David Richards has built successful teams in rallying, Formula 1 and business. This is the story of how he built Prodrive, which became a world leader in motorsport and advanced manufacturing. Why is the UK so successful in these industries? What can other businesses and industries learn from this? And how do you manage Formula 1 drivers and factory workers? You will find the answers in this episode of Business Leader Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jul 09, 2024•43 min
In 2006 Julia Hartz started a company with two co-founders in Silicon Valley. They wanted to shake-up how people bought tickets for events through using mobile phones and QR codes. Eventbrite started by facilitating meet-ups in the tech community. But last year it issued more than 300 million tickets for 5 million events around the world and the company was valued at more than $1.8bn when it floated on the stock market in 2018. In this episode of Business Leader, Julia Hartz, the chief executive...
Jul 02, 2024•32 min
How do you turn a bold idea into reality? How do you deliver when things get really hard? Mark Beaumont might be the expert on this. Anyone can come up with an idea and anyone can talk about performing at a high level. But Mark Beaumont has delivered on both. He holds the world-record for cycling around the world and has now turned his considerable skills to being a venture capital investor. But that is only part of his remarkable story, which also includes capsizing in the Atlantic Ocean, makin...
Jun 25, 2024•52 min
In 2017 Tom Leathes decided it was time to give the second-hand car market a digital update. With his two best friends and long-time business collaborators, Alex Buttle and Harry Jones, he co-founded Motorway. Investors spotted the potential and by 2021 the company was another British unicorn, valued at more than $1bn. The platform handled £2.2bn worth of transactions in 2023, helping customers sell their second-hand vehicles to a network of more than 5,000 verified car dealers. The three co-fou...
Jun 18, 2024•36 min
Lord Mark Price spent more than 30 years working for the John Lewis Partnership, including eight years as the boss of Waitrose. He then joined the government as trade minister before founding his own business, WorkL, which tracks the happiness of employees. In this episode of Business Leader we explore what he has learned about running a business as well as the past, present and future of the John Lewis Partnership, and why businesses are underestimating the importance of their staff being happy...
Jun 11, 2024•56 min
The story behind Manchester-based travel company Travel Counsellors and why it might be the company with the best reviews in the UK. Steve Byrne, the long-serving chief executive, explains why customers and staff rate it so highly, why you may not have heard about the company until now, and why it has ambitious plans for the future. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit offtolunch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. Se...
May 21, 2024•25 min
In 1989, Mark Dixon had an idea - the traditional office didn’t work for many businesses and they needed something more flexible. More than 30 years later, he has been proved right. IWG, the business he founded, is now worth more than £2 billion and runs 4,000 serviced offices around the world, which millions of people use to do their jobs as flexible working has taken off. But it has been a challenging and sometimes lonely battle to get IWG to this point. This is a story that involves rapid gro...
May 14, 2024•40 min
Josh Bayliss was appointed as the chief executive of Virgin Group by Sir Richard Branson in 2011. He works with an array of Virgin branded-businesses, 70,000 employees but just one shareholder - the Branson family. It is a unique job with unique challenges and unique opportunities. This is the story behind the Virgin brand and how Josh Bayliss ended up running it… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit offtolunch....
May 07, 2024•34 min
Kevin McCabe tells the story of how he built a property empire and then ended up running Sheffield United, his beloved football club. It is a story that has highs, lows, controversial goals and legal battles. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 30, 2024•28 min
In 2018 the founder of Tide, George Bevis, stood aside as chief executive and was succeeded by Oliver Prill. Since then Tide has grown rapidly. It has gone from being a promising financial technology start-up to a company whose online banking services are used by one in 10 small and medium-sized businesses in the UK. In this episode of Business Leader, Oliver Prill discusses the challenges of becoming chief executive, how to disrupt the financial services industry and why regulators may hold bac...
Apr 23, 2024•40 min
Wizz Air has emerged as one of the biggest airlines in Europe and a new low-cost rival to Ryanair and EasyJet. Its first flight was in May 2004, travelling from Katowice in Poland to Luton in the UK. Today it carries more than 60 million passengers every year and is valued at well over £2 billion after floating on the stock market in London. In this episode of Business Leader, Jozsef Varadi, the founder and chief executive of Wizz Air, discusses how he founded and built the airline, the challeng...
Apr 16, 2024•39 min
How does a business survive for 250 years and still be controlled by the same family? Rankin Brothers & Sons was founded in 1774 and is celebrating its 250th birthday in 2024. It has seen the creation of the United States of America, two World Wars, and the Covid-19 crisis. Jim Rankin is the sixth generation of the family to lead the business, which supplies corks and caps for beer, wine and spirits. He has been in the business for 30 years, but when he was younger he didn’t want to join it ...
Apr 09, 2024•35 min
Floyd Woodrow and Peter Malmstrom had illustrious military careers in the SAS, the special forces unit of the British Army. Now they are using what they learned about leadership, team-building, and negotiating to build a business. That business - Quantum Group - is already worth hundreds of millions of pounds, and they have ambitions to make it much bigger. This episode of Business Leader is the story of what the military taught them about how to build and scale-up a business. And it includes th...
Apr 02, 2024•37 min
Duncan Clark was an environmental journalist at The Guardian, pioneering a new way of telling stories through data visualisation and graphics. Now he is at the centre of one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world - Canva, which offers free online tools for graphic design and has been valued at $40 billion (£32 billion). This is the story of how he built a business, sold it to Canva, and is now leading the company’s ambitious expansion plans in Europe This is a public episode. If you ...
