Motivational speakers

Why organisations work with Rahul Kapoor A mindset framework taught inside IIM Bangalore’s Executive General Management Programme since 2009, not a stage routine reverse-engineered into a workshop. Two published books with Times Group Books and a long catalogue of corporate engagements with Accenture, Amazon, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung give buyers a track record across multinational audiences. Content is built for the personal layer of leadership performance: focus, self-direction, recovery, decision discipline. The brief that fits is “our senior people are running on empty,” not “we need a lecture on strategy.” Delivers in English and Hindi across South and Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and North America, which is rare for the South Asian executive audience segment. Biography highlights Guest faculty, IIM Bangalore, since 2009, leading the “Bond and Learn” programme for EGMP, Entrepreneurs & Family Businesses, and Armed Forces cohorts. Author of Workwise: Lessons in Excellence for Young Professionals (Times Group Books) and Dad and I. Outstanding Young Persons of India Award (2010); Young Achievers Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2016). Corporate engagements with Accenture, Amazon, Adobe, American Express, Cisco, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, SAP Labs, Nestle Nutrition Institute. Contributor to The Times of India (Education Times), Dainik Bhaskar, and Feelings Magazine. Bilingual delivery in English and Hindi, with engagement track record across India, the Gulf, Southeast Asia, and North America. Biography Most senior professionals reach a ceiling that has nothing to do with skill. Their calendars are full, their results are visible, and yet the personal layer underneath, the capacity to think clearly and recover quickly, is no longer keeping up with the role. Rahul Kapoor’s body of work addresses that layer directly. He has been guest faculty at IIM Bangalore since 2009, where his “Bond and Learn” sessions sit inside the Executive General Management Programme, the Entrepreneurs and Family Businesses Programme, and the Armed Forces Programme. The institutional context matters: the same content that runs as a keynote in a corporate room has been refined inside one of India’s most rigorous executive education environments for over a decade. His book Workwise: Lessons in Excellence for Young Professionals, published by Times Group Books, codifies the framework. Dad and I, a second book aimed at younger readers, extends it. Two awards, the Outstanding Young Persons of India and the Young Achievers Award for Social Entrepreneurship, recognise the contribution to early-career and youth audiences alongside the corporate work. The corporate roster reads like a global technology and professional services list: Accenture, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe, American Express, SAP Labs. What buyers in those rooms are commissioning is not a strategy lecture. It is a confident, bilingual practitioner who can shift the internal state of a senior audience inside ninety minutes and leave them with a usable mental model afterwards. Key speaking topics Mindset and self-leadership Personal performance and goal achievement Purpose, values, and work-life integration Resilience and emotional regulation under pressure Team motivation and engagement Executive development for early- and mid-career leaders Ideal for CEO and CHRO audiences commissioning an opening or closing keynote at leadership offsites Sales and revenue teams entering a high-stakes quarter or post-restructure period Executive education and high-potential cohorts inside multinationals operating in South and Southeast Asia Family business and entrepreneur networks looking for a serious mindset and values session Audience outcomes A direct framework for self-direction and personal performance that survives contact with a real working week Renewed clarity on individual purpose and how it maps onto current organisational role Practical tools for emotional regulation and recovery under sustained pressure A shared language inside the team for discipline, focus, and follow-through

Why organisations work with Ramon Ray He has built and exited three of his own companies and runs two active media platforms, so the advice is operator-tested, not theorised from the outside His Celebrity CEO framework gives founders a step-by-step way to build local and category authority, not generic personal-brand advice He has interviewed every Shark Tank investor and President Obama, and shares platforms with Seth Godin and Simon Sinek, which gives him an unusually wide read on what works across founder archetypes He has been invited to the White House and the US Congress on small-business and personal-branding topics, which gives the work institutional weight beyond the usual marketing-conference circuit He is a high-energy event host as well as a keynote speaker, and is regularly hired by Entrepreneur magazine and similar publishers to anchor their flagship conferences Biography highlights Founder of SmallBizTechnology.com and Smart Hustle Media, two long-running platforms serving small-business owners Author of The Celebrity CEO, Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing (Wiley), Technology Solutions for Growing Businesses, and two further titles Conducted the first live Google Hangout interview with President Barack Obama Member of the US Delegation to India led by Ivanka Trump for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit Invited expert witness to the US Congress and speaker at the White House on personal branding Contributor to Inc., Entrepreneur, PC World, Small Business Trends, and Allbusiness.com; co-founder of the Small Business Influencer Awards Biography Most small-business owners do not lose to better products. They lose to better-known competitors. The Celebrity CEO thesis takes that observation seriously and treats personal brand as a growth instrument with measurable outputs: leads, referrals, pricing power, retention. The book is the public face of two decades of work with founders trying to compete against larger rivals. The author of that thesis, Ramon Ray, is a five-time entrepreneur who has built and exited three companies, including SmallBizTechnology.com and Smart Hustle Media. He has written five books across technology, marketing, and personal brand, and his journalism appears in Inc., Entrepreneur, PC World, and Small Business Trends. His access to the top of the founder market is unusual. He conducted the first live Google Hangout with President Obama, joined the US Delegation to India for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, and has been invited as an expert witness to Congress and as a speaker at the White House on personal branding. He has interviewed every Shark Tank investor