Entrepreneurship

Why organisations work with Dave Noll He brings a working television creator’s instinct for what survives a pitch room, drawn from selling 60-plus series and more than 3,500 episodes to global networks. The Chopped origin story is a usable case study in persistence. The format was rejected by Food Network before becoming one of the longest-running cooking competitions on US television and earning a James Beard Award. His credentials sit outside the usual corporate speaker pool, which makes the message about creative risk land differently with sales and innovation audiences who have heard the standard versions. He frames innovation as a commercial discipline rather than an ideation exercise, focused on what gets bought, what gets renewed, and what scales internationally. Biography highlights Co-creator of Chopped (Food Network, 2009 to present); franchise inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame. Two-time Emmy Award winner and two-time Gracie Award winner. Chopped won the James Beard Award for Best Television Series in 2012. Co-founder of Keller Noll, a New York-based format development company with international productions across Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, South Africa, Turkey and the United States. Creator of America Says (Game Show Network), No Kitchen Required (BBC America), Rocco’s Dinner Party (Bravo), Beat the House (HGTV), Face The Truth (CBS) and Punchline (FOX). Signed a first-look deal with Boat Rocker in 2021, reported in Deadline. Biography Chopped was rejected by Food Network the first time it was pitched in 2007. The same concept, brought back months later, became one of the longest-running cooking competition formats on US television, has aired since 2009, was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame and won the 2012 James Beard Award for Best Television Series. The producer behind it is Dave Noll, co-founder of Keller Noll, a New York-based format development company he runs with Cleve Keller. Together, they have created and sold more than 60 television series and produced over 3,500 episodes, with productions filmed across eight countries and a 2021 first-look deal with Boat Rocker. His value to a commercial audience is the working knowledge of what it takes to get an idea past the people who say no for a living. That includes America Says on Game Show Network, No Kitchen Required on BBC America, Rocco’s Dinner Party on Bravo, Face The Truth on CBS, and the wider game-show and competition portfolio that the partnership has built since 2007. For sales, marketing and innovation teams, his contribution is closer to a master class in commercial creativity than a leadership talk. He works in an industry where every pitch is graded on what audiences will actually choose to watch, and brings that discipline into rooms where corporate innovation often loses contact with the customer. Key speaking topics Innovation as a commercial discipline Creative persistence and pitch resilience Turning rejected ideas into market-ready products Storytelling and format thinking for brand teams Sales performance and customer-centred creativity Team-level creative culture in deadline-driven environments Ideal for Sales and revenue leadership audiences working on creative differentiation Marketing, brand and innovation teams inside consumer-facing organisations Corporate offsites and annual kick-offs that want a non-corporate voice on creativity and commercial risk Higher education and association audiences focused on entrepreneurship and media Audience outcomes A concrete example of how a category-defining product survives repeated rejection before reaching the market A working producer’s perspective on what makes a creative idea commercially durable Practical reference points from inside one of television’s most successful format development partnerships Renewed conviction in pushing creative work through internal gatekeepers without diluting it

Why organisations work with Scott Dikkers A published method for generating creative output at volume, codified in the “How to Write Funny” series and tested over three decades of running The Onion newsroom. The founder’s view of how a $16,000 college newspaper became a national satirical brand worth multiples of that, with a defined argument about mission, culture and creative discipline drawn from “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Built and runs the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City in Chicago, training comedy writers who have gone on to Emmy-winning television rooms, so the keynote sits on top of a working teaching practice. A practitioner’s perspective on creativity in the age of generative AI, framed around how human writers and editors keep brand voice intact when first drafts are cheap and originality is not. Biography highlights Founder of The Onion and TheOnion.com, the world’s first humour website. Longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures (1988-1999 and 2005-2008) and former General Manager and VP of Creative Development. Number one New York Times bestselling author of “Our Dumb Century,” winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Author of more than 30 books, including the “How to Write Funny” series, “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Creator of the “Writing with The Onion” programme at The Second City training centre in Chicago. Syndicated cartoonist of “Jim’s Journal,” distributed to college newspapers across the United States from 1987 to 1997. Biography A satirical college newspaper bought for $16,000 in 1989 became one of the most recognisable brands in American media. The route from there to a national audience, a Peabody-winning news network and a publishing list that has sold millions of copies was not luck. It was a writers’ room run with unusual discipline, and Scott Dikkers ran it for most of its formative years. As editor-in-chief of The Onion across two tenures, and later as General Manager and VP of Creative Development, Dikkers built the editorial process that produced the headlines most readers can still quote. He launched TheOnion.com in 1996, the first humour website on the internet, and went on to edit “Our Dumb Century,” a number one New York Times bestseller that won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and has sold more than half a million copies. The argument behind his commercial work is set out in “How to Write Funny,” “Outrageous Marketing” and “The Onion Story.” Comedy is not magic. It is a method, and brand voice is the operational output of that method. Dikkers codified the process at The Onion, then transferred it into the “Writing with The Onion” programme he created at The Second City training centre in Chicago, where his students have been hired into Emmy-winning television rooms. For corporate audiences, the relevance is direct. Generative AI has made first drafts trivial and originality scarce. Dikkers’ keynote takes the writers’ room discipline that built The Onion and applies it to creative output, brand voice and the question every marketing and product team is now asking: how do you keep what makes your work yours when the cost of imitation has collapsed. Key speaking topics Creativity as an operating discipline Brand voice and editorial culture Humour and storytelling in business communication Building a media brand from a standing start Creative leadership in the age of generative AI Media literacy and the reading of satire Mission-led culture in creative organisations Ideal for CMOs, brand and content leaders managing creative output at scale Innovation, R&D and product leadership teams working alongside generative AI tools Communications, internal comms and L&D leaders rebuilding storytelling capability Entrepreneurship programmes and founder audiences at universities and conferences Audience outcomes A working method for generating original creative material, drawn from the writers’ room that built The Onion A clearer language for what brand voice is and how it survives contact with AI-generated content A founder’s view of how a small editorial team scaled into a national media business without losing its identity A sharper test for distinguishing satire and credible information in a feed-driven media environment A reference set of named examples from three decades of Onion headlines that a team can take back into its own creative reviews

Why organisations work with Aimee Connolly She has grown a cosmetics brand from one product to more than 100, and from a founder-led startup to around EUR 32.6 million in revenue in 2024 without external investment, giving her a concrete view on capital discipline most consumer founders do not have. She has worked every stage of modern beauty distribution in person: independent pharmacies, Boots, Brown Thomas, Dunnes Stores, Selfridges, airport retail, direct-to-consumer and standalone stores in Kildare Village, Belfast and London. Her team has scaled from her alone to more than 100 staff across Ireland and the UK, which makes her credible on the operational and cultural shifts a founder has to make to stop being the bottleneck. She is preparing a US launch for Q4 2026 and speaks openly about how AI is being used inside the business to lift productivity and support that expansion, which is unusually specific for a consumer-brand founder. Her awards are from credible named bodies (EY Entrepreneur of the Year Ireland 2021 in the Emerging category, IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year 2025, UCD Alumni Award in Business 2025), so her authority does not rest on a single category or year. Biography highlights Founder and CEO, Sculpted by Aimee; founded the business at age 23 while finishing her degree. Scaled the brand to EUR 32.6 million in 2024 revenue, 47% year-on-year growth, with more than 100 staff and over 500 stockists across Ireland, the UK and the Middle East. Retail footprint includes Boots, Brown Thomas, Dunnes Stores and Selfridges, plus own-brand stores in Kildare Village, Belfast and London. EY Entrepreneur of the Year Ireland 2021, Emerging category. IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year 2025; Young Businesswoman of the Year 2022; Business and Finance Elevation Award 2024. University College Dublin Alumni Award in Business 2025; BComm International (first-class honours), UCD. Founder of Sculpted: The Academy, a professional training business for makeup artists. Biography Sculpted by Aimee did not exist in 2016. By 2024 it was turning over EUR 32.6 million, growing 47% year on year, and sitting on shelves in Boots, Brown Thomas, Dunnes Stores and Selfridges. It got there without outside investors. That single fact changes the conversation about what a bootstrapped consumer brand can realistically do inside a category dominated by multinationals. Aimee Connolly built the business at 23, while finishing a first-class BComm International at University College Dublin. The first product was a three-pan sculpting palette, which is where the name came from. The range is now past 100 SKUs, the team past 100 people, and the retail footprint covers Ireland, the UK and the Middle East, with own-brand stores in Kildare Village, Belfast and London and a US launch planned for the fourth quarter of 2026. Her credibility on growth is not theoretical. She has lived each transition that breaks most consumer founders: from practitioner to operator, from single-market to multi-market, from independent stockists to listings with Boots and Selfridges, from founder-led decisions to a structured team. She has been named EY Entrepreneur of the Year Ireland in the Emerging category, IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year 2025, and received the University College Dublin Alumni Award in Business 2025. What she brings into a room is unusually specific for a consumer founder: the mechanics of self-funded scaling, retail buyer relationships, product discipline under rapid range expansion, and, more recently, how AI is being embedded inside the business to support the US move. She is the operator buyers want when the brief is how to grow without losing the brand, and without giving it away. Key speaking topics Scaling a self-funded consumer brand Founder to CEO transition Retail and omnichannel strategy in beauty Direct-to-consumer and e-commerce growth International market entry AI in operations and brand building Building and retaining a high-growth team Ideal for Founders and CEOs of consumer and beauty brands preparing for a step-change in scale. Retail, buying and category leadership teams looking at how challenger brands are winning shelf space. Women’s leadership and entrepreneurship programmes in large corporates. Marketing and e-commerce leadership teams in founder-led or founder-adjacent businesses. Audience outcomes A concrete sense of what self-funded scaling actually demands, from working capital to retail terms. A clearer view of the decisions that break founders at the EUR 10 million to EUR 50 million transition. Practical perspective on how a challenger brand gets and keeps listings at Boots, Brown Thomas and Selfridges. A grounded read on where AI is genuinely moving the needle in a consumer business today. Renewed confidence in the case for patient, brand-led growth over capital-heavy expansion.

