Growth Strategy

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 Jack Stratten Pattern recognition grounded in fieldwork. Insider Trends runs retail safaris in London, New York, Tokyo and Seoul, which means his examples come from stores he has physically been inside, not slide decks recycled from conference circuits. A named RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer in both 2023 and 2024, giving buyers a third-party signal of standing in the retail community. Direct experience advising Nike, LVMH, Ikea, Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover and Microsoft on retail formats and customer experience, so the frame of reference fits enterprise decision-makers. Works across the full retail stack, from store roles and staff models to omnichannel, supply chain and sustainability, which lets a single session connect teams that usually plan in silos. Format flexibility. Keynote, boardroom session, trend workshop or guided retail safari, all drawn from the same underlying research base. Biography highlights Head of Trends, Insider Trends, a London-based retail futures agency advising C-suite clients globally. Selected for RETHINK Retail’s Top Retail Influencers list in 2023 and 2024. Clients include Nike, Johnson and Johnson, Converse, Ikea, Shell, Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover, Costa Coffee, Diageo, Microsoft, LVMH, Nespresso, Twilio, The National Trust and Galeries Lafayette. Has run trend seminars for senior business audiences in partnership with the British Library. Media commentator on retail change, including appearances on Channel 4 and BBC Radio 5. Published author on Insider Trends and contributor to industry outlets including Retail Technology Innovation Hub. Biography Physical stores, e-commerce, app, social commerce, marketplace listings, supply chain footprint. For most retailers these are still governed as separate projects with separate owners, even though a single customer now moves across all of them inside one buying decision. That gap between how customers shop and how retailers are organised is the core tension Jack Stratten’s work addresses. As Head of Trends at Insider Trends, a London-based retail futures agency, he sits on top of a continuous research engine that tracks new store formats, brand experiences and commercial models in the cities where retail is evolving fastest. The agency’s client list spans Nike, LVMH, Ikea, Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover, Microsoft and Galeries Lafayette, and the work typically lands as a keynote, a boardroom session, a workshop, or a guided retail safari through live stores. The value to a leadership team is diagnostic as much as inspirational. Stratten is good at naming which shifts are real signals versus which are noise, which store formats actually drive commercial outcomes, and where omnichannel investment translates into loyalty rather than cost. RETHINK Retail named him one of its Top Retail Influencers in both 2023 and 2024, a practitioner-voted signal that buyers in the sector recognise his read on the category. What separates his sessions from a standard retail trends talk is the grounding. The examples are stores he has walked, brands his team has studied in depth, and commercial decisions he has watched play out, which makes the content usable inside a planning cycle rather than a year-end inspiration slot. Key speaking topics Retail trends and customer behaviour Omnichannel strategy Store of the future and new retail formats Customer experience in consumer brands Retail innovation and business model change Sustainability in retail and supply chain Direct to consumer and brand experience Ideal for Retail and consumer goods executive teams setting store, channel and format strategy. Heads of customer experience, digital and e-commerce aligning on a single commercial plan. Property, leasing and shopping centre leadership rethinking the role of physical space. Senior marketing and brand leaders in consumer categories adjacent to retail. Audience outcomes A clearer view of which retail shifts are material signals and which are surface noise. Concrete examples of store formats, brand experiences and omnichannel models that are working in 2025, with the commercial logic behind them. A shared vocabulary across store, digital, marketing and supply chain teams for the next planning cycle. Specific prompts for where to test, invest or pull back in the next 12 to 24 months. A sharper sense of how consumer brands and retailers are redefining the role of the store.

Why organisations work with Liz Jackson She has been on both sides of the table: founder of a B2B marketing firm she ran for 17 years, and now Sales & Marketing Director at M&A advisor BCMS, where she works with owner-managers through valuation, growth-to-sale, and the transition into life after exit. She runs The Fellows Group, a network of more than 200 entrepreneurs who have already sold their companies through BCMS. Few speakers can draw on a live, operational community of post-exit founders for their material. Her credibility on resilience is earned, not borrowed. She lost her sight at 25, the same year she founded Great Guns Marketing, and built the business into a multi-site national operation while blind. The MBE in 2007 was for services to business, not for personal story. She turns the conversation about disability and inclusion into a problem-solving conversation. Her framing, that disabled people develop unusually strong problem-solving instincts because they have had to, gives leadership teams a sharper lens on adversity and capability than the standard inclusion talk. Biography highlights MBE, 2007, for services to business Honorary doctorate, Staffordshire University, 2012 Founder, Great Guns Marketing, a national B2B telemarketing business she led for 17 years Sales & Marketing Director, BCMS (Initium Corporate Finance), advising owner-managers on sale and transition Host of The Fellows Group, a network of 200+ entrepreneurs who have exited their businesses through BCMS Featured on Channel 4’s Secret Millionaire Author of StartUp!, published by Pearson Prentice Hall Biography Great Guns Marketing was launched in 1998 by a 25-year-old with no degree, a £1,000 grant and a £4,000 loan from The Prince’s Trust. The same year, its founder lost her sight. Over the next 17 years the business grew into one of the UK’s leading B2B telemarketing firms, with offices across England, Scotland and Ireland. That arc is the foundation of Liz Jackson’s commercial credibility, but it is no longer her main subject. As Sales & Marketing Director at BCMS, the M&A advisor for owner-managed businesses, she now sits inside the transactions she once would have been on