and shared stages with Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Deepak Chopra. What makes the work commercially useful is the operator’s eye behind it. Ramon co-founded the Small Business Influencer Awards with Anita Campbell, anchors Entrepreneur magazine’s flagship conferences as host, and runs an active mastermind for founders applying the Celebrity CEO playbook. The advice is not theoretical; it is what he is doing for himself in public, in real time. Key speaking topics Personal brand as a growth engine for founders Small-business marketing and customer acquisition Community building and category authority Social media for entrepreneurs Digital tools and technology for small business Entrepreneurial mindset and resilience Ideal for Founders and CEOs of small and mid-sized businesses Franchise networks, dealer councils, and independent business associations Marketing and growth leaders inside larger organisations who serve SMB customers Diversity-in-business and youth-entrepreneurship programmes Audience outcomes A working definition of what a Celebrity CEO is, and what it takes to become one in their market A simple model for turning customer relationships into a referral and retention engine Specific tactics for showing up consistently on social platforms without burning out Renewed conviction that being visible is part of the job, not a vanity project A short list of next moves they can act on the same week

Why organisations work with Raphael Rowe His story is not a metaphor. He served close to twelve years in prison for a 1988 murder he did not commit, as part of the M25 Three case, before the Court of Appeal ruled the convictions unsafe in 2000. His broadcast credentials are substantial in their own right: host of Netflix’s Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons since season two, BBC Panorama reporter, and a track record on BBC Radio 4’s Today, BBC One’s Six O’Clock News and Pilgrimage: The Road to Santiago. The Panorama investigative work, including on the Barry George case, places him inside the British public-interest journalism tradition rather than on the margin of it. The Raphael Rowe Foundation, his own organisation focused on prison health, education and rehabilitation, gives him a platform on institutional accountability that is active, not historical. He is comfortable on any stage that wants the full range of his experience, from a resilience keynote to a main-stage moderator role to an in-depth session on justice, media and institutional failure. Biography highlights Presenter of Netflix’s Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons since 2018 BBC Panorama reporter, BBC Radio 4 Today programme, BBC One Six O’Clock News, Pilgrimage: The Road to Santiago (BBC Two) Investigative work including the wrongful conviction of Barry George in the Jill Dando murder case Author of autobiography Notorious Founder of the Raphael Rowe Foundation, working on prison health, education and rehabilitation Served close to 12 years wrongly imprisoned as part of the M25 Three case; convictions ruled unsafe, 2000 Biography The M25 Three case is one of the most-cited miscarriages of justice in modern British legal history. Raphael Rowe is one of the three men at the centre of it. Convicted in 1990 for a 1988 murder and a series of aggravated robberies, he spent close to twelve years in prison before the Court of Appeal ruled the convictions unsafe in July 2000. That experience is the reason he speaks with authority on institutional accountability, resilience and the cost of being wrong, and the reason he chose to spend the second half of his working life investigating the same systems from the outside. Since his release, Rowe has built a career in BBC and international broadcast journalism. He has reported for and presented BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, BBC One’s Six O’Clock News and BBC Panorama, where his investigations included the wrongful conviction of Barry George for the murder of Crimewatch presenter Jill Dando. Outside the newsroom, he presented Pilgrimage: The Road to Santiago for BBC Two, a format that allowed him to explore questions of meaning and resilience at long form rather than in soundbites. The Netflix commission is the title that most audiences now know him by. Since 2018 he has hosted Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons, the series that has taken him into maximum-security facilities in more than 20 countries, with a perspective no other presenter in the category has: he is the only host who has served time on the other side of the bars. The advocacy work sits alongside the broadcasting. He founded the Raphael Rowe Foundation to work on health, education and rehabilitation inside prison systems, and his autobiography Notorious is his first-person account of the conviction, imprisonment and rebuild. For corporate audiences, Rowe offers a resilience keynote that cannot be recreated, a host with Netflix-level recognition, and a credible voice on institutional failure when the brief calls for it. Key speaking topics Resilience and rebuilding after catastrophic adversity Criminal justice, wrongful convictions and institutional accountability Investigative journalism and the public interest Prison reform, health, education and rehabilitation Ethics and accountability inside institutions Media craft: hosting, long-form journalism and broadcast storytelling Ideal for Corporate audiences and leadership events looking for a first-person resilience keynote with substance Legal, justice and compliance audiences engaging with institutional accountability and miscarriage of justice Media, communications and PR organisations wanting an investigative-journalism perspective Events requiring a Netflix/BBC-grade host or moderator with a high-recognition public profile Audience outcomes A grounded account of what resilience looks like after a decade inside a system most audiences only study A clearer view of how and why institutions make catastrophic errors, and what breaks that cycle A specific set of examples from Netflix’s Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons and BBC Panorama investigative work Reference points on institutional accountability that are usable in legal, corporate and public-sector contexts The benefit of a recognised Netflix and BBC name in the room for audience engagement and post-event conversation