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 Lance Armstrong A first-person account of an integrity collapse at the top of elite sport, told without the usual euphemism. Few public figures will sit in that conversation on a corporate stage. Almost none will take unscripted questions on it. A working argument that “winning at all costs” is a leadership failure mode, drawn from the inside of the system that produced the most-litigated example of it in modern sport. Direct relevance to leaders thinking about culture risk, whistleblower dynamics, and the gap between stated values and operating norms in high-performance environments. A separate, substantive track on cancer survivorship and the building of LIVESTRONG, a foundation that has raised more than $500 million and continues operating independently of his sporting reputation. An investor’s lens on sport, fitness, health and human performance categories through Next Ventures, useful for briefs that touch consumer health, wellness, or the commercial side of endurance sport. Biography highlights Won the Tour de France seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005, titles subsequently stripped by USADA in 2012 and not reallocated by the UCI. Diagnosed with stage-three testicular cancer in 1996, with metastases to lung and brain; returned to professional cycling after treatment. Founder of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, now LIVESTRONG, which has raised more than $500 million in support of people affected by cancer. Confessed publicly to long-term doping in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013, having previously denied the allegations under oath and in litigation. Founder and managing partner of Next Ventures, a venture firm focused on sport, fitness, nutrition and human performance, with earlier personal investments in Uber and DocuSign. Host of THEMOVE and THE FORWARD podcasts on the WEDU platform; the network reports roughly 10 million annual listeners. Biography The 2012 USADA reasoned decision did not just end a cycling career. It documented, in unusual detail, how a high-performance culture had been built around systemic dishonesty, and how that culture had survived a decade of scrutiny by enrolling teammates, doctors, sponsors and the press in its maintenance. Lance Armstrong was the centre of that system. The fall, when it arrived, was institutional as well as personal. That story sits awkwardly on a corporate stage, which is part of why it is useful on one. Most failure-and-recovery talks describe a setback the speaker did not cause. This one does not. Armstrong’s argument, when he is on the right brief, is that a “win at all costs” operating norm is a leadership failure mode rather than a leadership style, and that the costs are paid by people other than the person at the top long before they are paid by the leader. The other side of the public record is also real. The Lance Armstrong Foundation, founded after his 1996 cancer diagnosis and now LIVESTRONG, has raised more than $500 million for survivorship work and continues to operate independently of his sporting reputation. As an investor, he was an early backer of Uber and DocuSign and now runs Next Ventures, a fund focused on sport, fitness and human performance. WEDU, his media platform, hosts THEMOVE and THE FORWARD, two of the more durable podcasts in endurance sport. For audiences willing to engage with the uncomfortable parts, Armstrong is one of the few speakers who can hold a serious adult conversation about reputational collapse, accountability, and what is and is not possible to rebuild after it. The right brief is honest, the right format is fireside or moderated Q&A, and the right room is one that wants substance rather than redemption theatre. Key speaking topics Win-at-all-costs cultures and the leadership cost of them Accountability after public failure Self-leadership under sustained pressure Cancer survivorship and the LIVESTRONG story High-performance teams and the dynamics of dissent Reputation, recovery and the long arc after a public shock Investing in sport, fitness and human performance categories Ideal for CEOs, boards and senior leadership teams interested in culture risk and the gap between stated values and operating norms Executive offsites and leadership development programmes addressing decision-making under pressure Health, wellness, sport and consumer-brand audiences with a survivorship or human performance angle Conferences willing to host an unscripted, on-the-record conversation about institutional failure rather than a polished keynote Audience outcomes A first-person view of how high-performance cultures normalise compromise long before any single decision goes wrong A frank account of what changed, and what did not, after public confession and the loss of a sporting career A clearer sense of what genuine accountability sounds like in practice, distinct from public-relations recovery language An honest portrait of survivorship work through the LIVESTRONG story, separated from the sporting record