the other side of, coaching founders through valuation, growth-to-sale and the life that begins the day the cheque clears. She also hosts The Fellows Group, a network of more than 200 entrepreneurs who have exited their companies through BCMS. It gives her a working evidence base on what actually changes for founders after a sale, the parts that are well rehearsed and the parts that are not. That material sits behind her work on entrepreneurship, growth strategy and exit planning, and it is what distinguishes her from speakers whose entrepreneurial story stopped at the founding moment. Jackson’s MBE, awarded in 2007 for services to business, and her honorary doctorate from Staffordshire University in 2012 are the public markers of that record. The Channel 4 Secret Millionaire appearance and her book StartUp!, published by Pearson Prentice Hall, are the points where her story has reached a broader audience. Inside a leadership room, her sharpest material is on how owner-managers can run a business now with the discipline of a business that will one day be sold. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Growth strategy for owner-managed businesses Sale readiness and post-exit transition Sales and B2B customer acquisition Resilience and adversity in business building Disability, problem-solving and inclusion Networking and founder community Ideal for Owner-managers, founders and shareholder-directors of mid-market businesses M&A advisors, private equity portfolio companies and corporate finance audiences Sales and commercial leadership teams in B2B businesses DEI and leadership audiences seeking a substantive voice on disability and capability Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what running a business “to be sold” actually looks like operationally, not just financially Specific insight from a network of 200+ post-exit founders on what makes the transition succeed or fail A sharper framing of disability and adversity as a source of commercial problem-solving capability A direct account of how a national B2B business was built, and sustained, by a founder operating without sight

Why organisations work with Andrew Lloyd Gordon He brings a working academic’s grasp of behavioural science into the room where pricing, positioning and campaign calls actually get made, rather than leaving it at theory. His Google Digital Academy and “We Are Squared” training work gives him a current, practitioner-grade read on how digital marketing is actually taught and executed inside the platforms buyers depend on. His Warwick teaching post on the business MSc at WMG means his material is tested on senior post-graduate students, not only conference audiences, which sharpens the frameworks before they reach a client room. He has delivered to commercial, public-sector and charitable buyers at the same level of specificity – Cabinet Office, Vodafone, Lloyds, Dyson, the NHS, University of Cambridge – so the behavioural-science argument holds up outside the usual marketing-conference audience. Biography highlights Assistant Professor, WMG, University of Warwick, teaching on the post-graduate business MSc. MSc Business Psychology (Distinction), Coventry University; BA (Hons) Psychology, University of Liverpool; Organisation Studies, Warwick Business School. Trainer on Google’s “We Are Squared” digital marketing programme and member of Google’s Digital Academy training team. Client work with the UK Cabinet Office, Vodafone, Lloyds, Dyson, Hitachi, Hearst Magazines, the NHS, Universal Music, Kings College London, UCAS and the University of Cambridge. Signature keynote topics include customer psychology, the psychology of pricing, marketing-led growth and innovation adoption. Speaks internationally across the UK, USA, Middle East, Europe and the West Indies, to audiences ranging from 30 to 3,000. Biography Buying decisions are not made on the spreadsheet side of the brain. Price sensitivity, brand preference, the decision to try something new, the decision to stay with a supplier – these sit in territory that behavioural science has spent four decades mapping. Most commercial functions have not caught up. That gap is the working material of Andrew Lloyd Gordon’s career. He is a business psychologist with an MSc from Coventry, undergraduate psychology from Liverpool and organisation studies from Warwick Business School, and he holds an Assistant Professor post at WMG, University of Warwick, teaching on the post-graduate business MSc. The academic grounding is real; the output is commercial. His practitioner credentials sit next to the academic ones. He is a trainer on Google’s “We Are Squared” digital marketing programme and a member of Google’s Digital Academy training team, which keeps his material close to how digital acquisition is actually executed inside the platforms most organisations rely on. Client work spans the UK Cabinet Office, Vodafone, Lloyds, Dyson, Hitachi, Hearst, the NHS, Universal Music, Kings College London, UCAS and the University of Cambridge. The argument he makes to senior commercial audiences is narrow and useful. Pricing, persuasion, innovation adoption and customer retention are psychological problems before they are channel problems, and teams built around funnels and attribution models routinely miss this. His keynotes walk leaders through the specific behavioural mechanisms – how price is perceived, how influence actually works, why new products stall on launch – and translate them into decisions marketing and product teams can take the next morning. Key speaking topics Customer psychology and the science of influence Behavioural pricing Marketing-led business growth Innovation adoption inside organisations Digital marketing strategy Applied behavioural science for commercial teams Ideal for CMOs, marketing directors and commercial leaders rebuilding how their teams think about customer decision-making. Pricing, revenue and product leaders who need a behavioural-science lens on pricing architecture and positioning. Innovation and transformation leads launching new propositions into sceptical internal and external audiences. Senior leadership teams in regulated or public-sector contexts where persuasion and adoption matter as much as the policy itself. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the behavioural mechanisms that drive customer choice, with named principles rather than anecdotes. Specific questions to take back to pricing, marketing and product teams about where psychology is being ignored in current practice. A sharper read on why well-resourced campaigns and launches underperform, and what to change first. Practical examples drawn from Google training and FTSE-scale client work, not laboratory studies alone.

