Dare To Be Brave with Joy Foster

Lockdown 1.0. As we all tried to make sense of the pandemic, we turned to: 💻 Zoom quizzes 🍌 Baking banana bread 🎁 Online courses (hello, TechPixies) and shopping! And it seems many of us had a sweet tooth too, because TechPixie Teresa Faley saw her letterbox brownie business rocket last year. And as is so often the case with entrepreneurs who dare to dream, the success of one business has led t...

It’s beginning to look a lot like… Ok, so we know some of you out there might not celebrate the festive season 🎄. But this is the time of year we traditionally spread a bit of TechPixies cheer, so we’ve decided to go all out. Filled with starry swag, our FAB Boxes have been supersized with some awesome donations from our TechPixie community and are ready and waiting to be snapped up by you in our...

What are you thankful for? It seems like a simple enough question, doesn’t it? You can probably list several things that you’re grateful for right off the bat: 🙏 Family 🙏 Friends 🙏 Health 🙏 Freedom 🙏 Being out in nature 🙏 Your hairdresser 😏 You get the picture. But have you ever really thought about being grateful no matter what? That moment when the chips are down, and you’re still able to...

Isn’t it bad enough that we have to deal with the little voice inside our head (you know the one – the inner critic that can be as savage as the Strictly judges branding a Paso ‘pedestrian’. 💃 Ouch!) without those closest to us adding fuel to the fire? Those innocent, throwaway comments made about our character or personality that we silently adopt as limiting beliefs that then hold us back. But...

Pivot. No, we’re not talking about the one with Ross, Rachel, Chandler and the sofa (comedy gold as far as we’re concerned). We’re talking about the major 180 TechPixie Ceri Gage has done in the past year. Going from being on Government benefits and living with her parents to having a business with a waiting list and renting a place of her own is pretty good going for someone who admits they were...

What if you could leave your salaried job and know that within six months you could earn your entire yearly salary? Not only that, but you’d do so by doing something you loved with the flexibility to manage your time as you saw fit? It’s the dream, right? Julia Heffer, our podcast guest this week, is living that very dream, working for herself as a branding consultant and helping her clients get o...

If you’ve ever felt the fear about putting yourself out there on social media, this week’s podcast episode is for you (yay! 👏). Because Judy Leung, a graduate of our group coaching prograrmme, is proof of what’s possible when you have faith in yourself Despite being, as Judy says, “about as introverted as you can get”, Judy got into the mindset of ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’, got out there o...

Are you wearing pink today? 🙋 If not, go and ferret around in your wardrobe and find something in the shade because it’s Wear It Pink Day. It’s a day we’re asking you to go and do your self-exam and get to know what’s normal for you. Because doing so really could save your life. Just ask Suzanne Luft. She’s a TechPixie who answered our call to share her story during Breast Cancer Awareness month,...

Elliott Connie. Wow, just wow! We invited Elliott onto the Sparkle and Thrive podcast to talk about the incredible success of his YouTube channel. But we couldn’t have predicted just how rich in depth this episode would become. It’s got soundbites galore!!!. Check out these Elliottisms: 🙌 “If you can figure out a way to give your pain purpose, it is no longer pain. Once you give pain purpose, it...

Joy, our chief TechPixie, just bought her family a campervan (we’re placing bets on how long it’ll be before it’s decked out in stars!!! ⭐). But when she wanted to know how to work the Rock & Roll bed (no, we have no idea either 😂), where did she head?   YouTube, of course.   If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to buff out a scratch on your wooden floor, do a smokey eye like a pro, or have se...

This week, we’re surrounded by banana plants, tree ferns, bamboo, and eucalyptus. 🌴 No, we haven’t raided our NatWest baby Woody piggy bank 🐷 and jetted off to the tropics. We have, in actual fact, taken a trip down the M4 to… BRISTOL. It’s the home of Lisa Mellis, our head of brand and our guest on the podcast this week, who had the wild idea of giving tropical gardening a go - in the UK. And i...

Now we don’t want you to choke on your Cornflakes (so strap in for a moment), but did you know… 📹 YouTube has over 2 billion active monthly users. 📹 Just over a quarter of the world’s population access YouTube every month. 📹 We consume more than 1 billion hours of content on YouTube Every. Single. Day. (Source: Backlinko) 🤯🤯🤯 Want a piece of the action? Of course you do. It’s why we’ve added...

No one likes to feel like they’re being sold to. FACT. Think of all the times you’ve experienced the ‘hard sell’ and tell us it hasn’t left you feeling a little icky. It makes you want to run like Forrest Gump in the opposite freakin’ direction, right? 🏃🏃🏃 And yet, encouraging someone to buy what you’ve got to offer is at the heart of every successful business – you need to get it right to surv...