Why organisations work with Ben Edmonds Patent record. He is named inventor on commercial patents inside Dyson’s New Product Innovation team and earlier at Xyratex, including the global stowage system on the Dyson DC49 vacuum cleaner. He speaks about innovation from the perspective of an engineer who has shipped commercial products. Inside view of an engineering-first culture. More than a decade at Dyson taught him what structural conditions allow teams to produce original products consistently. He can name the specific choices that distinguish companies that innovate from companies that talk about it. Tactile method, not slideware. His sessions involve teams building real prototypes from cardboard. Senior leaders walk out having designed something with their own hands. Translates equally to executives and children. Edmonds runs an international Inventor Club for young people alongside corporate work. The discipline of teaching twelve-year-olds removes abstraction from how he explains innovation to senior leaders. Biography highlights Twelve years at Dyson, leaving as Principal Designer in the New Product Innovation department. Named inventor on multiple patents assigned to Dyson Technology Limited and earlier to Xyratex (since acquired by Seagate), including the global stowage system on the Dyson DC49. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Aided Product Design from the University of Portsmouth. Founder of InnovationBen and the international Inventor Club, an innovation programme running with young people across multiple countries. Speaking clients include Airbus, the UK Ministry of Defence, Dyson, and the UK Sheet Plant Association. Founder of CRINNAC, a prototyping and product development workshop for hardware founders. Biography At Dyson, engineering ran the show and marketing followed. Engineers solved the problem first, then marketing built the story to sell it. That ordering is the structural difference between companies that ship original products and companies that talk about wanting to. Edmonds spent more than a decade inside that culture, working in Dyson’s New Product Innovation department and rising to Principal Designer. He is the named inventor on commercial patents covering parts of the Dyson product range, including the stowage system for the DC49 vacuum cleaner. Before Dyson he led design at Xyratex, where his team built the storage hardware that held data for IBM, Dell and NetApp. His teaching draws a direct line between two settings most innovation speakers keep separate: the corporate boardroom and the school workshop. He runs an international Inventor Club for children alongside corporate engagements with Airbus, the Ministry of Defence and the Dyson alumni network. The same five-step discipline applies in both: observe a problem, generate options, build a prototype, test it, communicate what you found. The work he does with senior teams uses cardboard prototyping. It looks playful, and audiences laugh through it. The point is serious. Within an hour, a finance team or head office leadership group has designed and built something that did not exist when they walked in. Key speaking topics Innovation culture and structural design Practical creativity in the workplace Product design and rapid prototyping Building inventive teams Engineering thinking applied to commercial problems Creative confidence and problem-solving The structural conditions for sustained innovation Ideal for Heads of R&D, innovation directors, and chief product officers responsible for new product pipelines Executive teams in engineering-led businesses asking how to scale creative output without losing rigour Heads of culture and people functions tasked with building innovation capability across non-technical teams Off-sites and leadership retreats where the goal is for teams to leave having built something together Audience outcomes A working prototype their own team built during the session A diagnosis of which structural conditions in their business help or hinder new ideas Tools they can apply the next day to spot problems worth solving Methods for treating creative problem-solving as a learnable team discipline

Why organisations work with Alex Polizzi She has walked into more than a hundred real struggling businesses on camera and named exactly what was failing – her credibility is documented and specific, not theoretical. Audiences working on customer experience get something rare: an operator who can describe the gap between management assumption and customer reality from both sides of the front desk. Her commercial advice carries a weight most speakers cannot match – she applies the same standards to The Polizzi Collection’s three boutique hotels as she applies to the businesses she advises, with her own balance sheet as the test. Her BBC Two series The Fixer took her diagnostic approach beyond hospitality into retail, manufacturing, and food service – making her relevant to any audience grappling with family-run or founder-led business performance, not only hotels. She founded and scaled Millers Bespoke Bakery from start-up to a supplier of Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, and Fortnum & Mason, giving her genuine entrepreneur-to-operator credibility that extends beyond the family hospitality dynasty. Biography highlights Presenter of Channel 5’s The Hotel Inspector since 2008 – nineteen-plus series visiting and turning around struggling British hospitality businesses Presenter of BBC Two’s The Fixer (four series, 2012-2015) – extending the business turnaround model to family enterprises across retail, manufacturing, and food Co-owner and active operator of The Polizzi Collection: Hotel Tresanton (Cornwall), Hotel Endsleigh (Devon), and The Star, Alfriston (East Sussex, opened 2021) Trained at the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong; worked for Marco Pierre White at the Criterion, London; held operational roles across Rocco Forte Hotels in Cardiff, Rome, and St Petersburg Read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford Co-founded Millers Bespoke Bakery; grew to supply Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, and Fortnum & Mason Author, Alex Polizzi’s Little Black Book of Hotels (2010) Granddaughter of Lord Forte; mother is Olga Polizzi CBE, Director of Design at Rocco Forte Hotels Biography Most owners of service businesses are certain they know what their customers experience. Nineteen series of Channel 5’s The Hotel Inspector suggest otherwise. Alex Polizzi has spent more than fifteen years walking into struggling British hotels and family enterprises