Why organisations work with Les Binet The 60:40 brand-to-activation framework he co-developed with Peter Field is the most cited effectiveness benchmark in UK marketing strategy. Organisations use it to build a defensible, evidence-based case for long-term brand investment to boards focused on quarterly ROI. His analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank covers more than 1,000 case studies across 700 brands, 83 sectors and over three decades of commercial data. No comparable longitudinal evidence base for marketing investment decisions exists in published form. The Share of Search metric he developed gives organisations a free, predictive tool for tracking brand health and anticipating market share movements, validated across automotive, energy and handset categories using publicly available Google Trends data. Research he presented at the 2025 IPA Effectiveness Conference showed that marketing budget is eight times more important than ROI in driving effectiveness. Most CMOs surveyed believed the opposite – a gap his work directly addresses. His grounding in Physics, Artificial Intelligence research and LSE econometrics makes him one of the few voices in effectiveness who can construct, interrogate and critique the statistical models organisations use to evaluate their own campaigns. Biography highlights Co-author of The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013) and four further IPA effectiveness reports; has contributed to more IPA Effectiveness Awards papers than any other individual (per the Advertising Association) Former Group Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB; joined BMP account planning in 1987 and remained across all iterations of the agency for more than three decades Recipient of the IPA President’s Medal (2014), the highest honour the UK advertising industry can award Elected IPA Honorary Fellow (2004); Convener of Judges, IPA Effectiveness Awards (2005) Board Advisor, Journal of Advertising Research; named in Campaign Magazine’s “40 over 40” (2023) MA Physics, Oxford; MPhil Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh; postgraduate Economics (Birkbeck) and Econometrics (LSE) Biography The Long and the Short of It, published by the IPA in 2013, is one of the most-cited effectiveness documents in marketing. Its co-author, Les Binet, spent three decades at adam&eveDDB building the evidence that most organisations structure their marketing investment around the wrong metrics. The research drew on 996 advertising effectiveness case studies across 700 brands, 83 sectors and more than 30 years of IPA Databank data. Its central finding of the “60:40 heuristic” recommended that most consumer brands allocate roughly 60% of marketing budget to brand building and 40% to short-term activation. The report has since been cited in over 70 academic publications and referenced across multiple languages. Binet’s subsequent work has continued to extend the evidence base. The Share of Search metric he developed gives organisations a free, predictive tool for tracking brand health using Google Trends data, validated across automotive, energy and handset categories. At the 2025 IPA Effectiveness Conference, he presented research with Medialab showing that budget is eight times more important than ROI in driving marketing effectiveness. Most CMOs surveyed believed the opposite. He read Physics at Oxford and completed an MPhil in Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh, later adding postgraduate study in Economics at Birkbeck and Econometrics at the LSE. Elected an IPA Honorary Fellow in 2004, he received the IPA President’s Medal in 2014. He serves as a Board Advisor to the Journal of Advertising Research and consults independently through Binet Consulting. Key speaking topics Marketing effectiveness measurement Brand building versus short-term activation The 60:40 investment framework Share of Search and brand demand indicators Econometrics and advertising evaluation Media effectiveness in digital environments Evidence-based marketing investment strategy Ideal for CMOs and senior marketing leaders making significant media and brand investment decisions CFOs and finance functions reviewing marketing accountability and budget allocation Boards and executive teams evaluating the commercial return on advertising investment Strategy, planning and insight functions in organisations with major advertising spend Audience outcomes A clear, evidence-grounded framework for distinguishing short-term ROI from long-term profit growth, and why the difference matters to boards Practical understanding of the 60:40 brand-to-activation heuristic and how to adapt it by sector, brand maturity and business context A working introduction to Share of Search as a predictive brand health indicator, applicable without specialist tools or budget A stronger internal case for protecting brand investment in organisations under pressure to demonstrate immediate measurable returns Familiarity with the specific effectiveness patterns – reach, share of voice, emotional advertising – that the IPA data consistently identifies as drivers of commercial results

Why organisations work with Deborah Meaden Twenty years of unscripted investment judgement on Dragons’ Den, where she has personally backed dozens of businesses, given audiences a working language for evaluating risk, founders and growth. Operator credibility built on a £33 million sale of Weststar Holidays to Phoenix Equity Partners in 2005, after a management buyout she led from inside the family business. A consistent, public position on sustainability as a commercial question: through The Big Green Money Show on BBC Radio 5 Live she has interrogated CEOs of major UK and global businesses on what climate strategy actually costs and earns. Author credibility across audiences from senior operators (Common Sense Rules) to financial literacy for children (HarperCollins Little Experts series, including a Financial Times Book of the Year 2023 Critics’ Choice). A direct, plain-language style that translates entrepreneurial decisions into something a leadership team can argue with, not just admire. Biography highlights Investor on BBC’s Dragons’ Den since 2006. Led the 1999 management buyout of Weststar Holidays and sold the majority to Phoenix Equity Partners in 2005 for £33 million. Author of Common Sense Rules (Random House Business, 2009) and the HarperCollins Little Experts financial literacy series. Why Money Matters named a Financial