Why organisations work with Ray Stubbs Four decades anchoring live football, darts and snooker on BBC, ESPN, BT Sport and Talksport mean the interviewing reflex is current, not nostalgic. The questions land because the format has been his daily job, not an occasional engagement. He has presented every major international tournament across 1994 to 2008 for BBC Sport, including World Cups, European Championships, the 1998 Winter Olympics and the 1998 Commonwealth Games. That is a rare working knowledge of how big sport actually unfolds for an audience. The football network is real. Years fronting Football Focus alongside Mark Lawrenson and reporting from inside the England camp at Euro 96 and France 98 have left him with the contact book to put credible names on a sports-themed corporate panel. He has presented FA Cup finals on ESPN and the World Seniors Darts Championship most recently, which gives him cross-sport range when the brief is not strictly football. Biography highlights Lead football presenter, ESPN UK, 2009 to 2013, including live coverage of the FA Cup finals Lead reporter, BT Sport, from launch through 2016 Presenter of Football Focus, BBC One, 1999 to 2004, alongside Mark Lawrenson BBC England football reporter from 2007; on-the-ground reporter at Euro 96 and the 1998 FIFA World Cup Co-host of BBC snooker coverage with Hazel Irvine; lead presenter of BBC darts coverage Presenter, World Seniors Darts Championship, 2023 and 2024 Former junior professional footballer at Tranmere Rovers and former Commercial Director of the club Biography Live network sports presenting is one of the most exposed jobs in British broadcasting. Three hours of cup-final coverage, a tournament closing ceremony, a darts final going to a deciding leg, with no autocue and a paying audience in millions. Ray Stubbs has done that job across BBC, ESPN, BT Sport and Talksport for more than forty years. The BBC years were the spine. Stubbs joined BBC Radio Merseyside in 1983, moved to BBC Manchester in 1986, and went on to anchor Football Focus from 1999 to 2004 with Mark Lawrenson. He covered every major international football tournament from the 1994 World Cup in the United States through to Euro 2008, including Euro 96 and France 98 from inside the England camp, and presented the BBC’s darts and snooker output alongside Hazel Irvine. In 2009 he left the BBC for ESPN as lead presenter of the network’s new UK Premier League coverage, fronting the FA Cup finals of 2011, 2012 and 2013. The move to BT Sport at the rebrand made him one of its lead reporters through 2016. Most recently he has presented the World Seniors Darts Championship in 2023 and 2024 and works for Talksport. The reason organisations book him is not access to a thesis; it is access to a presenter who has held network sports rooms together for forty years and has the football, darts and snooker contact book to fill a stage. That is a working broadcaster, not a guest celebrity. Key speaking topics Sports dinner hosting and after-dinner speaking Conference and award-evening chairing Panel moderation with sports figures and executives Live event presentation and Q&A Football, darts and snooker broadcast insight Corporate hospitality hosting Ideal for Sponsor and hospitality dinners around football, darts, snooker and major tournaments Annual corporate award evenings looking for a recognised sports broadcaster as host Sports industry conferences needing a moderator across player, executive and media panels Internal company events with a sports theme or sports-personality lineup Audience outcomes An evening paced with network broadcast timing, on the clock and on the brief Sports-figure panellists drawn out beyond standard interview lines by a peer who has chaired them on TV Anecdote and analysis from inside England camps, World Cup tournaments and FA Cup finals A host the audience already knows from BBC, ESPN and BT Sport, which raises the perceived weight of the agenda

Why organisations work with Rebecca Jane A founder story that is genuinely unusual: an all-female private investigation firm launched at twenty-four, scaled into national media coverage, and sold in 2018. Direct experience of running a consumer-facing business through personal upheaval, including divorce and the collapse of a previous property enterprise. A published HarperCollins memoir, The Real Lady Detective Agency, that gives the after-dinner content a documented spine rather than a stitched-together speech. Comfort with national audiences from sustained appearances on ITV’s This Morning, BBC Radio, Dragons’ Den and Big Brother, which translates into stage presence in front of large rooms. Biography highlights Founder of The Lady Detective Agency, established 2009, sold 2018. Author of The Real Lady Detective Agency: A True Story, HarperCollins, January 2013. Pitched on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, Series 10, 30 September 2012. Housemate on Channel 5’s Big Brother UK Series 18 in 2017. Regular national media contributor: The Daily Mail, Daily Star on Sunday, BBC Radio, ITV’s This Morning. Biography The Lady Detective Agency began in 2009 as a one-person operation in Lancashire. Rebecca Jane was twenty-four, recently divorced, and had just lost a property business. The agency went on to become one of the UK’s better-known female-led private investigation firms, with national newspaper coverage and broadcast features following within a few years. Her 2013 HarperCollins memoir The Real Lady Detective Agency set out the story in book form, including the surveillance work, the honey-trap operations and the personal arc that produced the company. The book is the spine of her speaking material and the source of most of the after-dinner content she now performs for corporate audiences. Television followed the publishing track. She pitched on Dragons’ Den in 2012, took part in Big Brother in 2017, and remained a regular on ITV’s This Morning and BBC Radio across the decade. The agency was sold in 2018, freeing her to work full-time on speaking, writing and media. What buyers get is a coherent founder narrative with a sellable arc: a young entrepreneur, an uncomfortable subject matter, a business built and exited, and a ten-year media career on top of it. The content is biographical rather than framework-driven, which is the basis on which to commission her. Key speaking topics Female entrepreneurship and start-up Personal resilience and recovery Building a business in an unconventional sector Media and public profile for founders Customer trust in sensitive consumer services Selling a founder-led business Ideal for Corporate after-dinner audiences looking for a strong personal story rather than an analytical keynote. Women-in-business networks and female founder events. Conferences on entrepreneurship, scale-up and exit, where a first-person account is wanted alongside expert speakers. Audience outcomes A first-hand account of what running a small consumer-facing business actually looks like through divorce and reinvention. A view of the UK private investigation sector from the inside, including how the agency was built and how it was eventually sold. A worked example of how national media exposure can be used by a founder to grow a small consumer brand. A motivational close grounded in a documented personal story rather than borrowed material.

