Business Leader

Rohan Blacker is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Sofa.com. Blacker shares his journey with host Dougal Shaw, from an unfulfilling legal career to becoming a pioneer in UK e-commerce. He left Sofa.com in 2015 when a private equity firm took over. Today he’s still very much in furniture retail, running Pooky.com and Schplendid sofas. Blacker tells the story behind acquiring the Sofa.com doma...

James Mishreki is the founder of the UK-based, fast-growing skincare brand Skin + Me. In this episode Mishreki discusses with host Richard Harpin his unconventional entrepreneurial journey. It began in childhood with selling copied CDs at school and included a stint as a professional poker player, a role he credits with building his resilience. The conversation explores how Skin + Me aims to disru...

FlightStory CEO Georgie Holt and Chief Revenue Officer Christiana Brenton discuss with Dougal Shaw how they are pioneering podcasts and new media alongside Steven Bartlett, creator and host of The Diary of a CEO. Moving beyond traditional audio, they operate an end-to-end studio scaling global IP across newsletters, live events, and commerce. The duo explains how they "kil...

Sue Hayes, CEO of Nottingham Building Society, joins Dougal Shaw on the Business Leader podcast to explore how she’s been transforming a 175-year-old institution into a modern mutual. Hayes discusses her key strategy, defined as "together we fight for the extraordinary". Her mission is to target underserved borrowers, like Gen Z and side hustlers with irregular incomes, and help them buy homes. Sh...

Few businesses have more than 17 million customers and can say the Queen was one of them. But that's the AA. However, it has had a difficult time recently. It was drowning under £2.7 billion of debt and was taken off public markets following a takeover by the private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Towerbrook. Since then chief executive Jakob Pfaudler has been working on a turnaround of this uniqu...

He leads a US tech firm valued at $8bn, but Sanjay Poonen puts his success down to a major career setback. Poonen is CEO of US cybersecurity and AI company Cohesity, based in Silicon Valley. He grew up in Bangalore, India, but a scholarship to Dartmouth College in the US to study computer science brought him to the US. On graduation, he rose up the ranks of a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley tech compa...

In this episode, host Josh Dornbrack speaks with Bob Skinstad, former Springbok and Rugby World Cup winner, about leadership, elite performance and transitioning from professional sport into business. He shares lessons from rugby, venture capital, consulting and building winning teams in high-pressure environments. Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-si...

The department store chain Debenhams was founded in 1778 but went bust in 2020, leading to thousands of job losses and the disappearance of one of Britain's best-known high street names. But now it is back, reimagined for the digital age. In this episode of the Business Leader Podcast, Debenhams chief executive Dan Finley tells the story behind this turnaround. Dan Finley was appointed the boss of...

It’s a magnet for side hustlers around Europe. The CoCreate event was held this November in London, the first time it’s come to Europe. It’s an event run by Alibaba.com, a global online marketplace for b2b wholesale trade. Small businesses use it to source in bulk products from manufacturers and trading companies to then sell to consumers themselves. Alibaba.com is part of Alibaba Group founded by...

Many prime ministers don’t make it to 10 years in office. US presidents only get eight at most to secure their legacy. Katharine Viner has had a decade and counting as editor-in-chief at the Guardian newspaper. She is also the first woman to hold the role. She’s made radical changes to an institution more than two centuries old, while returning it to profit. Dougal Shaw took a trip to the Guardian...

In this episode, Lucie Macloud reveals the unexpected story behind Hair Syrup’s meteoric rise—from a homemade solution shared on TikTok to a multi-million-pound beauty brand. In this episode of the Business Leader podcast, she joins Lucy McPhee and Josh Dornbrack to talk about battling self-doubt, navigating Dragons’ Den, handling explosive growth and learning how to lead long before she felt read...

The story of how one of the best-known high street chains was built. Mountain Warehouse now has more than 400 shops and generates more than £450m in annual revenue. But, as founder and chief executive Mark Neale tells Graham Ruddick, this story starts with a shop selling roller blades... Business Leader is a membership community for ambitious CEOs and founders of mid-sized UK companies, designed t...