Times Book of the Year 2023 Critics’ Choice; silver at the Made For Mums Toy Awards. Co-host of The Big Green Money Show on BBC Radio 5 Live with Felicity Hannah. Trustee of Tusk Trust, Fellow of WWF, Ambassador for the RSPB, Marine Conservation Society and World Horse Welfare, Compassion Visionary at CIWF. Honorary degrees from the University of Exeter Business School, Staffordshire University, Keele University and Bath Spa University. Biography Weststar Holidays was a single-site family business when Deborah Meaden joined its arcade operations in 1988. By 2005 it was a five-park operator hosting around 150,000 holidaymakers a year, sold to Phoenix Equity Partners for £33 million after the management buyout she had led six years earlier. The arc, from operator to owner to seller, is the spine of how she reads other people’s businesses. Two decades on Dragons’ Den have widened that lens. Since 2006 she has sat through several thousand pitches and put her own capital behind a long list of UK ventures, from artisan manufacturer Fox Brothers to consumer brands across food, retail and clean technology. The pattern audiences see, the questions about unit economics, founder discipline and market truth, is the same pattern she applies to her own portfolio. Her published work extends the argument into financial literacy and commercial sustainability. Common Sense Rules (Random House Business, 2009) sets out the operating principles she uses on the Den. The Little Experts series with HarperCollins takes the same plain-language approach to children: Why Money Matters was named a Financial Times Book of the Year 2023 Critics’ Choice. On The Big Green Money Show with Felicity Hannah, she presses senior corporate leaders on whether climate commitments survive contact with a profit-and-loss account. Trustee at Tusk Trust, Fellow of WWF, Ambassador to the RSPB, Marine Conservation Society and World Horse Welfare, and Compassion Visionary at CIWF: the environmental work is a working part of how she frames commercial choices. Honorary doctorates from Exeter, Staffordshire, Keele and Bath Spa recognise the same combination of operating record and public argument. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership Investment judgement and growth strategy Building and selling a business Sustainability as a commercial discipline Brand, customer and consumer trust Resilience and decision-making in private companies Women in business and leadership Ideal for Founders, CEOs and senior operators of growth-stage and family-owned businesses Boards setting strategy on sustainability and long-term capital allocation Sales, partner and customer-facing leadership teams Annual conferences and leadership offsites for operating businesses Audience outcomes A practical view of how an experienced investor reads pitches, plans and people. Concrete reference points from twenty years of UK private investment, including her own deals. A clear-eyed framing of sustainability as a commercial choice, with named examples from major UK and global businesses. Confidence to ask harder questions of their own numbers, founders and customers. A memorable, direct keynote voice that audiences quote back inside their organisations.

Why organisations work with Cate Trotter A working method, not a trend report. Trotter pairs structured signal analysis with a disciplined experimentation approach that gets innovation off the slide deck and into the P&L. Direct access to live retail signal infrastructure: Insider Trends runs on-the-ground retail safaris in London, New York, Paris and Seoul, used by senior teams at Chanel, Lego, Nike, Hugo Boss and Carrefour. A retail futures lens recognised by the industry’s own gatekeepers: Rethink Retail Top 100 Global Retail Influencer in 2021 and 2022, LinkedIn Top Voice, TechNation 200 Thought Leader. GINI Certified Chief Innovation Officer credentials applied to commercial problems, not abstract innovation theory. Useful for boards that have tired of innovation programmes that do not pay for themselves. Builds the bridge between AI hype and AI deployment that actually saves money, in language operators and finance teams can act on. Biography highlights Founder and Head of Trends, Insider Trends, a London-based retail futures agency operating retail safaris in London, New York, Paris and Seoul. Rethink Retail Top 100 Global Retail Influencer, 2021 and 2022. LinkedIn Top Voice and TechNation 200 Thought Leader. Future 100 Entrepreneur (Striding Out) and StartUp 100 Entrepreneur (Startups). GINI Certified Chief Innovation Officer. Client roster includes Chanel, Lego, Nike, Mercedes, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, Hugo Boss, Galeries Lafayette, Marks & Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover, Carrefour, L’Oreal, Unilever, Google and Meta. Biography Retail leaders rarely lack trend material. The Carrefour COO, the Hugo Boss board, and the senior teams at Chanel and Lego all have access to the same headline reports as everyone else. What they buy from Insider Trends is the layer underneath: the structured reading of signals that have not yet become headlines, and a method for acting on them before competitors do. Cate Trotter founded Insider Trends to close that gap. The firm runs in-person retail safaris in London, New York, Paris and Seoul, used by senior operators to ground strategic decisions in what is actually working on the shop floor and on the screen. Clients include Nike, Mercedes, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, Marks & Spencer and Galeries Lafayette. Her method joins two disciplines that usually sit apart. A structured PESTLE-style reading of non-obvious signals on the front end, and a disciplined experimentation practice on the back end, drawn from her work as a GINI Certified Chief Innovation Officer. The result is innovation that earns its budget, rather than innovation as performance. Recent work focuses on AI deployments that operators can defend on commercial grounds, not on novelty. The industry has noticed. Rethink Retail named her a Top 100 Global Retail Influencer in 2021 and 2022. LinkedIn ranks her as a Top Voice. TechNation listed her among its 200 Thought Leaders. She speaks to audiences of up to 800 across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and frequently advises CEOs, COOs and boards directly, including the General Manager of L’Oreal France and the Chief Operations Officer of Carrefour. Key speaking topics Retail futures and