Mar 26, 2024•31 min
Robinhood is one of the fastest-growing companies in America and claims it is helping to democratise finance by offering commission-free share trading for all. Now it is coming to the UK. Jordan Sinclair, the president of Robinhood UK, explains how it is approaching a UK launch, the story behind the business and the challenges it has faced along the way… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mar 19, 2024•38 min
A failed athletics career and an unfulfilled Olympics dream. A successful business. A failed business. Another successful business and a redemption story. This podcast episode could be four stories in one. But remarkably it is one story, which is why it is slightly longer episode of Business Leader than normal. This is the story of John Stapleton. He co-founded the New Covent Garden Soup Company and Little Dish, two successful food businesses. But in between those success stories he suffered a b...
Mar 12, 2024•1 hr 4 min
Ophelia Brown is the founder of Blossom Capital, a venture capital firm which has raised around $1 billion (£789 million) from investors since she launched it in the UK in 2018. Blossom uses the money it has raised to invest in promising businesses in Europe. Blossom is a rare success story - it is a female-led start-up and venture capital firm but is also thriving away from the traditional heart of this industry in Silicon Valley. This is the story of how Ophelia Brown founded the business, rai...
Mar 05, 2024•37 min
It’s time for the second episode in our story about how B&M went from a small discount chain in the north of England to one of the biggest retailers in the UK. In part two we look at B&M’s transition from a promising medium-sized business to a FTSE 100 giant. This is a transition that many businesses fail to make. For B&M, it was about keeping your focus despite constant distractions. But it was also about learning and evolving - in terms of strategy and people. At the end of the epi...
Feb 27, 2024•42 min
The story behind how Simon Arora and his brothers Bobby and Robin turned B&M from a small discount chain in the north of England into one of the biggest retailers in the UK. In part one, we speak to Simon Arora about how he found B&M, the strategy behind building the business, and how it nearly all ended after less than a year… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit offtolunch.substack.com Hosted on Acast....
Feb 20, 2024•38 min
Marc Allera explains how EE went from being an upstart mobile phone brand to a key part of BT and a business with big ambitions for the future. Plus he explains what he learned from launching Sega’s Dreamcast games console and mobile phone brand Three in the early 2000s, which had mixed success. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Feb 06, 2024•42 min
It is nearly 30 years since Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou founded easyJet in the mid-1990s and helped to transform air travel in Europe. In this episode of Business Leader , Sir Stelios discusses how he built the airline, how he used distinctive marketing to fight fierce competition, how fly-on-the-wall documentary Airline became one of the most popular shows on television, and why he has launched a new award for young entrepreneurs. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with ot...
Jan 30, 2024•36 min
How do you get to the top of the venture capital industry? Why should CEOs be concerned about burning out? And what does a promising business actually look like? Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton Capital and one of the leading venture capital investors in Europe, explains all of that and more in our latest episode. He tells the story of his journey from working at Autonomy to being the founder and chief executive of a promising technology company and then leaving all that behi...
Jan 23, 2024•36 min
Tom Beahon, the co-founder of Castore, explains how he and his brother Phil built a sportswear brand in North West England that is taking on Nike and Adidas. The story begins with Beahon failing to make it as a professional football with his beloved Tranmere Rovers. Castore is now worth nearly £1 billion and makes kits for the England cricket team, Newcastle United and other high-profile teams and athletes. But the journey for this British success story has taken twists and turns… Hosted on Acas...
Jan 16, 2024•59 min
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson, the boxer, once said. So what does a business leader do when life doesn’t turn out as expected? That is the question behind this episode of Business Leader . A sharp drop in passenger numbers, strikes by workers, an accounting scandal, a row with the government and a takeover bid. That is what Christian Schreyer faced after taking over as chief executive of Go-Ahead Group, one of the UK’s largest rail and bus companies. He st...
Jan 09, 2024•28 min
The story behind Peloton and how it has tried to change the way people exercise. Peloton has enjoyed big success but also faced big challenges. Amanda Gilmore, Peloton’s general manager for the UK and expansion, discusses how the company has built a community of loyal users around the world and changed how people keep fit, as well as how to improve diversity in the business world This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, v...
Dec 27, 2023•37 min
Jeff Kelisky, the chief executive of Seedrs, the crowdfunding platform, tells the story of what it is like to succeed a founder as boss of their own company and how crowdfunding is helping businesses scale-up This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit offtolunch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Dec 19, 2023•30 min
The story behind why a company based in King’s Cross in London, not Silicon Valley or Detroit in the US, may hold the answer to self-driving cars being on our roads This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit offtolunch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Dec 12, 2023•23 min
What skills does it take to run one of the UK’s biggest companies for a decade? What does a business leader do when an activist investor demands you change your strategy? How is the UK really doing with its net-zero ambitions? And why should a leader be concerned about wet paint? All of that and more are covered in the latest episode of Business Leader as we speak to Alistair Phillips-Davies, one of the longest-serving chief executives in the FTSE 100… This is a public episode. If you would like...
Dec 05, 2023•31 min
The story of how Metro became the most-read daily newspaper in the UK after launching in 1999. How did this newspaper - which is free - disrupt a highly competitive industry and then survive a string of big challenges? We speak to Deborah Arthurs, the editor-in-chief, and Richard Thomson, the managing director… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit offtolunch.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...
Nov 28, 2023•30 min
The story of how Sydney-born Dan Labbad rose through the property industry to become chief executive of the Crown Estate and be tasked with the extraordinary challenge of “creating lasting and shared prosperity” for the UK. This episode explores the history of that unique organisation, its £16 billion collection of assets that range from Regent Street in London to the seabed around the UK, and how Labbad’s approach to management has been shaped by the discrimination his Egyptian father suffered ...
Nov 23, 2023•37 min