Thea Green, the founder of Nails. INC, is one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs in the beauty and self-care space. Her early background was in journalism, but she spotted a gap in the fashion market back in the late 1990s – and grabbed the opportunity. When the world was crazy about everything “dot com” and coffee shops, she saw that the UK hadn’t caught up yet with the American trend...

Iwoca is one of the UK's most promising new businesses. It has a fascinating mission - to finance one-million small businesses. Christoph Rieche and James Dear founded Iwoca in 2011 to solve one of the biggest problems facing the UK economy - how to get more funding to small and medium-sized businesses to help them grow. As Christoph Rieche tells Graham Ruddick, they are making real progress, but...

Most people measure success in likes and views — but not Amelia Sordell. In this unfiltered discussion, she sits down with Lucy McPhee and Josh Dornbrack to explain why virality is meaningless without credibility and connection. Sordell shares the frameworks she uses with CEOs, founders and global enterprises to turn content into clients. She also demystifies what actually works on platforms like...

Jack Zhang founded Airwallex in 2015 in Melbourne, Australia. It has now gone global and is valued at more than $6bn by investors. Zhang has moved to London in order to help Airwallex scale globally. He tells Dougal Shaw why there was a unique window of opportunity to build his fintech platform and why traditional banks still have a lot of catching up to do if they want to capitalise on the new re...

Former England scrum-half, British & Irish Lion and Rugby World Cup winner Matt Dawson joins host Josh Dornbrack for an honest and inspiring conversation about performance, leadership and reinvention. The conversation goes far beyond rugby. Dawson shares how the values forged on the field - discipline, communication, accountability and the idea of “borrowing the shirt” - have shaped his life i...

James Reed is the chairman and chief executive of Reed, the recruitment business, which was founded by his father. He has also written a new book called Karma Capitalism , in which he says capitalism needs to change. In this podcast episode, James Reed speaks to Graham Ruddick about building a family business with annual revenues of more than £1 billion and his big ideas about the future of capita...

Aron Gelbard is a founder and CEO obsessed with feedback. The business he has built is Bloom & Wild, which made its name with flower delivery but has now expanded into other gifts, such as brownies and whisky. It pioneered the idea of letterbox delivery, where flowers are packaged in flat boxes that can be assembled into bouquets at home. Gelbard tells Dougal Shaw how an obsession with feedbac...

Zygi Kamasa is building a new movie business called True Brit, which is focused on British films. Kamasa is the former chief executive of Lionsgate UK and Europe as well as Marv Studios, one of Business Leader's Growth 500, the fastest-growing businesses in the UK. He tells Graham Ruddick the story behind why he is building his own business, the story behind his global hits like Bend it Like Beckh...

From chart-topping pop star to powerhouse entrepreneur, Rochelle Humes has built a career defined by creativity and reinvention. As the founder and creative director of My Little Coco, one of the UK’s best-selling baby and family brands, Humes has shown how passion and purpose can drive lasting success. In this episode, she opens up about the challenges of starting a business during a global pande...

Autotrader has gone from a dying print magazine to one of the UK's biggest tech businesses. Autotrader made 60 per cent of its revenue from the print magazine in 2007. But today it makes nothing from the magazine, having stopped it in 2013. Yet Autotrader is now a much bigger business. It is part of the FTSE 100 and valued at £7bn. So how did this extraordinary transformation take place? Graham Ru...

Francesca Brown is the award-winning founder of Goals4Girls and a champion of female youth development. She has turned her love of football into a transformative programme that empowers girls aged 11-16 in marginalised communities, boosting their confidence, leadership skills and educational outcomes. Josh Dornbrack and Lucy McPhee dive into her journey from aspiring athlete to social impact pione...

How do you make the big strategic decisions that will define the future of your business? How do you gather the information to make that decision? Simon Carter, chief executive of British Land, one of the biggest property companies in the UK, bet on offices when many said that office-working was dead. Graham Ruddick speaks to Simon Carter about making that contrarian decision, running a FTSE compa...

John Amaechi is an organisational psychologist, best-selling author and a professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School. He is quick to dismantle the myth that great leaders are “born, not made.” In this candid conversation, he reveals that the skills which make leaders exceptional, from emotional literacy to effective storytelling, aren’t magic tricks. They’re basic, learnab...