customer experience Innovation as a managed commercial discipline AI deployment in retail and consumer-facing operations Trend signals and structured foresight Disciplined experimentation Digital transformation in retail Customer behaviour and consumer signals Ideal for Retail and consumer goods CEOs, COOs and boards setting innovation and customer experience priorities. Chief Innovation Officers and transformation leads under pressure to convert experiments into commercial returns. Chief Marketing and Customer Officers in consumer-facing categories. Leadership offsites at brands rethinking physical and digital retail formats. Audience outcomes A sharper read of the non-obvious signals shaping their category, separated from the noise of trend headlines. A repeatable method for converting trend insight into commercial experiments with measurable returns. Concrete examples of AI use cases in retail that have already paid for themselves. A clearer view of what the world’s best retail operators are actually doing differently. Confidence to retire innovation projects that exist for show and back the ones that move the P&L.

Why organisations work with Anna Bance First-mover operator in luxury fashion rental. She built the category in 2009, before “circular” was a retail strategy term, and has spent over a decade running the unglamorous infrastructure behind it. Direct line of sight on what rental does to a balance sheet. Inventory turns, dry-cleaning economics, customer acquisition costs and breakage rates are answered from experience, not from a McKinsey deck. Credibility on both sides of the luxury question. Former Head of UK PR at Hermès, then founder of a platform that puts luxury brands into a rental model many of them initially resisted. Backed by Global Founders Capital, the Rocket Internet associated fund of Oliver Samwer, with Girl Meets Dress one of its maiden investments. A useful proof point on commercial substance, not just narrative. Articulate on the consumer shift behind the model: experience economy, sustainability pressure, and the limits of “buy something new every season” as a retail proposition. Biography highlights Co-founder and CEO, Girl Meets Dress, since 2009 Former Head of UK PR, Hermès, and PR for Temperley London BA (Hons) Fashion Promotion, London College of Fashion Early-career editorial roles at The Telegraph, Harper’s Bazaar and InStyle First institutional funding from Global Founders Capital, the Oliver Samwer fund Recognition includes Drapers Etail Innovation Award, NatWest Fashion Entrepreneur of the Year, Specsavers Everywoman in Retail, and a Management Today 35 Under 35 cover Biography Girl Meets Dress launched in 2009, before “circular fashion” was a retail board agenda item. The proposition was simple, the operations were not: rent designer dresses online, return them, repeat. Anna Bance built the company from inside the luxury PR world, where she had been Head of UK PR for Hermès, and where she had watched designer wardrobes sit unworn for most of their useful life. The harder part of the story is what comes after the idea. Rental at scale is a logistics business dressed as a fashion brand: dry cleaning, inventory rotation, repair, sizing accuracy, customer acquisition against a category most consumers had to be taught existed. Global Founders Capital, Oliver Samwer’s fund, named Girl Meets Dress as one of its maiden investments, and the business spent the next decade proving the unit economics of rental in a category designed for ownership. That operator vantage point is what makes her useful to retail and consumer leadership teams. The argument for circular commerce is well understood at this point. The argument that needs sharper voices is the operational one: where rental margins actually come from, why some categories work and others do not, what the brand consequences are when a luxury house lets its product enter a secondary access model, and how consumer behaviour around occasion-wear is shifting under experience economy pressure. Recognition has followed the build, not the pitch. Drapers Etail Innovation Award, NatWest Fashion Entrepreneur of the Year, Specsavers Everywoman in Retail, a Management Today 35 Under 35 cover. The work that earned them is still running. Key speaking topics Circular fashion and rental as a retail model The operational economics of access over ownership Luxury brand strategy in a secondary-use market Female founders and scaling a category-defining business Consumer behaviour in the experience economy Sustainability as commercial strategy, not marketing Ideal for Retail, fashion and consumer goods leadership teams reassessing wholesale and DTC models Brand owners and CMOs in luxury weighing entry into rental, resale or subscription Sustainability and strategy leads who need the commercial case for circular, not the ethical one Female founder networks, VC-backed scale-up audiences and entrepreneurship programmes Audience outcomes A sharper read on which retail categories rental works in and which it does not Honest numbers on what circular fashion does to inventory, margin and customer acquisition A clearer view of where luxury brands stand to gain or lose by entering rental A founder-level account of building a category before its time, and the operational cost of doing so

Why organisations work with Allyson Stewart-Allen She has worked with more than 260 businesses across 27 countries, including named clients such as BAE Systems, HSBC, Lufthansa, NBCUniversal, Shell, Burberry and Chanel, which means her advice is calibrated against live transatlantic deal flow rather than secondary research. Working with Americans, now in its second edition with Routledge, is the most specific practitioner handbook on US business culture from a non-American authority, and it gives organisations a shared reference point before she walks into the room. She is the first two-time winner of the European Foundation for Management Development Excellence in Practice Award, for programmes delivered with Lufthansa at London Business School and BAE Systems at Oxford Saïd, which is rare independent recognition of how her work lands in executive development. Her teaching affiliations at Saïd Business School (Oxford) and the Møller Institute (Cambridge) place her inside the senior-executive programmes her audiences attend; she speaks to issues she also teaches on. Her media track record, including BBC, CNN, Sky News, Financial Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal, makes