and naming, clearly, what the management cannot see from the inside. Her authority comes from two directions. She trained at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong, worked for Marco Pierre White at the Criterion, and held operational roles across Rocco Forte Hotels in Cardiff, Rome, and St Petersburg. She also co-founded Millers Bespoke Bakery with her then-partner Marcus Miller – building it from a start-up to a supplier of Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, and Fortnum & Mason. She read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. That experience extends to The Polizzi Collection, three boutique hotels she co-owns and actively operates with her mother, the designer Olga Polizzi: Hotel Tresanton in Cornwall, Hotel Endsleigh in Devon, and The Star in Alfriston, East Sussex. Her advice to other businesses carries the weight of someone whose own commercial performance depends on the same standards she applies elsewhere. For BBC Two’s The Fixer (four series, 2012-2015), she extended the same diagnostic lens beyond hotels to family businesses in retail, manufacturing, and food – demonstrating that the tension between conviction and commercial reality is not a hospitality problem alone. The granddaughter of Lord Forte, she brings both the heritage of a three-generation hotel dynasty and the independence of someone who has built and operated alongside it on her own terms. Key speaking topics Hospitality leadership and operational improvement Business turnaround in service and family-run enterprises Customer experience and service standards Commercial positioning for independent and boutique businesses Entrepreneurship and scaling founder-led businesses Recruitment and performance in service industries Family business dynamics and succession Ideal for Hospitality industry conferences and hotel association events Family business forums and owner-managed business summits Customer experience and service excellence programmes (cross-sector) SME and entrepreneurial leadership events where founder perspective is central Audience outcomes A clearer framework for diagnosing the gap between what a business intends to deliver and what customers actually receive Practical understanding of the operational and cultural patterns that drive underperformance in service businesses Insight into how service standards, staff performance, and commercial positioning interact – and which lever to pull first Perspective on the specific challenges of running or advising family-owned enterprises, including how personal loyalty can mask business-critical problems Grounded confidence that improvement in service and commercial performance is achievable through process discipline, not wholesale transformation

Why organisations work with Chika Russell CHIKA’S Foods went from home production to listings in Waitrose, Holland & Barrett and Ocado, and then to a $9.8 million Series A – Russell’s perspective covers every stage of that journey, not just the origin story. Her management accounting background gives her a financially specific way of talking about growth decisions that most founder narratives avoid: she built her initial stock and order management systems in Excel before the business could afford software, and that discipline remained the foundation of the company’s commercial architecture. She navigated a reverse diaspora expansion – building a UK consumer brand first, then returning to Nigeria with a manufacturing operation producing 2.6 million units a week – which is a rare, documented case study in cross-border market entry that runs in the opposite direction to most internationalisation models. In 2015 she received offers from all five investors on BBC’s Dragons’ Den and declined them all; six years later she secured institutional PE from a fund backed by the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank. For organisations thinking about strategic patience and investor fit, that sequence is evidence, not anecdote. Social impact is structurally embedded in her commercial model – a penny from every pack sold goes to World Vision’s Empowering Girls programme, and CHIKA’S Africa employs over 300 people, more than half of them women – making her a credible voice on what purpose-led growth actually costs and yields. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of CHIKA’S Foods, launched 2015; UK national retail distribution including Waitrose, Co-op, Holland & Barrett, Ocado and WH Smith Secured $9.8 million Series A from Alitheia IDF, a gender-lens private equity fund backed by the European Investment Bank and African Development Bank (December 2021) Qualified management accountant; ten years in banking and finance before founding CHIKA’S BBC Dragons’ Den (2015): received offers from all five investors; Deborah Meaden described it as one of the best pitches she had ever seen BBC Question Time panellist; regular contributor to BBC Radio’s Wake Up to Money Business Leader Top 30 Inspiring UK Entrepreneurs (2019); Consumer Business Rising Star, Black British Business Awards (2019) Biography CHIKA’S Foods began in a home kitchen in 2014 with hand-toasted peanuts and plantain crisps inspired by Nigerian street food. Within a decade it had secured institutional private equity backing and a Lagos manufacturing operation producing 2.6 million units a week. The path between those two points is what Chika Russell talks about. Her background shapes that conversation in an unusual way. She is a qualified management accountant who spent a decade in banking before founding CHIKA’S. Her instinct for financial architecture, investor narrative and cost control runs through every growth decision she describes – not as theory, but as method. In 2015, she appeared on BBC’s Dragons’ Den and received offers from all five investors. She turned them all