Sales. The word alone can send even the most seasoned entrepreneur into a cold sweat. Get your sales process right and you’ll feel like Rocky at the top of those steps. 🏆 Misjudge your marketing – well, yikes! But never fear, Alison Edgar is here! 🦸 Known as The Entrepreneur’s Godmother, Alison’s helped Dragon’s Den slayers and winners of The Apprentice to sales glory, and she’s on the Sparkle a...

You know the saying ‘not all superheroes wear capes’? We think this sums up every social entrepreneur out there, including our very own CEO, Joy Foster. They’re the peeps who spot a social problem and then go out and create a business to solve it. 👊 Their mission is fuelled by a passion for making an impact, changing lives for the better with an idea that makes money AND does good. Perhaps we’ve...

Before you do anything else today, go and listen to Brenė Brown talking about Theodore Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech. 🏃‍♀️ (Don’t worry, we’ll wait ‘til you’re done.) Got you thinking? You’re not the only one. This talk inspired the name of the company run by our guest on the Sparkle and Thrive podcast this week, a woman you need on speed dial if you’re looking to raise investment in yo...

Does it make the boat go faster? 🚣 That’s that the quote Addie Pinkster has on the wall of her investment business. It’s inspired by the question the men’s Olympic gold medal-winning rowing eight asked themselves ahead of the Sydney Olympics: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?' If the answer was ‘yes’, they carried on doing it; if it was a ‘no’, they stopped. And Addie says it’s laser focus l...

Have you ever done that thing where you write down your dream dinner party guests? Well here at TechPixies, dream guests don’t get much bigger than Amy Porterfield. 🤩 She’s an online course building LEGEND who helped our chief TechPixie reshape our (rather brilliant) 90-Day Transformational Social Media Programme. So we couldn’t quite believe our luck when Amy said yes to swinging by to help us c...

How do you play big when the system keeps you playing small? Whoa! We know, right?! That’s one BIG question. ⛰️ It’s one of the many headscratchers we’re tackling in this belter of a podcast with a woman we’re quite happy to admit we’ve developed a bit of a girl crush on. 🙌 Because if you’ve ever sat in a salary or fee negotiation that has gone nowhere (we can so relate), you’re going to be cheer...

If you’ve ever spent a weekend baffled by Ikea’s assembly instructions 😵, you’ll know that some things in life are unnecessarily complicated. Take a critical path analysis. Sahar Hashemi and her brother used it to bring the New York-style coffee bar to the UK and turn a nation of tea drinkers into a country unable to start its day without a skinny latte or caramel macchiato to go. As Sahar explai...

Stress. 😰 How do you handle it? Whether it has you dashing for the biscuit tin 🍪 or grabbing your running gear to pound the pavement 🏃‍♀️, you’re going to want to tune in to this week’s episode of the Sparkle and Thrive podcast. Rachel Carrell, founder of a £14 million childcare start-up, has had a fair few nail-biting moments in her entrepreneurial journey, but she has a nifty reframe that you...

When we were young, our heroes included the likes of Floella Benjamin, Tony Hart, and Long Distance Clara (yes, we know we’re showing our age!). 🚛 For Sherry Coutu, arguably one of the UK’s most successful serial entrepreneurs, she was inspired by someone in a different league: Dame Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley. Dame Stephanie showed Sherry a completely different path from the one she’d been expecti...

Days don’t get much bigger than when the Prime Minister pops in to say ‘hi’. 👋 Back in 2017, Joy Foster received a call that set in motion one of the most incredible days in the wonderful world of TechPixies. This was the day Theresa May swung by to check out exactly how Joy sprinkles her special brand of Pixie dust in tech education 😲. This was the day TechPixies got namechecked on national TV...

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go! 🚀 Go and get out of your comfort zone 🚀 Go pick up the phone to that client...boss...investor 🚀 Go invest in our Social Media Superhero Bootcamp 😉 We’ve got Mel Robbins to thank for the 5-second rule, and it’s one that Joy, our rather awesome founder, has been using for years. It’s got her through VAT returns, jumping into rivers after her runs, and getting funding and inves...

There’s a brilliant exercise in this week’s episode that you need to hear (check it out at 30:14). It’s Toni Kent’s version of a TechPixies BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in case you’re wondering) and it helped her work out what she REALLY wanted. Today, Toni, our guest on the Sparkle and Thrive Podcast, is enjoying a pretty sweet ride through life: 🎭 doing stand-up comedy about social mobility,...