her a credible voice for high-profile internal events and externally facing client conferences. Biography highlights CEO and founder of International Marketing Partners Co-author of Working with Americans: How to Build Profitable Business Relationships (Routledge, second edition) First two-time winner of the European Foundation for Management Development Excellence in Practice Award, for programmes with Lufthansa (London Business School, 2009) and BAE Systems (Saïd Business School, Oxford, 2012) MBA from the Drucker School, Claremont Graduate University, where she studied under Peter Drucker; BSc International Business, University of Southern California Teaching affiliations with Saïd Business School (Oxford) and the Møller Institute (Cambridge) Regular commentator for BBC, CNN, Sky News, Financial Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal Biography US market entry is one of the most consistently over-promised and under-delivered strategic moves a European or Asian company can make. Allyson Stewart-Allen has spent her career working on the other side of that problem. As CEO and founder of International Marketing Partners, she has advised more than 260 organisations in 27 countries on how to internationalise their brand, their sales approach and their leadership style without losing what made them work at home. Her grounding is unusual. An MBA from the Drucker School under Peter Drucker himself, a BSc in International Business from USC, and a London-based practice that has worked with Accenture, BAE Systems, Burberry, Chanel, HSBC, Lufthansa, NBCUniversal, SABMiller and Shell. The resulting point of view is specific rather than diplomatic: most companies fail internationally for reasons that were visible at the approval stage and deferred by the people in the room. Her book Working with Americans, co-authored with Lanie Denslow and published by Routledge in a second edition, is the practitioner text in its category. It remains the reference most widely used by European and Asian professionals trying to build durable commercial relationships with US counterparts. The programme work is comparable in scale: she is the first two-time winner of the EFMD Excellence in Practice Award, for leadership programmes with Lufthansa at London Business School and BAE Systems at Oxford Saïd. The teaching continues at Saïd Business School and the Møller Institute at Cambridge, alongside non-executive and advisory roles at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the British Business Excellence Awards and the Chief of Staff Association. For organisations planning significant international moves, that combination is unusual: an operator with an academic footprint, a published author in the room, and a commentator whose voice their leadership team has already seen on the BBC or FT. Key speaking topics International growth strategy and market entry US market entry and transatlantic commercial culture Global brand building and brand internationalisation Corporate diplomacy and cross-cultural leadership Reputation strategy for globally facing organisations Building and running international teams Ideal for CEOs, CCOs and CMOs committing to US or multi-market expansion Boards and executive committees pressure-testing an international growth plan before approval Heads of international, regional presidents and business unit leaders operating across US, UK, EU and Asia Leadership development and talent functions designing programmes for globally mobile executives Audience outcomes A practical diagnostic of where a planned international expansion is most likely to fail, based on patterns from 260-plus client engagements Specific frameworks for US market entry and working across US-international commercial relationships, drawn from Working with Americans A sharper view of how global brand decisions translate into local commercial outcomes Reference points from named client programmes recognised by the EFMD, applicable to the audience’s own sector

Why organisations work with Steve Faktor He works from a proprietary, named methodology, the 4C’s of Innovation™, developed inside Fortune 100 innovation programmes at American Express, Citi and MasterCard, not adapted from case studies of others’ work. His operating record is concrete. As head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, he launched commercial products including Zync, LoyaltyEdge, and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. His 9 Corporate Personality Types™, the viral Forbes piece picked up by NPR, gives audiences a working tool for diagnosing why innovation initiatives die inside specific corporate cultures. He carries a 750,000-strong LinkedIn following from his status as one of the platform’s original 160 Influencers, alongside figures like Richard Branson. Buyers hiring him get a futurist whose calls are public and dated. The voice in Econovation, sharp and satirical, is the same voice on stage. Senior leaders get an honest read on innovation work without the consultant gloss. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of IdeaFaktory, the innovation incubator behind multiple $100M+ businesses for Fortune 100 brands, built on its proprietary 4C’s of Innovation™ process. Former Vice President of Growth and Innovation and Head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, where he launched Zync, LoyaltyEdge and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. Former SVP of Innovation and Growth Ventures at Citigroup; senior strategy and innovation executive at MasterCard; former management consultant at Arthur Andersen. Author of Econovation: The Red, White, and Blue Pill for Arousing Innovation (Wiley, 2011). Forbes and Harvard Business Review contributor; one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following. Host of The Trendaddy show; media credits include The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg Radio and MSNBC. Graduate of NYU Stern School of Business. Biography At American Express, the Chairman’s Innovation Fund came with a $50M budget and a brief to launch new businesses inside the company. Steve Faktor ran it. Out of that role came Zync, LoyaltyEdge and a Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. The same period produced the methodology he has since codified as the 4C’s of Innovation™: context, creativity, capabilities and culture. That methodology is the operating logic he now applies through IdeaFaktory, the innovation firm he founded after leaving