down. Six years later, she secured $9.8 million from Alitheia IDF – a gender-lens private equity fund backed by the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank. For organisations trying to understand what attracts the right institutional capital, that sequence is direct evidence. CHIKA’S Africa, launched in Lagos in 2022, now employs over 300 people – more than half of them women. The business donates a penny from every pack to World Vision’s Empowering Girls programme. Russell is a BBC Question Time panellist and a regular on BBC Radio’s Wake Up to Money: the standing of an operator who has built across markets, not one who has written about doing so. Key speaking topics Consumer brand building and retail distribution Access to growth capital and institutional investment Cross-border market entry and expansion into Africa Financial discipline in early-stage and scaling businesses Purpose-driven commercial growth Entrepreneurship and founder decision-making Gender-lens investing and impact-linked capital Ideal for Founders and entrepreneurs seeking institutional capital or retail distribution scale FMCG, CPG and consumer brand leaders exploring cross-border or emerging market growth Investment and private equity audiences focused on impact-linked or growth-market strategies Senior executives in corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, or commercial development programmes Audience outcomes A clearer understanding of how financial discipline – not product vision alone – determines whether a consumer brand crosses from traction to institutional scale Insight into what impact-linked institutional investors actually require, and how to construct a credible narrative for them A practical perspective on cross-border market entry drawn from real first-mover experience in both the UK FMCG market and Nigeria Greater clarity on how to embed social purpose into a commercial model without compromising financial performance A more honest account of the investor journey – including the strategic value of declining the wrong capital

Why organisations work with Dino Sofos He has built category-leading shows in two different genres, launching Dua Lipa’s At Your Service as Persephonica’s first title and co-creating The News Agents, which hit 24 million downloads in seven months. He ran BBC News Podcasts for long enough to learn what works at scale: 85 million downloads across Brexitcast, Americast and Newscast during his tenure as editor. He understands the commercial crossover between audio and broadcast, having been the first editor to transfer a current affairs podcast, Brexitcast, onto BBC One in 2019. He speaks from operator experience, not commentary, which makes him useful to executives weighing real decisions about content, talent and audience strategy. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Persephonica, an independent audio production company established in 2021. Former Editor of BBC News Podcasts, with 14 years at the BBC. Creator of Brexitcast, Americast and Newscast for the BBC. Brexitcast won the Listeners’ Choice award at the British Podcast Awards 2019. Co-creator of The News Agents with Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, produced in partnership with Global. Producer of Dua Lipa: At Your Service, featuring guests including Elton John, Amal Clooney and Pedro Almodovar. Biography Brexitcast started inside the BBC as an experiment in how political reporters talked to each other when the cameras were off. Dino Sofos was the editor who turned that informal energy into a format, then into a habit, then onto BBC One in 2019, the first time a current affairs podcast had crossed over to television. That move, and the 85 million downloads accumulated by BBC News Podcasts during his editorship, gave him a specific kind of knowledge. He understands how audio formats work commercially, how much of audience loyalty is structural rather than topical, and why most attempts to manufacture habit fail in the first six weeks. He left the BBC in 2021 to found Persephonica. The company launched with Dua Lipa’s At Your Service, featuring guests from Elton John to Pedro Almodovar, and followed with The News Agents, co-created with Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall in partnership with Global. The News Agents became the UK’s most downloaded daily news podcast, reaching 24 million downloads in seven months. For organisations trying to build their own audience, his value is less about podcasting as a channel and more about the operating discipline behind it: choosing the right voices, designing formats that reward return listening, and running the commercial side of attention without losing the editorial instinct that attracted people in the first place. Key speaking topics Podcasting and digital audio strategy Building loyal audiences at scale Creative entrepreneurship and independent production Talent identification and format design Editorial innovation in news and current affairs Commercial models for original content Ideal for CMOs and communications directors weighing investment in owned audio and content formats Media, publishing and broadcasting leaders considering how to adapt for a podcast-first audience Founders and heads of content designing subscriber or listener strategies HR and internal comms leaders looking at audio for employee engagement and leadership storytelling Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what separates shows that build habit from content that merely accumulates views. Practical reference points from launching chart-topping podcasts in both celebrity and news formats. Specific lessons from editorial formats such as Brexitcast, Americast and The News Agents on pairing talent with structure. A working view of the commercial and talent economics of independent production.