Why organisations work with Rene Godefroy He brings a named, ownable philosophy. The “Village Hero” frame gives leaders a vocabulary for belonging that survives the keynote and shows up in daily behaviour. His client roster is unusually concentrated in frontline, customer-facing organisations. Coca-Cola, Aflac, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army. He speaks to the people who actually carry the brand. The resilience material is grounded in a specific lived narrative, not borrowed research. That gives the message authority with audiences who have heard the standard motivational circuit. He writes and speaks for retention and morale outcomes, not abstract inspiration. The brief he answers best is the one that mentions turnover, change fatigue, or a workforce that has stopped believing the slogans. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Village Hero, Inc., Atlanta. Author of Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent. Keynote work for Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott Hotels, Hyatt Hotels, and the U.S. Army. Speaker at the National Association for Pupil Transportation and the Michigan Assisted Living Association annual conference. Recognised by the City of Smyrna, Georgia with a dedicated “Rene Godefroy Day”; granted a key to the city by Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Runs humanitarian work supporting orphanages and health clinics in Haiti, partly funded by program fees. Biography Most workplace culture problems are not really about culture. They are about belonging. People decide to stay, contribute and look out for one another long before any engagement survey captures it, and they decide on the basis of small, daily signals from the people above them. That is the territory the “Village Hero” philosophy sits in. The frame comes from a specific origin. Godefroy grew up in a rural Haitian village, arrived in the United States as a young man with almost nothing, and worked through janitorial and service jobs before building a speaking practice. The argument he draws from that life is not biographical theatre. It is a working theory of how belonging is built one act at a time, and how leaders carry disproportionate responsibility for those acts inside an organisation. That theory has been tested against a particular kind of audience. His client list, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, Verizon Wireless, Marriott, Hyatt, the U.S. Army, is heavy on frontline and customer-facing workforces, where morale, retention and belief in the mission show up directly in operational performance. Kick Your Excuses Goodbye: No Condition Is Permanent extends the same material into individual accountability for change, particularly under pressure and constraint. He is most useful to organisations that have already tried the values posters and the engagement task force, and are now asking a more honest question. What behaviour, repeated daily by managers, would actually rebuild the social contract here. The Village Hero framework gives them a starting answer, and the City of Smyrna, Georgia, which declared a “Rene Godefroy Day” in his honour, gives a small civic indicator of the impression that practice has left. Key speaking topics Resilience and change leadership Workplace culture and belonging Employee engagement and morale Team performance under pressure Frontline leadership Purpose-driven leadership Personal accountability and mindset Ideal for HR, people and culture leaders rebuilding engagement and retention in frontline-heavy workforces Operations and customer experience leaders in retail, hospitality, telecoms, insurance, and logistics Sales kick-offs and dealer or franchisee networks that need a morale reset, not a tactics talk Defence, public sector and uniformed services audiences with high-pressure operating conditions Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for belonging that managers can use the next day, anchored in the “Village Hero” frame A direct, personal challenge to the stories teams tell themselves about change and constraint Concrete behaviours that lift morale and retention without waiting for a new culture programme A renewed sense of purpose for workforces fatigued by repeated restructuring and uncertainty

Why organisations work with René Meulensteen He spent six years inside the Ferguson dressing room during one of the most studied winning runs in modern sport, and can describe how standards, feedback, and selection were actually managed day to day. He developed and ran the individual technical and finishing programme that Cristiano Ronaldo credits for the shift from winger to record goalscorer, a working example of how senior performers are coached, not managed. His book “United, Sir Alex and Me”, with a foreword by Ferguson, gives him a documented and endorsed account of the methodology behind a sustained elite culture. As Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos, he has carried the same operating model into a different country, league, and squad and reached the World Cup knockout stage with it. Biography highlights First Team Coach at Manchester United from 2007 to 2013 under Sir Alex Ferguson. Three Premier League titles, one UEFA Champions League and one FIFA Club World Cup during his First Team Coach tenure. Twelve years at Manchester United in total, beginning in 2001 as Youth Technical Skills Development Coach. Author of “United, Sir Alex and Me: My Life in Football” (2023), foreword by Sir Alex Ferguson. Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos, contributing to qualification and Round of 16 progression at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Former Head Coach of Fulham FC in the English Premier League. Biography Manchester United won three Premier League titles, a Champions League and a FIFA Club World Cup in the years René Meulensteen spent as First Team Coach under Sir Alex Ferguson. The interesting question is not what was won. It is how a squad of senior internationals kept raising standards once they had already won everything. Meulensteen joined the club in 2001 as a youth technical skills development coach, working with academy players on the kind of detail that usually disappears once a player turns professional. By 2007 he was working with the first team, running individual development sessions with players including Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Ryan Giggs. The Ronaldo finishing programme, run during a suspension early in the 2007-08 season, is one of the few publicly documented cases of an elite forward being rebuilt as a goalscorer by deliberate coaching design. After Ferguson’s retirement in 2013, Meulensteen took head coach roles at Anzhi Makhachkala and Fulham FC in the Premier League, then moved into international football. Since 2018 he has been Assistant National Team Coach to the Australia