AmEx. IdeaFaktory has helped Fortune 100 clients launch multiple $100M+ businesses by partnering with vetted startups and rebuilding their internal innovation programmes from the culture out. The ‘culture out’ part matters. His viral Forbes piece on the 9 Corporate Personality Types, picked up by NPR, came from watching innovation initiatives die at the hands of identifiable, predictable internal characters. Faktor’s second strand of work is futurist. Econovation (Wiley, 2011) argued that consumerism was ending and producerism was emerging, with economic value shifting to those who make rather than those who consume. As one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following and Forbes and Harvard Business Review columns, he has built more than a decade of dated, public predictions clients can audit. In a boardroom, both strands earn their seat. Senior teams get a working framework rooted in real product P&Ls, the AmEx ones with his name on them, not someone else’s case studies. They also get a voice that has been right enough, often enough, in public, that buyers can audit the work before they commission it. Key speaking topics Innovation strategy and methodology Corporate-startup partnerships and commercialisation Growth strategy in financial services and consumer goods Futurism and trend forecasting Innovation culture and corporate change Business model innovation Digital commerce, payments and loyalty Ideal for Chief Innovation Officers and Heads of Strategy in Fortune 500 firms whose innovation programmes have plateaued at pilot stage. Growth and commercial leadership teams in financial services, payments and consumer goods evaluating where to commit capital next. Boards and executive committees commissioning a candid, externally validated read on internal innovation capability. Founders and corporate venture teams looking for an operator’s view of how large enterprises actually make buying decisions. Audience outcomes A specific diagnostic for why their innovation programmes are stalling, anchored to the 4C’s of Innovation™. A working vocabulary for the cultural archetypes that block or enable change inside large organisations, drawn from the 9 Corporate Personality Types. A view of which trends in technology, economics and consumer behaviour are most likely to disrupt their P&L over the next five to ten years. A short list of the highest-leverage moves a senior team can make to convert innovation budget into commercial product launches.

Why organisations work with Seth Godin The permission marketing framework, first articulated in 1999, anticipated the mechanics now encoded in GDPR, email consent law, and the inbound marketing movement. Organisations working with Godin are drawing on the original source, not a derivative Purple Cow provides a genuinely testable argument: remarkability must be designed into the product or service from the outset, not applied as a marketing layer afterwards: a direct challenge to most organisations’ R&D and go-to-market sequencing His body of work spans 21 bestsellers over three decades with a consistent intellectual thread; buyers are not engaging with a single-thesis speaker, but with someone whose thinking has proved durable across multiple market cycles Inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (2018), the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame (2013), and the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame – the only person known to hold all three – giving him third-party validation across the full spectrum of marketing practice His daily blog, running for over 25 years without interruption, is itself a proof point for the compounding value of consistent, permission-based communication: a lived demonstration of the principle he teaches Biography highlights Author of 21 international bestsellers translated into 38+ languages, including Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribes, Linchpin, This Is Marketing, and This Is Strategy (2024 National Bestseller) Originator of the «permission marketing» and «interruption marketing» frameworks (1999), now foundational to digital marketing, CRM practice, and consent regulation worldwide Founder of Yoyodyne, a pioneering permission-marketing company sold to Yahoo! in 1998; served as Yahoo!’s VP of Direct Marketing post-acquisition Inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (AMA New York, 2018), the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame (2013), and the Guerrilla Marketing Hall of Fame MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA in computer science and philosophy, Tufts University Founder of the altMBA, an intensive online leadership and decision-making workshop Five TED Talks; author of one of the most-read daily business blogs in the world Biography Seth Godin sold his first company, Yoyodyne, to Yahoo! in 1998 for $29.6 million. It was a permission marketing business: built around the then-contrarian argument that reaching people who had consented to hear from you was worth more than reaching vastly more people who had not. That argument is now the structural basis of email marketing, CRM, and data consent regulation across most markets. His 1999 book Permission Marketing named the framework and introduced its counterpart: interruption marketing, the logic of buying attention from people who did not want to give it. The book’s central claim – that anticipated, personal, relevant communication outperforms volume-based reach at every commercial stage – has proved more durable than most marketing theory of its era. HubSpot built a software category around a version of it. GDPR made it legally mandatory. The same structural argument runs through his subsequent work. Purple Cow made the case that a product worth noticing is the precondition for marketing worth running. Tribes reframed leadership as community-building rather than hierarchy. This Is Strategy, published in 2024 and a US National Bestseller, gives organisations a practical framework for distinguishing between long-term systems thinking and reactive planning. Each book refines the same underlying question: what does it actually take to earn the attention and trust of people who have a choice? He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a degree in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University. Inducted into three marketing halls of fame and the author of 21 international bestsellers, Godin writes a daily blog that has run without interruption for