Why organisations work with Kelly Vero She has shipped AAA games (including credits across the Lara Croft and Transformers franchises) and now runs an AI-powered digital fashion business, so she speaks about immersive technology from the inside of two different commercial stacks, not from a consultancy slide. As CEO and CTO of NAK3D, she gives leadership teams a concrete view of how 3D content, AI and consumer brands are starting to fit together at production scale. Her book How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals (Routledge) gives executives a structured way to read the metaverse as the natural extension of forty years of game technology, not a marketing fad. She has worked at policy and institutional level with the European Commission and Pro Helvetia, which means she can frame technology questions in terms a regulated board will recognise. Biography highlights CEO and CTO of NAK3D, a Swiss AI-powered digital fashion start-up. Chief Metaverse Officer at Aequaland, an educational platform for children. Author of How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals, published by Routledge. Earlier edition nominated for the British Business Book Awards 2024. 30-year career in interactive entertainment, with credits across the Lara Croft and Transformers franchises. Consultant to the European Commission, Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council) and Confetti Media Group. Won a Startup Innovation Award at a World Economic Forum-linked event in Davos, January 2024. Biography The metaverse arrived in the boardroom as a slogan and left as a question: where is the operational substance behind any of this. The honest answer is that it sits inside the games industry, where 3D worlds, real-time content pipelines and live-service economies have been working at scale for two decades. That is the world Kelly Vero has spent thirty years inside. Her credits stretch across the Lara Croft franchise and Hasbro’s Transformers games, taking her from script and character work into production at the heart of mass-market AAA development. The result is a deep, practitioner-level grasp of how immersive technology actually gets built, shipped and monetised. She now applies that experience as CEO and CTO of NAK3D, a Swiss AI-powered digital fashion company sitting between gaming, virtual platforms and consumer brands. NAK3D won a Startup Innovation Award at a World Economic Forum-linked event in Davos in January 2024. Vero is also Chief Metaverse Officer of the children’s education platform Aequaland, and has consulted for the European Commission and Pro Helvetia on technology and creative policy. Her book How Video Games Made the Metaverse: From Pixels to Portals, published by Routledge, treats the metaverse as the next chapter of a long technical lineage, not a sudden hype cycle. For boards trying to decide what to fund, what to ignore and what to build, that frame is more useful than any forecast. Key speaking topics AI and 3D commerce The metaverse as commercial infrastructure Digital fashion and virtual goods Generative AI in creative production Game design as a model for customer experience Web3 and immersive platforms Innovation strategy in deep tech Ideal for CMOs and brand leaders deciding how to commit to virtual goods, digital fashion and immersive customer experience CEOs and boards of consumer and entertainment businesses weighing AI and 3D investment CTOs and digital transformation leads scoping AI commerce, content pipelines and creative AI Investors and innovation teams in retail, fashion, media, gaming and adjacent sectors Audience outcomes A clear read on which immersive and metaverse claims are commercially serious and which are not Concrete examples of how AI and 3D content are already reshaping fashion, retail and entertainment commerce A working frame for treating game technology as the parent discipline of the metaverse, with practical implications for product and platform decisions Confidence to scope a first credible AI or 3D content initiative, rather than commission another exploratory study

Why organisations work with Alicia Asín She runs Libelium, the Spanish IoT company behind the Waspmote wireless sensor platform, deployed across smart cities, precision agriculture and environmental monitoring projects worldwide. Audiences get a working founder-CEO view, not a technology commentator. She was the first woman to receive Spain’s National Young Entrepreneurs Award (2014) and received the Rey Jaime I Award for Entrepreneurship in 2017, a prize whose jury includes Nobel laureates. These are sovereign-level, externally adjudicated credentials. Second position in the 2018 European Commission Prize for Women Innovators reinforces the EU-level recognition. Her “Datacracy” argument, that data should strengthen democratic accountability rather than erode it, gives public-sector, smart-city and ESG audiences a specific vocabulary for the governance layer of IoT and AI deployment. She works in English and Spanish, which makes her directly useful for pan-European, Iberian and Latin American corporate and public-sector events. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO, Libelium; creator of the Waspmote IoT sensor platform First woman to receive Spain’s National Young Entrepreneurs Award (2014) Rey Jaime I Award for Entrepreneurship, 2017 Runner-up, European Commission Prize for Women Innovators, 2018 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader Named “Spanish with Talent” by Marca España; 2016 National Computer Science Prize Biography Sensors are the quietest part of the technology stack and the one that will most shape the next decade of public-sector decision-making. Alicia Asín co-founded Libelium in Zaragoza and has spent the intervening period building Waspmote, the company’s open-source IoT hardware platform, into a reference product for smart cities, precision agriculture and environmental monitoring deployments worldwide. The recognition record is sovereign-level. She was the first woman to receive Spain’s National Young Entrepreneurs Award (2014). In 2017 she received the Rey Jaime I Award for Entrepreneurship, one of the most prestigious prizes in Spain, whose jury includes Nobel laureates. In 2018 she was named runner-up in the European Commission Prize for Women Innovators. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. The argument she brings to senior audiences is governance, not hardware. “Datacracy” is her shorthand for the idea that IoT and AI should strengthen institutional accountability, in cities, in food systems and in public services, rather than weaken it. That framing gives public-sector, smart-city and ESG audiences a specific lens on procurement, data ownership and the design of monitoring systems that people will actually trust. For technology leadership, smart cities, sustainability and European public-sector audiences, Asín offers the working view of a multi-award-winning founder who is still running the company. She speaks in English and Spanish, which makes her directly useful across Iberian, pan-European and Latin American programming. Key speaking topics Internet of Things and the Waspmote platform in practice Smart cities, precision agriculture and environmental monitoring at scale Datacracy: data, transparency and institutional accountability Women in technology and STEM education under AI Founder-CEO experience of scaling a European hardware company Ideal for Technology leadership, innovation and R&D audiences at European corporates Smart-city, public-sector and urban-policy conferences Sustainability, agri-food and environmental programmes evaluating IoT deployments Women-in-tech and leadership events at pan-European and Latin American programmes Audience outcomes A working founder-CEO view of IoT deployment in cities and food systems A vocabulary (“Datacracy”) for the governance layer of IoT and AI adoption Specific examples drawn from Libelium deployments in smart cities and precision agriculture A pan-European perspective on the policy and procurement context for sensor-led programmes

Why organisations work with Carl Leighton-Pope He has sustained a boutique agency relationship with artists like Bryan Adams, Michael Bublé and Billy Ocean across decades of contractual and technological upheaval, which is rare evidence of how to keep large clients inside a small business. The catalogue of names is its own form of credibility: the Marquee Club in 1964, Dire Straits and Simple Minds at NEMS, The Chippendales as a touring product, WWE and Harlem Globetrotters in Europe. Few speakers can draw on a working roster of this length. He is, in commercial terms, an entrepreneur who diversified beyond his core: from agency work into management, into theatre production with Carnaby Street The Musical and LOVE, and into international touring across genres outside music. The delivery is built for audiences who want a senior business story told with humour and specific characters, not a framework deck. Useful for after-dinner, leadership offsites, and entrepreneurial events where the room wants substance carried by narrative. Biography highlights Founder and Managing Director, Leighton-Pope Organisation, London (incorporated 1991, Companies House 02634876). Career began in 1964 at the Marquee Club in Soho, working in an environment that included Rod Stewart, The Who and Eric Clapton. Former agent at NEMS, where he signed Dire Straits, Simple Minds, Patti Smith, The Motors, UFO and Camel. Signed Bryan Adams as an agency client in 1984 and has subsequently represented Michael Bublé, Billy Ocean, Van Morrison, Bonnie Tyler, Chris Rea, Keith Urban and Jeff Healey. Producer and international tour operator for The Chippendales, and his agency has handled WWE and Harlem Globetrotters tours. Writer and producer of Carnaby Street The Musical and the West End play LOVE (2023). Biography The music business has been rebuilt three times in a single working lifetime. Vinyl gave way to CDs, CDs to downloads, downloads to streaming, and the contractual and revenue logic underneath each change tore through agency businesses that could not adapt. The Leighton-Pope Organisation, founded in London in 1991, has carried the same artists across most of that turbulence. That continuity is the credential. Bryan Adams, signed in 1984 while Carl was still building his agency career, remains a client. Michael Bublé and Billy Ocean sit on the current roster alongside historical clients like Van Morrison, Bonnie Tyler, Chris Rea and Keith Urban. Earlier in his career, working at NEMS, he signed Dire Straits, Simple Minds, Patti Smith, The Motors, UFO and Camel. The names matter because they are the proof of an agency model that has held under load. The career began in 1964 at the Marquee Club in Soho. By 1972 he was running a recording studio in Cardiff and managing the band Sassafras on Chrysalis Records. The Leighton-Pope Organisation followed in 1991 and has since extended beyond music into international touring for The Chippendales, WWE and the Harlem Globetrotters, and into theatre production with Carnaby Street The Musical and the West End play LOVE in 2023. The speaking work draws directly on that operating history. The substance is entrepreneurship inside a creative industry, told through specific decisions, specific clients and specific deals over six decades. Audiences leave with named cases and the texture of how a small business keeps very large clients. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship in the entertainment industry Talent identification and long-term client retention Building a boutique business with global clients Diversification beyond a core service line Music industry reinvention across format cycles Business storytelling for leadership audiences Ideal for Entrepreneurs and founder-led businesses scaling around a small senior team. CEO and board offsites where the brief is business reflection through narrative rather than framework. After-dinner and gala audiences at industry conferences and corporate events. Leadership programmes covering client relationship longevity and creative industry commercial models. Audience outcomes A working understanding of how a boutique agency retains top-tier clients across decades and format changes. Specific cases on signing, developing and managing globally commercial artists. A view on diversification decisions taken across music, live entertainment and theatre. Material on entrepreneurial judgement under industry-wide disruption, drawn from a six-decade career.