Socceroos under Graham Arnold, including the squad’s progression to the knockout stage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. His book “United, Sir Alex and Me”, co-written with Wayne Barton and with a foreword by Ferguson, sets out the working methodology behind that period: how standards were set, how individuals were stretched, how a culture was held together across generations of senior players. That is the material organisations engage him to translate. Key speaking topics Building and sustaining a winning culture Coaching senior performers through individual development Leadership transition and succession in elite environments Standards, feedback and accountability inside high performance teams Translating elite sport methodology into executive teams Team cohesion across generations and personalities Ideal for Executive teams and boards seeking to maintain performance after a founder, CEO or long-tenured leader transitions out Sales leadership, partner groups and senior performer cohorts where individual development is the unlock Talent and people leaders responsible for high performance culture, succession and leadership pipeline Leadership offsites and conferences focused on team cohesion and sustained excellence Audience outcomes A working understanding of how Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United actually operated day to day, told from inside the coaching staff A concrete model of how senior performers are developed individually, drawn from the Ronaldo finishing programme Specific language for the standards, feedback and accountability practices that hold an elite culture together A clearer view of the leadership behaviours that survive a change at the top, and the ones that do not

Why organisations work with Rhys Jones He has turned back 200 metres from a summit in order to get a team home safely. That experience anchors his safety leadership work: he speaks credibly to the hardest call in any high-risk operation, which is stopping a job when stopping is the right answer. INEOS is the documented engagement. Jim Ratcliffe (then INEOS Chairman) sponsored his record-setting Everest climb in 2006, and the relationship developed into operational work, including a four-presentation programme for INEOS Olefins and Polymers in Texas. That is a reference a buyer can verify directly. The world record is documented and time-stamped. He completed the Seven Summits on his 20th birthday in May 2006 and held the title as the youngest in the world until Jordan Romero broke it in December 2011. The dates and the climb logs are public. He still runs an active expedition company. Monix Adventures, which he co-founded with his wife Laura, operates today as a luxury expedition and adventure travel business, so his material draws on current operational mountaineering rather than a single career-defining climb. His safety presentations are built around the recurring root causes of preventable injuries. Audiences come away with usable observations on team behaviour and the cultural habits that show up consistently in safer operations. Biography highlights Held the world record as the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits, completing the challenge on his 20th birthday in May 2006; record stood until December 2011. Set two earlier records on the way: youngest Briton to summit Mt McKinley (Denali) at age 17, and youngest summiteer of Mount Vinson in Antarctica at age 19. Everest expedition sponsored by INEOS, with public endorsement from Jim Ratcliffe at the time of the climb. 2007 expedition to South East Greenland produced first ascents of four previously unclimbed peaks. 2014 self-supported ski mountaineering ascent of Gunnbjorn Fjeld, the highest mountain in the Arctic, with his wife Laura. Co-founder of Monix Adventures, a luxury expedition and adventure travel company; documented safety leadership engagement with INEOS, including a four-presentation programme for INEOS Olefins and Polymers in Texas. Biography Organisations in oil and gas, construction, and aviation have written every safety procedure that needs writing. The injuries that still happen on site come from judgment under pressure and team behaviour in the moment a decision is taken. That is the territory Rhys Jones works in. Jones brings a specific source of authority to the conversation. In May 2006, on his 20th birthday, he became the youngest person in the world to climb the Seven Summits, holding the record until Jordan Romero broke it in 2011. The route there included two earlier records: youngest Briton up Denali at 17, and youngest summiteer of Mount Vinson in Antarctica at 19. INEOS sponsored the final Everest climb, beginning a corporate relationship that would later extend into his speaking work. What is distinctive is how he uses the experience. The talks are organised around moments of decision under stress. The central case is a climb on which he turned back 200 metres short of the top because conditions did not justify the final push. That kind of call is the central problem in safety culture, and the hardest thing to deliver in the moment. Today Jones runs Monix Adventures with his wife Laura, a luxury expedition company that takes private clients and corporate teams into the mountains. The speaking work sits alongside that. His longest documented client relationship is with INEOS, beginning with the company’s sponsorship of his Everest climb in 2006 and continuing through to a four-presentation programme for the Olefins and Polymers division in Texas. Key speaking topics Safety leadership in high-risk industries Decision-making and risk management under pressure Team behaviour in safety-critical operations Operational resilience and goal-setting Wellbeing and personal achievement Inspirational and after-dinner speaking Ideal for Heads of HSE and operations leaders in oil and gas, construction, infrastructure, and aviation Frontline supervisors and site teams in safety-critical industries who need a credible voice on the human factors behind preventable injuries Senior leadership offsites where the brief is risk decision-making, team accountability, and resilience Annual sales kick-offs, after-dinner engagements, and award ceremonies that need a credible keynote on goals and discipline Audience outcomes A grounded picture of where preventable injuries actually originate, framed around the recurring judgment and team-behaviour patterns that show up in incident analysis. The language and the standing to stop a job when conditions have changed, including who in a chain of command has the authority to make that call. Specific moments from extreme mountaineering that map onto high-risk industrial operations, useful as reference points in safety conversations afterwards. Stories from current expedition work that connect personal goal-setting and recovery habits to sustained performance at work.