over 25 years; a compounding body of public intellectual work that few business writers at any level have matched. Key speaking topics Permission-based marketing and opt-in engagement Market differentiation and the logic of remarkability Strategy, systems thinking, and long-term planning Tribe leadership and community-driven growth Creative practice and the discipline of shipping work The economics of attention in overcrowded markets Climate communication and collaborative action Ideal for CMOs and brand leadership teams rethinking acquisition and retention strategy CEOs and senior strategy leads pressure-testing their differentiation logic Founders and growth-stage leaders building category identity Boards and executive teams resetting planning frameworks in volatile conditions Audience outcomes A working understanding of the permission marketing framework and how it applies to current customer acquisition and retention strategy A testable argument for why remarkability must precede marketing investment, not follow it Practical framing for the difference between short-term attention tactics and long-term trust-building Exposure to the systems-thinking approach in This Is Strategy, useful for teams that confuse tactics with strategy A challenge to default assumptions about reach, volume, and interruption as commercial levers

Why organisations work with Richard Reed He built Innocent from a £500 stall at a London music festival to Europe’s number one smoothie brand and a Coca-Cola exit valued at over half a billion dollars. He ran every stage of that growth as co-CEO of the brand side of the business. JamJar Investments has backed Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health and Tails.com. The portfolio gives him a live investor view of what is working in consumer brands today, beyond any retrospective Innocent story. He pioneered “wackaging”, the on-pack conversational copy that built Innocent’s brand voice. Other UK consumer brands copied the device for more than a decade, which is unusually long-lived evidence of a marketing mechanic that travels. Innocent committed 10% of profits to charity through the Innocent Foundation from day one, and Reed kept that operating model intact through every funding round and the Coca-Cola sale itself. Purpose at scale is something he has actually operated, not theorised. His book “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing” (Canongate, 2016) collected single pieces of advice from Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and Sir David Attenborough among others. He brings that breadth of access into the room with senior audiences. Biography highlights Co-founder of Innocent Drinks (1998); grown from £500 of fruit at a London music festival to Europe’s number one smoothie brand Sold Innocent to The Coca-Cola Company in 2013, in a transaction valued at over half a billion dollars Co-founder of JamJar Investments, the consumer-focused early-stage venture firm whose portfolio includes Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health and Tails.com Author of “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing…” (Canongate Books, 2016), with interviews including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama and Sir David Attenborough Appointed CBE in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the food industry and to charity Founder of Art Everywhere; co-founder of the Innocent Foundation; presenter of BBC Three’s “Be Your Own Boss” Biography Innocent Drinks started with £500 of fruit at a London music festival in 1998, and a sign asking passers-by whether the founders should give up their day jobs. Fifteen years later, Coca-Cola paid over half a billion dollars for the company. Richard Reed was one of three Cambridge graduates who took it that distance, running the brand side of the business as co-CEO from market stall to category leader. What set Innocent apart at scale was discipline about what to keep. The brand voice, the on-pack “wackaging” copy that competitors imitated for over a decade, and the 10% of profits committed to charity through the Innocent Foundation all stayed intact. They survived every funding round and the eventual Coca-Cola sale. By 2010, Innocent held roughly three-quarters of the UK smoothie market. Since 2013, Reed has invested in the next wave of consumer founders through JamJar Investments. The portfolio reads as a working hypothesis about where consumer brand power is going: Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health, Tails.com. He carries the operator’s view of what scales and what does not into every deal. Beyond the day job, he authored “If I Could Tell You Just One Thing” for Canongate Books in 2016. The book drew single pieces of advice from Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Sir David Attenborough and forty-odd others, with author’s profits donated to mentoring and social inclusion charities. He was appointed CBE in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the food industry and to charity. Key speaking topics Building consumer brands from start-up to category leader Brand voice, marketing innovation and the wackaging mechanic Social purpose as operating model, not communications layer Scaling under competitive pressure and corporate ownership Early-stage investing in consumer businesses Founder mindset and entrepreneurial discipline at scale Customer conviction and brand love in commodity categories Ideal for Founders and founder-CEOs scaling a consumer-facing business through the awkward middle stages Marketing, brand and customer-experience leaders working on customer conviction inside large organisations Boards and corporate development teams making capital decisions on consumer brands or considering an acquisition of one ESG, sustainability and purpose leads moving social commitments out of communications and into the operating model Audience outcomes A first-hand account of what scaling a consumer brand demands at each stage, from market stall to category leader to corporate exit Specific examples of how Innocent built brand voice, wackaging and category share, and what survived corporate ownership versus what did not A live investor-side read on which consumer-brand bets are paying off, drawn from JamJar’s positions in Deliveroo, Tony’s Chocolonely, Babylon Health and Tails.com A grounded argument for why social purpose works commercially when it is built into the operating model, with the Innocent Foundation as the worked example