-four, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and stayed in the UK top ten for forty-six weeks. It won the 2016 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award for Non-Fiction and changed how a generation of British readers spoke about depression. Notes on a Nervous Planet followed in 2018 with a sharper argument: that the texture of modern life, especially digital life, is a major part of why so many people feel ill. Both books are short, plain, and unguarded, which is why they have travelled. Alongside the memoirs is a serious fiction career. The Midnight Library won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, became an instant New York Times bestseller, and has sold over ten million copies worldwide. The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, The Comfort Book, and The Life Impossible sit alongside it. Children’s titles include Shadow Forest, a Nestle Smarties Gold winner, and A Boy Called Christmas, adapted in 2021 into a feature film with Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, and Kristen Wiig. For organisations, the value is straightforward. Haig is not a clinician and does not pretend to be. He is a working writer with a global readership who has thought longer and more publicly about anxiety, depression, and modern overload than almost any non-specialist alive. Audiences listen because he has earned the subject, and because the language is recognisably his own. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Depression and anxiety in modern life Digital overload and always-on culture Resilience and recovery Storytelling and the language of wellbeing Creativity under pressure Ideal for CHROs and heads of wellbeing programming a serious-register keynote on mental health. Internal events tied to World Mental Health Day, Mental Health Awareness Week, or wider EVP and culture moments. Leadership offsites where the brief is to model open conversation about anxiety, burnout, and pressure rather than to brief on policy. Employee audiences in high-intensity sectors (finance, professional services, media, tech) where always-on working is part of the culture. Audience outcomes A first-person account of severe depression and recovery that gives employees permission to talk about their own experience. A clearer argument for why digital life and modern work conditions amplify anxiety, drawn from Notes on a Nervous Planet. Practical anchors for managing low moods, panic, and the social media environment, in language that does not sound like a wellness pamphlet. A reminder, useful for leaders, that the most credible communications about mental health do not sound like communications. Permission to treat mental health as a normal subject of adult conversation rather than a compliance topic.

Why organisations work with Matthias Schmitt He has scaled and exited the companies his audience is still inside. wealthpilot reached over 100,000 European customers under his co-founding, and Skigaudi became Germany’s leading student winter festival brand. His Expansion State Method is a named, proprietary coaching framework, not a borrowed model. It is designed specifically for founders navigating the gap between commercial success and personal meaning. He addresses burnout from inside the experience, having walked out of his own companies after hitting it. The credibility with senior operators is earned, not theoretical. He works in the territory most leadership programmes avoid: nervous system regulation, identity after exit, and the practical mechanics of sustaining decision quality under sustained pressure. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific named him to its Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024, which gives the work external editorial validation in a category usually short of it. Biography highlights Co-founder of wealthpilot, a Munich-based FinTech SaaS serving over 100,000 European customers Co-founder of Skigaudi, Germany’s leading winter festival brand for students Founder of the Expansion State Method, a proprietary coaching framework for post-exit founders Named to Entrepreneur Asia Pacific’s Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024 Trained in NLP, behavioural science, nervous system regulation, and meditation as applied to executive performance Works publicly under the title “Chief Fulfillment Officer,” focused on post-exit founders and conscious leaders Biography The exit is supposed to be the win. For many founders, it is also the moment the architecture they built their identity on disappears. The high-performance habits that scaled the company keep firing into an empty room. Matthias Schmitt co-founded wealthpilot, a Munich FinTech that scaled past 100,000 European customers, and Skigaudi, the leading German winter festival brand for students. He exited and hit burnout. The recovery became the work. Today he coaches post-exit entrepreneurs and senior leaders through that transition, using a proprietary framework he calls the Expansion State Method. The practical content draws on NLP, behavioural science, nervous system regulation, and meditation, applied to the specific problem of how senior operators sustain decision quality and meaning after the pressure that organised their lives lifts. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific named him to its Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024. The recognition matters because the category he works in, founder coaching, is crowded with generalists. The differentiator here is operational time served at the level his clients are leaving. Key speaking topics Burnout recovery for founders and senior operators Post-exit identity and purpose Peak performance without collapse Nervous system regulation for high-pressure leadership Sales leadership and revenue performance Purpose-led business building Ideal for Founder communities, scale-up CEO peer groups, and post-exit networks Sales leadership offsites where revenue performance and team wellbeing are both on the table Private wealth and family office audiences working with HNW and UHNW founders Executive development programmes addressing sustained performance and burnout risk at senior levels Audience outcomes A clearer read on where current performance habits are producing diminishing returns Specific practices for nervous system regulation under sustained executive pressure A language for the post-exit transition that senior operators rarely have available Permission to treat fulfilment as a performance variable, not a soft topic

Why organisations work with Mel Abraham A practitioner’s view of personal finance, not a motivational one. Thirty years as a CPA advising founders and high earners sits behind every framework he teaches. Financial wellbeing translated into a workforce metric. His employee financial wellness sessions connect personal money stress directly to productivity, retention, and engagement numbers a CFO recognises. A published, repeatable system. Building Your Money Machine and its Wealth Priority Ladder give audiences a sequenced model they can act on the next morning, not a set of principles to remember. Credibility at the top of the speaker profession. The Certified Speaking Professional designation is held by fewer than one in ten working speakers, and Abraham earned it on top of the CPA qualification. A founder’s story buyers can verify. He built, sold, and reinvested through a cancer diagnosis and recovery, which is why the work avoids the abstract optimism that defines most personal-finance content. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Building Your Money Machine (Hay House, 2024). International bestselling author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution. Certified Public Accountant with more than 30 years of advisory experience to founders and entrepreneurs. Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association. Host of the Building Your Money Machine podcast and YouTube show, reaching around two million viewers. Has shared stages with Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Arianna Huffington, Ed Mylett, and Amy Porterfield. Biography The gap between earning a high income and being financially free is wider than most professionals expect. Lifestyle absorbs salary growth, savings sit idle, and the moment when work becomes a choice keeps moving further out. Mel Abraham has spent three decades inside that gap as a CPA advising founders and high earners, and his work begins with the mechanics of closing it. Building Your Money Machine, his 2024 USA Today bestseller, sets out the sequence: earn, grow, protect. The book introduces the Wealth Priority Ladder and the Five Incomes, frameworks he uses to move audiences from a single salary to a portfolio of cash-producing assets. It followed The Entrepreneur’s Solution, an earlier international bestseller written for owner-operators trying to scale without trading their lives for the business. Inside organisations, Abraham translates the same material into a workforce argument. Personal financial stress shows up as distraction, presenteeism, and turnover, and his Financial Wellness, The Missing Link to Employee Wellness programme reframes it as a measurable productivity issue rather than a soft benefit. Buyers tend to be CHROs, founders, and benefits leads who want financial literacy treated with the same seriousness as physical and mental health. The Certified Speaking Professional designation, held by under one in ten working speakers, sits alongside the CPA credential. The combination is unusual, and it is what allows Abraham to take a stage at a sales kickoff of 20,000 or a boardroom of 10 and treat both as exercises in numerical precision. Key speaking topics Personal financial freedom and wealth-building systems Employee financial wellness and productivity Entrepreneurship and founder economics Wealth priority sequencing for high earners Legacy planning and intergenerational wealth Money mindset and behavioural finance Ideal for Sales conferences, founder summits, and entrepreneur networks CHROs and benefits leads building financial wellbeing into the employee proposition Wealth management, banking, and financial services events for client audiences Professional services firms and partnerships addressing partner and associate financial literacy Audience outcomes A sequenced model for converting earned income into income-producing assets A clearer view of which financial moves come first, second, and third Language for treating financial wellbeing as a measurable workforce outcome, not a benefit line item A founder’s account of building wealth through health crisis and business reinvention Tools drawn from a CPA practice rather than a motivational frame