Why organisations work with Riccardo Agostini Eight national and international titles across single-seater and GT racing, including three consecutive Italian GT Sprint championships and the Lamborghini Super Trofeo World Final. The credibility is documented, not narrated. A working understanding of how a small, specialised team performs under repeated time pressure. Pit crew, race engineer, and driver decisions land in the same second, and Agostini speaks to how that coordination is built and held. Instructor experience at Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, the Italian advanced driving school. He coaches as well as competes, which translates into a session that can teach, not only inspire. Italian and English delivery for European corporate audiences without translation overhead. Biography highlights Three-time Italian GT Sprint champion (2019, 2020, 2021) and 2021 Italian GT Endurance champion. 2017 Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America champion and Lamborghini Super Trofeo World Final winner. 2015 Porsche Carrera Cup Italia champion; 2012 Italian Formula Three champion (European and Italian series). Tested a Ferrari Formula One car in November 2012 as the Italian F3 rookie prize. Current factory-supported driver competing for Richard Mille AF Corse in the 2025 European Le Mans Series and the 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans. Development driver and instructor at Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, founded by former F1 driver Andrea De Adamich. Biography A GT car at racing speed sends information to the driver faster than most people can read a single line of text. The driver acts on it, the engineer on the pit wall reads telemetry from the same lap, and the crew prepares the stop. Three roles, one decision, repeated for two hours. That is the working environment Agostini has competed in since 2015. His titles span four manufacturer programmes. Porsche Carrera Cup Italia in 2015. Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America and the Super Trofeo World Final in 2017. Italian GT Sprint with Audi Sport Italia in 2019, 2020, and 2021, alongside the Italian GT Endurance title in 2021. He now races a Ferrari 296 GT3 for Richard Mille AF Corse in the European Le Mans Series and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The relevance to leadership audiences sits in two places. The first is composure: how a driver handles a bad lap, a strategy call that goes against him, or a mechanical failure with thirty minutes still to run. The second is coordination: how a driver, engineer, and crew of specialists make a sequence of decisions in compressed time without re-litigating each one. Both translate cleanly to senior teams operating in markets where the response window has shrunk. Agostini also coaches. As an instructor at Centro Internazionale Guida Sicura, the high-performance driving school founded by former F1 driver Andrea De Adamich, he develops younger drivers and corporate clients. That teaching role is what differentiates him from a circuit-only speaker. He has practised the translation from the cockpit to the classroom, which is the part that most motorsport profiles describe but few have actually done. Key speaking topics Performance under pressure Team coordination in compressed decision windows Recovery from mistakes and setbacks Coaching and talent development Discipline and preparation as competitive advantage Resilience through career uncertainty Cross-cultural team leadership in international motorsport Ideal for Sales and commercial leadership teams operating in high-frequency decision environments Operations and manufacturing leaders building cross-functional team coordination Talent and L&D directors designing high-performance coaching programmes Corporate hospitality programmes for automotive, engineering, and luxury brand audiences Audience outcomes A working model for how composure is built and held, drawn from cockpit experience rather than theory Specific examples of how driver, engineer, and crew compress decisions into seconds without losing alignment A view of how mistakes are processed inside a race weekend so that the next session is not compromised A coach’s perspective on developing younger team members under demanding conditions

Why organisations work with Richard Hammond A face audiences already trust. Two decades on Top Gear and The Grand Tour means a senior room recognises him the moment he walks on, which shortens the warm-up and lifts the agenda. Hosting craft built in live broadcast. Hammond reads a room the way a presenter reads a studio, which is the specific skill awards nights and corporate dinners need. Storytelling drawn from genuine high-stakes experience. The 2006 Vampire crash and the 2017 Rimac crash give him material that lands without rehearsal because it actually happened. Entrepreneurial second act. DriveTribe and The Smallest Cog give Hammond credible commercial experience to draw on when a brief calls for substance beyond hosting, particularly in automotive, media, and brand-building contexts. Comfortable across formats. Awards host, after-dinner speaker, panel moderator, fireside Q and A; he does not need a single staged format to work. Biography highlights Co-presenter, Top Gear, BBC Two, 2002 to 2015, with Jeremy Clarkson and James May. Co-presenter, The Grand Tour, Amazon Prime Video, 2016 to 2024. Author of On the Edge: My Story (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008) and As You Do (Orion, 2007). Founder of The Smallest Cog, a classic car restoration business in Hereford, opened 2021. Co-founder of DriveTribe, the automotive content platform launched in 2016. Presenter of Brainiac: Science Abuse (Sky One), Total Wipeout (BBC One), and Richard Hammond’s Workshop (Discovery+). Biography Top Gear