eccuity Podcasts

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Matthew Cutts, who spent nearly thirty years performing lead roles in some of London's biggest West End musicals, Cats, Starlight Express, Mamma Mia, Jersey Boys, before trading the stage for the boardroom. When Matthew moved back to New Zealand, he expected people to be impressed. Instead, his CV meant nothing, nobody knew who he was,...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Sarah Laurie, founder of Take a Breath, whose breathing software has been tested at scale inside companies like Microsoft, Spark, and The Warehouse Group. Here's the claim that reframes everything: breathing isn't about relaxation. It's a performance mechanism. When you breathe properly, the part of your brain responsible for d...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to John Ballinger, a tech entrepreneur and software developer who once built the first iPhone heart monitor app, an app that featured in an Apple ad and detected a user's heart condition. But this conversation is really about how John invests, and it breaks almost every rule you've been taught. He holds 99% of his portfolio in a singl...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Natasa Rasic, co-founder of ProBizBalance, a business support and bookkeeping company she runs with her own daughter. Natasa built an accounting firm in Serbia and ran it for twenty years. When she decided to leave it all behind and move to the other side of the world for her daughter's future, she didn't just close the business or...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Sarah Clearwater, founder and CEO of Reframer, a customer experience consultancy, and the person who built New Zealand's largest community of customer experience professionals. Here's a number that should worry any business owner: in a typical B2B sale, seven to ten people have to say yes before you ever sign a contract, and at lea...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jeffrey To, founder of MĀKI, a New Zealand company that builds autonomous boats, submarines, and underwater robots to go where humans can't. Bored in his garage during lockdown, Jeffrey took a cheap fishing kit, turned it into a self-driving boat, and sent it out to scan his local lake. What it found stopped him cold: a 55-metre, star-...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Harrison Stott, founder of The Kitchen Collective, New Zealand's first cloud kitchen, with sites in Auckland and Christchurch. If you've ordered food on an app lately, there's a growing chance it came from a kitchen with no storefront, no dining room, and no sign on the door. Harrison runs the spaces where that food gets made,...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dec Penfold, a chef and food consultant who has built restaurant brands everywhere from Dubai to Melbourne, and who once pitched a now-thriving chicken brand to a room full of famous YouTubers using nothing but a shoebox with stickers on it. Dec has been in kitchens since he was 14, washing pots in a Thai restaurant in North Wales. At 22 h...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Andy Wright, founder of Engage Media, a one-man social content agency that has made videos for everyone from Volkswagen to the local pharmacy down the road. Andy spent a decade as a radio presenter, had a stint as a professional golfer, and now fronts golf coverage for Sky, but the thread running through all of it is an obsession with a si...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kai Malte Röver, a German-born industrial designer who has spent over 20 years building products on the other side of the world. Kai's career reads like a tour of modern design. He built six-axis robots for Toyota, designed car dashboards, developed luxury fireplaces, worked on hydrogen and solar systems, and now leads product design at Ma...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Christine Liggins, co-founder and CEO of the DebtFix Foundation, a charity that now helps 8,000 New Zealand families a year claw their way out of debt. If you think the people drowning in debt are who you'd expect, this conversation will change your mind. Christine's average client isn't on a benefit. They're middle to high...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Kristina Mydlar, founder of Mydlar Consulting, a boutique London firm that helps fintech and financial services companies put AI to work where it actually makes a difference. Kristina spent over 20 years in banking and finance before everything changed in a single evening. During COVID, she found out from a Financial Times article on a Mon...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Paul Tranter, a serial entrepreneur from Birmingham whose life has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show. Paul has been a graphic designer in the London rat race, living in a broom cupboard. He chased an advert promising £700 a week on a tropical island and ended up selling timeshare in the Canaries, not knowing at...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Peter Bird, a registered nurse who spent 25 years in occupational health before a health scare made him look closely at what he, and everyone around him, was actually eating. Here is the problem he kept running into. You stand in a supermarket aisle holding a product covered in healthy-sounding claims, and you genuinely cannot tell whether...

Every founder talks about growth. Raise the round, hit the milestones, scale the team. Nobody warns you about the price tag that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet. In this compilation episode of Ways to Wealth, Charlie Meaden pulls together four conversations that each answer the same uncomfortable question from a completely different angle. Luigi Lenguito (BforeAI) proved traction in the US be...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Deborah Crowe, a serial entrepreneur, engineer, and circular economy leader whose career has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show. Deborah grew up on a sheep and grain farm in Southland, the oldest of four in a family with 55 first cousins. She wanted to be an astronaut, until the Air Force told her women weren&#39...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Nathan James, executive director of The Attention Seeker, a social media agency that pulled in 1.2 billion organic views last year across just 20 clients. Nathan has spent 30 years in advertising. He's worked with Nike, Adidas, PlayStation, Budweiser, and the BBC, and lived in New York, London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm before landing i...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Matt Mudford, CEO of Ngāpuhi Asset Holding Company, the commercial arm of the largest iwi in New Zealand. On paper, Matt runs a $100 million portfolio. In practice, he thinks about something most CEOs never have to. He is not managing money for shareholders who want a return next quarter. He is managing it for 200,000 people, most of them...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Leonard Hope, a US patent attorney and computer engineer who has spent nearly three decades protecting the ideas of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo, and who now builds his own AI tools for legal work. Here's the contradiction at the heart of this conversation: Leonard writes AI software that could draft a patent in secon...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Thomasge Aravinda, founder of CareerCraft and a supply chain professional who spent 15 years working across Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore, and New Zealand before building a business around the question most people are too comfortable to ask: is my career still going to exist? Thomasge started helping friends land jobs during COVID when the m...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Alexa Karpova, co-founder and CEO of Davos Premier, an agency that gets businesses, founders, and investors into the rooms they can't access on their own. Eight years ago, a crypto client asked Alexa if she could help host a dinner at the World Economic Forum. She didn't have a plan for it. She had a business partner in Switzerland...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Lorraine Miller, co-founder of Foot Mechanics, New Zealand's largest privately owned podiatry business, and co-founder of Whai Basketball in Tauranga. Lorraine and her husband John have spent 29 years building businesses side by side. Literally. They sit at desks next to each other. They are 50/50 partners in everything they own. At on...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Marcus Nelson, co-founder of UserVoice, the feedback tab that sat on the side of Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft Xbox before most people knew what customer feedback software was. He sold the company last year and moved to New Zealand as a single father with his youngest son. Marcus raised $900,000 during the GFC when only five companies i...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Manu Caddie and Kenny Au, co-founders of GEMS, an asset management platform built for the people who keep New Zealand's electricity, water, and critical infrastructure running. Both spent decades inside the industry before deciding that the tools they were forced to use were not fit for purpose. The process was always the same: pull da...

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Jase Te Patu, founder of Hauora Aotearoa and a man who has spent 33 years in wellbeing work, driven by something deeply personal. Jase started this charity because his brother passed away and left eight kids behind. When he asked his 12-year-old niece how she was doing, she told him she couldn't sleep because every time she closed her...