ran for thirteen years on BBC Two with three presenters who became, between them, one of the most exported television properties in British broadcasting history. Hammond was the smallest of the three on screen and the one audiences most often warmed to first. That recognition is the asset corporate buyers are buying when they put him on a stage. Hosting a room of senior executives is closer to live television than to keynote speaking. The host has to set the tempo, hand off cleanly between segments, recover from a missed cue, and keep the audience with the agenda rather than ahead of it. Hammond has spent more than twenty years doing exactly this work, first across local BBC radio, then across motoring television, and most consistently as one third of the Top Gear and Grand Tour line-up. The 2006 Vampire dragster crash at RAF Elvington gave him a recovery story that has become its own asset. He was travelling at 288 mph when the tyre failed; he spent two weeks in a coma; he wrote about the recovery in On the Edge in 2008. When the brief calls for an after-dinner set with substance behind the laughs, that material is genuinely his. Beyond broadcast, Hammond has a working business in The Smallest Cog, the Hereford classic car restoration workshop he opened in 2021, and a media platform in DriveTribe, which he co-founded with Clarkson and May in 2016 and now runs himself. Both give him commercial ground to stand on when a brief moves from hosting into something closer to a fireside conversation about reinvention, brand, or the economics of motoring media. Key speaking topics Awards hosting and ceremony presenting Corporate after-dinner sets Automotive media and broadcast Recovery and return after the 2006 Vampire crash Building DriveTribe and The Smallest Cog The Top Gear and Grand Tour years Engineering, performance cars, and motoring journalism Ideal for Annual award nights and industry awards ceremonies Corporate dinners, gala evenings and partner events Automotive sector conferences and dealer events Brand activations and customer hospitality with a motoring or engineering audience Audience outcomes An evening that runs on tempo, with a host who keeps the agenda moving without flattening it. A first-hand account of the 2006 crash and recovery that anchors the room when the brief calls for it. A working perspective on automotive broadcast, classic car restoration, and the commercial side of motoring media. The recognition value of a presenter the audience already watches at home.

Why organisations work with Richard Noble He is one of the very small number of speakers who has actually held a world record under personal physical risk and built the team, the car and the funding model that made it possible. The Thrust2 record stood for fourteen years. His work on ThrustSSC produced the first and only land vehicle to break the sound barrier, and the lessons he draws are about how a small underfunded team executed something the established motor industry had judged impossible. He is the rare speaker whose case studies are his own. The Bloodhound education programme, the ARV Super2 light aircraft, Farnborough Aircraft and JCB Dieselmax are all ventures he founded or led, and the failures are discussed as openly as the records. He pioneered distributed sponsorship in Britain, with the ThrustSSC supporters club running what his team describes as the country’s first end-to-end electronic trading site. Boards considering crowdfunding, community equity or non-traditional capital get a working precedent. His message is uncomfortable on purpose. He argues that the British funding establishment systematically rejects ambitious engineering, and he uses his own story to challenge audiences who claim to back innovation without backing risk. Biography highlights Drove Thrust2 to 633.468 mph at Black Rock Desert, Nevada, on 4 October 1983, returning the World Land Speed Record to Britain after thirteen years in American hands. Project director of ThrustSSC, which on 15 October 1997 became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier, at 763.035 mph, with RAF pilot Andy Green at the wheel. Founded the Bloodhound SSC project in 2008 and built its associated education programme, which has reached approximately 4,600 UK schools and over two million schoolchildren worldwide. Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE); winner of the 1983 Segrave Trophy; honorary Doctor of Technology from the University of the West of England (2010); honorary degree from the University of Bradford (2018). Author of “Thrust: The Remarkable Story of One Man’s Quest for Speed” (Partridge Press, 1998) and “Take Risk!” (Evro Publishing, 2020), which together document eleven of his record-breaking and aviation projects. Founder of ARV Aircraft (the Super2 light aircraft) and Farnborough Aircraft, and a contributor to the JCB Dieselmax diesel record car that exceeded 350 mph at Bonneville in 2006. Biography Most organisations talk about risk. Very few are built to back the kind of venture where failure is the likely outcome, the budget is gone in three months, and the project has to be rebuilt from a scrapyard sale of the previous prototype. Richard Noble has spent his working life inside that gap. His Thrust2 programme began in the mid-1970s with £175 raised from selling the wreckage of his crashed Thrust1 car for scrap. Eight years later, on 4 October 1983, Thrust2 averaged 633.468 mph at Black Rock Desert and returned the World Land Speed Record to Britain. He was awarded the OBE and the Segrave Trophy that year. The record stood for fourteen years. The follow-on project, ThrustSSC, started with a £40,000 sponsorship from Castrol and a two-year computational research programme led by aerodynamicist Ron Ayers. Noble gave up the driving seat to concentrate on funding. On 15 October 1997, with RAF Tornado pilot Andy Green at the controls, ThrustSSC ran at 763 mph and became the first land vehicle to officially break the sound barrier. The financing model behind it, including a supporters’ club website his team has described as Britain’s first end-to-end electronic trading site, prefigured a generation of distributed online fundraising. The Bloodhound SSC project, founded in 2008, aimed at 1,000 mph and built one of the largest STEM education programmes in the UK, working with around 4,600 schools. It went into administration in 2018, was sold to Ian Warhurst, and Noble has written about that ending as candidly as he has written about the records. His 2020 book “Take Risk!” tells the same story from the angle that matters most to a corporate audience: the eleven projects, the people and companies who backed him, and the British institutional culture that he argues consistently fails to back ambitious engineering. Key speaking topics High-risk venture leadership Resilience under repeated failure Team formation under extreme pressure Risk-taking and risk culture in business Entrepreneurship and unconventional capital formation British engineering ambition and innovation Leading without institutional backing Ideal for Boards and senior leadership teams setting risk appetite, particularly those wrestling with the gap between stated ambition and actual investment behaviour. Innovation, R&D and engineering leaders responsible for high-uncertainty programmes where conventional ROI cases do not apply. Sales conferences and incentive events where the audience needs a credible, lived account of resilience and persistence rather than a generic motivational story. After-dinner audiences at industry conferences who want a senior speaker with genuine record-breaking authority and a sharp argument about institutional risk aversion. Audience outcomes A concrete sense of how a small underfunded team can deliver something an established industry has judged impossible, drawn from Thrust2 and ThrustSSC rather than abstract case studies. A sharper view of where their own organisation talks about risk-taking but funds and governs as if it does not. Practical reference points for raising capital outside conventional institutional channels, including distributed sponsorship and supporter-funded models. An honest account of failure as part of the same career as the records, including Bloodhound’s collapse, that gives senior teams permission to talk about their own setbacks more openly. A persistent argument they will keep returning to: that ambition without willingness to absorb sustained personal and financial risk produces neither records nor breakthrough commercial outcomes.

Why organisations work with Rob Halford A first-person account of addiction and 40 years of sobriety from a public figure who chose to speak about it rather than manage it privately. Lived experience of coming out in 1998 in an industry built on machismo, which gives weight to inclusion conversations that policy slides cannot. A memoir, Confess, named a Best Music Book of 2020 by Rolling Stone and Kirkus Reviews, that anchors his talks in a published account audiences can read alongside. A Grammy-winning career across five decades, which earns him the attention of a room before he has said a word about the harder material. Biography highlights Lead vocalist of Judas Priest, Grammy Award-winning heavy metal band. Author of Confess: The Autobiography, Headline Publishing Group, 2020, co-written with Ian Gittins. Named one of the Best Music Books of 2020 by Rolling Stone and Kirkus Reviews. First openly gay heavy metal musician of his stature, coming out publicly in 1998. Marked 40 years of sobriety in January 2026, having spoken openly about addiction and recovery in NME, Rolling Stone, Louder Sound and Fox News. Side projects across his career include Fight, 2wo and the solo project Halford. Biography The metal world in the 1980s did not invite confession. Rob Halford had built one of its biggest voices, fronting Judas Priest through the band’s commercial peak, while privately working through alcoholism and a sexuality he could not name in public. The break came in early 1986. Halford got sober and has now marked four decades without a drink. He has spoken about that decision in interviews with NME, Louder Sound and Fox News, framing it in plain language about humility, honesty and living one day at a time. In 1998 he came out, the first heavy metal singer of his stature to do so. Confess, his 2020 memoir written with Ian Gittins and published by Headline, set the full account on record. Rolling Stone and Kirkus Reviews named it a Best Music Book of the year. For corporate audiences, the value is the voice behind the story. Mental health, addiction and inclusion conversations land differently when the person at the front has lived all three and is willing to talk about them without softening the edges. Key speaking topics Addiction and recovery Mental health and resilience LGBTQ+ inclusion in hostile environments Life and career lessons from five decades in music Coming out and identity at work Sustained sobriety as a daily practice Ideal for Employee resource group events and Pride programming Wellbeing, mental health and recovery awareness days Leadership offsites where a human story is the anchor of the day After-dinner and conference keynote slots for large mixed audiences Audience outcomes A first-person reference point on addiction and long-term recovery that policy material rarely provides. A more honest baseline for internal conversations about mental health and what disclosure costs. A grounded account of what inclusion looks like from the inside of a hostile industry. A memorable session that signals the organisation takes these topics seriously enough to put a public figure in front of staff.